Former Marijuana Regulator Joins Cannabis Consulting Firm

The consulting arm of Denver Relief, a
cannabis grower and retailer in Colorado’s capital, today announced
that Laura Harris, former director of the state Department of
Revenue’s Marijuana Enforcement Division (MED), has joined the firm
as a regulatory
adviser. Harris, who took over what was then the Medical
Marijuana Enforcement Division in late 2011,
retired last August after 30 years of working for the revenue
department. In an email message that was leaked to The Denver
Post, Harris said she had planned to stay at the MED until
mid-2014, after the newly legal recreational pot stores were up and
running, “but I found that the personal toll of this job was too
much.” She added that “I found that I was becoming ineffective with
my colleagues at those times when it was necessary to address areas
of disagreement.”

When I interviewed Harris for my 2013
Reason cover
story about legalization in Colorado, I found her to be
refreshingly candid. Although Colorado’s medical marijuana
regulations were widely cited as a model for other states, she made
it clear that they were largely arbitrary and difficult  to
enforce. She questioned the rule requiring dispensaries to grow at
least 70 percent of their inventory (which applies to recreational
stores until this October) and the practicality of developing
child-resistant packaging for cannabis-infused foods. “The current
code is extremely difficult to regulate,” she said. “What you will
hear from many in industry is that this works. Well I’m not as
optimistic about it working. If it worked, we would be able to
present evidence of how the model works toward good enforcement.”
This was two months before the state auditor released a report that
was
sharply critical of medical marijuana regulation in
Colorado.

Harris, who worked as a revenue agent and a criminal
investigator before becoming Colorado’s chief cannabis regulator,
had a pretty steep learning curve. “Even in college,,” she said, “I
did not partake. I can say that honestly. I had friends in law
enforcement. My first husband was in law enforcement, which was the
environment in which I was raised. My perception of what marijuana
was when I came into this division is the little flowers in the
baggie that I had seen others carry around.” A year or so later,
she had learned “much more about the canabis plant, much more about
the theory around its medicinal effects and much more about what is
actually extracted from the plants other than the flower—the resin
and all the products that are created from the resin. So yes, its
been very educational.”

Now Harris will be educating others—not about the plant so much
as the often baffling rules surrounding its use. “It’s exciting to
be able to bring my expertise on cannabis regulation to Denver
Relief Consulting, a firm that has demonstrated a commitment to
establishing a responsible model for the entire nation to follow,”
she says in a press release. “As more states follow Colorado’s
regulatory lead, both in medical and retail cannabis, it is
imperative that individual governments have a framework in which to
work so that there are no unintended consequences.”