 Okay. My name is James Pepper. I'm the chair of the Vermont Cannabis Control Board. Today is July 29th, 2021. It's 9.30. And I am going to call this meeting of the board to order. I have a few administrative details. Our executive director, Brynn Hare, has officially extended an offer to our finalists for our ASM-3 position. And she has accepted, which is fantastic news. I'm going to give her a little bit of time to make her own notifications before I announce her name. But I can tell you that she brings a very extensive background in managing a regulatory body. And it's just such a positive and helpful person and brings a real degree of professionalism to the board. So we're lucky she'll be joining us. Our general counsel position and our administrative service coordinator, two positions have closed and Brynn is in the process of reviewing and interviewing those candidates. So really with these hires coming together and our advisory committee having been named and our consultants being onboarded, our core team is really starting to take shape. And that actually coincides nicely with kind of where we are as a board. Today is our actual final single issue and a thematic meeting. And it really marks the end of this initial sort of fact finding stage that we're in. We may have one more meeting to kind of get to some witnesses that we haven't heard from that weren't, we weren't able to schedule earlier and we might take a week off. But for the most part, we are going to shift our work and really lean on our consultants to help guide us and our advisory committee through every aspect of the regulatory framework and start to develop some of those recommendations that we need to make in October and November. Before we get to our agenda, has anyone, everyone had an opportunity to review the draft minutes from 722? Yes. Yes. I take a motion to approve the minutes. Move to approve the minutes from July 22nd. Seconded. All in favor? Aye. Aye. So, turning to the agenda, today we are focusing on public safety issues, including highway safety and safe banking. Our first witness today is Mandy White, who's the Highway Safety Data Analyst for the VTrans Remind Agency of Transportation. Specifically, she manages crash data for the state and I thought it would be a very helpful framing for our conversation today to hear about that data and any trends that we might be experiencing in Vermont. Mandy, I hope I'm not getting you in trouble by mentioning, but you were gracious enough to come to join us while you are double booked and it just speaks to the level of importance of the data that we're going to hear on this issue. So, if you're with us and you'd like to turn your video on or unmute yourself, please feel free. Good morning, everyone. Hi. Hi. So, I did a little presentation. I didn't know. I just started it and I don't know if I'm going to be able to share it or not. So. You should be able to. You're a presenter. Okay. Let's do it this way. Can everybody see the slides? I don't have it in slide show mode, but. Yeah. Yeah, we can see it. That's great. It's a pretty simple slide show. I just wanted to go through a few things and this was the easiest way for me to explain things. Thank you, James, for inviting me to speak to this this morning. So you had asked me to talk a little bit about where crash data comes from. We collect the crash data from law enforcement reports. So every time there's a motor vehicle crash on a public highway, we collect that data in a web based crash report system called web crash within that system. We have an ad hoc reporting tool where we can then query the data. So anything, any piece of data that law enforcement collects on our roadways is queryable, which includes drug and alcohol information. The next thing. So I wanted to talk a little bit about recent data. So currently we have 31 fatal crashes in Vermont with 34 fatalities. Last year in 2020, we had 58 fatal crashes with 61 fatalities. The reason I wanted to point out the difference in, so this little chart here shows where we're at compared to previous years. So we're currently at 31. Last year we were at 30 at this time of year. The last time we were this high isn't even on the chart, to be honest. So 2018 was our worst year prior to this. So in 2020, the differences that we had the pandemic, we had a stay at home order during that time. The traffic on our roadways was reduced significantly. We still saw a huge increase in fatalities over that year. So I added some BMTs, so that's vehicle miles traveled. It's an annual number. So the annual number for 2020 was 5.9 billion cars. In 2019, to compare that to a normal, what we would call a more normal year is 7.3 billion cars on our road. So we had an 18% decrease. I think there was a news report not too long ago that said that the traffic on our roadways was comparable to World War II or something. So it's very much, it was a huge decrease on our roadways. So during the stay at home order in the early parts of it, we were seeing the dips as low as like 50 to 40% of our traffic, normal traffic, but the overall decrease over the whole year was 18%. And currently right now we're seeing still on our roads about a 14% lower number than we had at this time in 2019. So if that gives you a little bit of a background on, we have less cars on our roads, but we're still seeing an increase in fatalities and fatal crashes. So I send out a, on a weekly basis, I send out this little chart here that kind of shows fatal crashes as compared to previous years. I just wanted to call this out because, because James had asked me to talk about some poly substance and where we're at, where, what we, what it looks like in the past year. So in 2016, we, we saw, we had this year where we had more alcohol than drug. So, well, let me talk about these. Alcohol, operator suspected it is driving under the influence of alcohol only. Then there's the operator suspected it is driving under the influence