Nearly 20 years after legalizing medical marijuana, California passed a trio of bills this weekend that would regulate medical marijuana cultivation, distribution and consumption. Professor Ryan B. Stoa, whose upcoming article on marijuana cultivation and water rights is forthcoming in the Hastings Law Journal, was quoted in a Gizmodo article on the subject:
But there’s another risk for suddenly applying regulations to what has thrived as an essentially black market industry for decades, according to a study by Ryan Stoa, a Senior Scholar at Florida International University who specializes in environmental and natural resources law.
He spent the last few months interviewing cultivators and scientists throughout the Emerald Triangle and believes that some regulatory water rights issues still need to be worked out—especially because so much of the state’s meager rain falls in those northern counties where pot cultivation is expanding. “If you take a really heavy-handed approach to regulation, people will stay on the black market,” he says. “Regulators need to find that delicate balance between regulations that protect the environment while providing incentives for farmers to participate.”
Read the Gizmodo article here.
Faculty Website: http://lawdev.wordpress.fiu.edu/faculty/directory/ryan-b-stoa/