The Nevada Tax Commission is planning to address shortages in recreational marijuana after the first week of legal sales in the state outperformed expectations.
The commission is meeting Thursday and could adopt emergency regulations. The panel plans to look into whether the state has enough marijuana distributors, according to NPR.
"Right now, only companies that are also licensed to distribute liquor in Nevada are able to bring marijuana to dispensaries. The dispensaries say that's why they're running out of the drug," Casey Morell of Nevada Public Radio said in the NPR report.
Gov. Brian Sandoval, a Republican, endorsed the Taxation Department's statement of emergency, which said changes were needed to keep users from resorting to illegal marijuana purchases and to support new businesses that have arisen because of the legalization of sales, NPR reports.
The issue with licensing must be resolved or stores may close, said Deonne Contine, executive director at the Taxation Department.
"The inability to deliver product to the retail stores will result in many of these employees losing their jobs and will cause this nascent industry to grind to a halt," Contine wrote in a statement, NPR reports.
Nevada opened up the legal sale of recreational marijuana on July 1, with 47 licensed stores. In the first weekend, tax officials said the stores handled "well over 40,000 retail transactions," NPR reported.
Some retailers reported a need for new deliveries, because of sales twice as high as they had expected, according to the NPR report, and the state's tax department said that as of July 5, no wholesale liquor dealer had met the requirements to get a marijuana distribution license. At least seven dealers had applied.
Tax officials in the state said they expect sales of marijuana to bring in $100 million over the next two years.
Some recreational marijuana stores are "running on fumes," Nevada Dispensary Association President Andrew Jolley said Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.
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