PRIORITIES

Ensure that advantages promised to social equity applicants are preserved.

Prevent unnecessary regulatory barriers and inconsistent enforcement to ensure small businesses can successfully enter and remain int he market.

Support clear, consistent, and workable regulations that promote business success and consumer safety.

Promote an accessible, stable, and sustainable market structure through a fair, transparent, and efficient regulatory framework that prevents monopolization and protects against premature market concentration.

Address regulatory obstacles and unworkable policies that limit product availability and supply stability.

Ensure that OCM operates under strong legislative, legal, and public oversight to prevent overreach, ensure it properly carries out its legislative mandates, and maintain alignment with legislative intent and industry realities.

Increase scrutiny of OCM’s rulemaking process and regulatory authority by establishing clearer limits on its discretion, requiring justification for major policy changes, and ensuring that rules reflect statutory intent rather than arbitrary agency interpretations.

Demand full transparency into the work OCM has outsourced to out-of-state consultants by requiring public disclosure of contracts, decision-making influence, and regulatory recommendations while preventing the agency from continuing to operate in secrecy.

Reshape OCM’s culture and approach to stakeholder engagement by ensuring that interim and permanent leadership are required to actively work with local industry, communities, and experts—and are held accountable for fostering a transparent, responsive, and collaborative regulatory environment.

Ensure that the hemp product market—including topicals, oils, and low-potency edibles and beverages—remains accessible to the diverse range of businesses that currently manufacture, wholesale, and retail them, so that economic opportunities are widely distributed and consumers continue to have access to these products.

Prevent the requirement of an adult-use cannabis license for activities currently permitted under a hemp registration, ensuring that businesses operating legally under the hemp framework are not forced into an unnecessary and burdensome licensing process.

Ensure that licensing, regulations, and compliance requirements for hemp businesses remain minimally burdensome, focusing only on measures necessary to protect public health and safety.

Eliminate cannabis taxation on non-intoxicating hemp products, ensuring wellness products derived from hemp are not unfairly taxed as recreational cannabis.

Work to make medical cannabis more affordable, available, and accessible by reducing unnecessary regulatory barriers, simplifying supply chains, protecting the tax-free status of medical cannabis products, and ensuring patients can access safe, effective cannabis-based treatments.

Protect patient rights and continuity of care by strengthening anti-discrimination protections, supporting accommodation requirements, reducing barriers to access, and ensuring Minnesota patients and visiting patients can obtain the products and services they need.

Support reasonable expansion of Minnesota's caregiver cultivation program and other patient-centered policies that increase access while maintaining appropriate safeguards and oversight.

Explore opportunities to recognize qualifying hemp-derived cannabinoid products within Minnesota's medical cannabis framework when doing so improves patient access, affordability, and therapeutic options.

Support research, education, and evidence-based policy discussions related to psychedelic-assisted therapies and other emerging treatment modalities.

Modernize possession limits for cannabis and hemp products to align with the treatment of other adult-use products, and end the criminalization of cannabis use and possession.

Ensure that drug policy reforms actively repair past harms by expanding expungement efforts, securing resentencing opportunities for individuals impacted by drug-related convictions, and ensuring reinvestment in communities most harmed by prohibition.

Defend civil liberties at the intersection of drug policy and law enforcement by opposing unnecessary surveillance, workplace discrimination, and other punitive measures that restrict individual rights based on legal drug use or past drug-related offenses.

Expand access to fair, transparent, and responsible financing options for licensed cannabis businesses.

Protect Minnesota cannabis operators from predatory lending practices and unfair financial arrangements.

Promote policies that increase access to capital while preserving opportunities for independent and locally owned businesses.

Support market structures that allow small businesses to compete and thrive alongside larger operators.

Identify and remove financial and regulatory barriers that disproportionately impact new entrants, social equity applicants, and small businesses.