As the state’s legal marijuana market expands, documents show sellers of medicinal marijuana were racking up alleged violations for two years, breaching the state’s security and safety rules, yet won approvals to enter the recreational market anyway. Exclusive documents obtained by Bloomberg under New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act reveal the state Cannabis Regulatory Commission issued more than 50 citations to seven companies from January 2020 to mid-April 2022 — when marijuana sales broadened from medical-only to recreational. The alleged violations included staff using fraudulent security access cards to workers regularly neglecting to enter patient purchases into the registry for medical marijuana.
According to the Bloomberg report, one cultivation site had 50 jars of weed go missing, while one medical dispensary had moldy weed on its shelves. The most frequent alleged violations occurred at Zen Leaf shops, with three of New Jersey’s locations run by Verano Holdings, which was ordered by investigators in April 2021 to destroy 127 pounds of marijuana inventory because some “may have been swept up from the floor” and contaminated.
The report points out that hundreds of thousands of error-free sales have been processed since the state started medical marijuana use in 2012. But the documented violations are the type of missteps that critics of legal marijuana warned about.
