If the box doesn’t have a yellow tag on it then Taylor McLaughlin, vice president of redeye 420 won’t buy it and certainly won’t sell it.
“I can’t buy it and put it in my store without that yellow tag,” McLaughlin said
McLaughlin says people come into the store nearly every week trying to sell product that doesn’t have the RFID chip and is not registered with Mectrc, a third party vendor that tracks all marijuana products that are legal in the state.
“I know it for a fact because they try and sell it to me and I am not partaking,” he said.
For the last year as they are required to do by law, Redeye 420 tracks everything that makes it to their shelves using the Metrc database, a third-party system that tracks the plant or product all the way down to where it was planted. He says it is similar to what they did with OMMA, but Metrc is just an outside party.
“It is a more organized system as far as the tracking system goes,” he said.
But McLaughlin says it has not weeded out, so to speak, people who are still illegally selling and growing.
“You can’t track something that is not already being tracked,” McLaughlin explained.
Ask Mark Woodward with the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, he knows all too well the struggle of cracking down on illegal marijuana sales.
“We have as many as 3,000 of our 6,500 license manufacturers …close to three thousand are under investigation by obtaining their licenses by fraud. That is nearly 50 percent,” Woodward said.
He says Metrc has helped but its only scratching the surface.
“They are putting tags on these plants to make them look legitimate,” Woodward explained.
For McLaughlin and his crew sure, it helps spot the illegal weed but also raises his prices.
“It added a 25 percent tax additional to almost every item that we sell with a metrc tag on it,” he said.
Some lawmakers are pushing to have another vendor handle the database of registered marijuana product.
Source: FOX23 News
