State to sign contract for tracking pot | Honolulu Star-Advertiser

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DENNIS ODA / DEC. 18, 2014

Karl Malivuk, who has a Hawaii medical marijuana card for chronic liver disease, shows a bud that he will smoke.

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The state said Monday it expects to sign a contract this week for a marijuana tracking system required before Hawaii’s first dispensaries can open for business.

The Department of Health selected Florida software vendor BioTrackTHC to install the system in December but has taken almost a year to agree on a contract with the company. The software tracking program must interact with an existing marijuana patient registry system to ensure dispensaries are not exceeding the eight-ounces-per-month restriction on sales to patients.

“We hope to sign it (later this week),” said DOH spokeswoman Janice Okubo.

Keith Ridley, head of the Department of Health’s medical marijuana dispensary program, told a legislative oversight committee last week that the state was waiting to get the signed contract back from the contractor.

“The main stumbling block has been our need to renegotiate the contract that we started out with earlier in the year with BioTrack,” Ridley said last week. “We have since done that and we’ve sent them the contract, and we have back assurances from them that they have signed the contract.”

The tracking system, which will monitor production and sales of medical cannabis, follows plants as they are grown, processed and sold to make sure no marijuana is used illegally.

In addition, the DOH has received one application for certification from a laboratory that will open on Maui. The company will do business statewide to test cannabis products before they are sold.

Hawaii legalized medical marijuana 16 years ago, but patients did not have a legal way to obtain the drug. Act 241, passed in 2015, allowed the state to issue eight licenses for a total of 16 medical marijuana dispensaries statewide. The law allowed dispensaries to open July 15, but the state and licensees weren’t ready. Some of the license holders have said they are ready to go as soon as the state puts the tracking system in place.

Last week voters in three states — California, Nevada and Massachusetts — approved the use of recreational marijuana, bringing the total number of states allowing recreational pot use to eight.