of drugs only. And then there's the, the dual alcohol and drug in here. And then I call out the cannabis in here because I've been asked to. So the numbers, as you can see, we kind of fluctuate between alcohol and drug. 2020 was the first year where alcohol was a lot higher than it had been in several years. But drug, drug only crash operators with only drugs in their system have kind of stayed pretty consistent in, in the 15 to 20 range. I should say 14 to 20 range. The dual, the dual drug and alcohol that kind of, that seems to have come down a little bit over the last couple of years. But as you can see, marrow or cannabis involved in crashes has kind of been consistent in that teens and the teens there. I don't know if you, if you want me to do questions at the end. I didn't even think to ask this. I tend to, as I do these things, ask. Yeah, just because you're short on time, why don't you, why don't we save questions for the end? Just so we can make sure we get through your slides. Absolutely. Okay. So this one I wanted to show, it's a similar chart. What we're looking at is alcohol only, but this also calls out alcohol and Delta nine THC or cannabis. You can see that in this line here over the years, alcohol and other drugs, which does include Delta nine. So there's another poly substance line here. And then the Delta nine alone. And then drugs other. And if anybody can't see this, I can always provide this to you, James. And then we can, you can share it. So the main point here is to look at this impaired percentage of fatal crashes. So we're seeing at least 50% most years since 2016, at least 50% of our fatal crashes have an impaired driver involved in their crashes. From 2019 to 2020, that increased about 4%. And then I also have this little, this other chart here or graph that shows just the marijuana, like the different percentages of marijuana, either alone with alcohol, with other drugs, or with other drugs and alcohol. So just that another, it's kind of just slicing and dicing the data a little bit differently for everybody. So you can see what you're looking for, if you're looking for something specific. And this, this last chart I did, it's actually, I kind of copied something I think Colorado did several, several years ago, I saw on a report and I was like, well, I wonder what Vermont's would look like. And so I put, put our data into a chart and it shows crashes where a driver tested positive for marijuana. I added in the date of decriminalization and then the date of legalization and where, where we're at on that chart. The purple line is total crashes. And then the blue line is major crashes. And a major crash is any crash where at least one person has died or one person has been seriously injured. And then the one other thing James had asked me to speak to is countermeasures and strategies. I put a little, I slide in here. Basically, these are all countermeasures and strategies for highway safety that I'm aware of. I'll put that qualifier in there. Our, we put them into our strategic highway safety plan, which is a five year plan that states our goals and aligns tactics for minimizing the occurrence and severity of crashes. And those are, those are all, we generally look at major crashes as defined a few minutes ago. And then the other plan is the highway safety plan. That's an annual plan that's done by the state highway safety office. That is data driven. They use all of the data coming right out of, of my program, the crash program. And then they establish performance targets and select countermeasure strategies for, for highway safety activities. That's a pretty quick, I think, I think that's answers, or at least that hits on a lot of the things that you had sent me an email. So I wanted to make sure that I hit those points for you. And that's, that's all my slides. So thank you. Thanks for putting that together. And especially kind of that last chart, which kind of tracks the loosening of our cannabis policies and how that, how that has impacted or may, may have impacted or correlated at least with some of the fatal crashes or major crashes. And other questions from Andy? I have a question about this chart, actually. So it legalization in, in 2018, and then an immediate dip and then an immediate rise. Do you have any sense of what, what the cause, what, what has impacted that? I don't. And I know you might be speaking with other highway safety people today. And I'm happy to, to send this to you. And have you asked them to, but I don't, I think 2019, I will say 2019, I didn't put it in my, in my data set. But our 2019, we had an unusually low number of fatal crashes. And that could have also, we, we did have, I think we had 44 fatalities that year, which is a very, our average generally for fatal crashes and fatalities is around 60 to 65. So 44 was our second lowest year in like 40 years or something. I can't remember exactly how many, but it was an unusually low number. So it's possible that that it kind of dipped with the whole, with the overall crash data. Was 2019 the year that the sort of like speed monitoring was set up on the interstate? And I suppose that's a question to anyone who sort of remembers that timeline. Okay, thank you. I'll do a little research there. I don't know if I necessarily have a question more so than an observation, I guess. You said that in 2020, there is the fewest amount of cars on Vermont highway since World War II, yet it's the highest on this graph. There's the highest number of total crashes involving somebody who tested positive for marijuana. So more of an observation than anything else, but hopefully I'm understanding that, right? Yeah, we definitely, it's our fatality rate, which is a number where we compare our fatalities to our vehicle miles traveled, our fatality rate like skyrocketed. I mean, it jumped extremely high and you know, we're under the gun now to not meet some federal performance measures because of it, but we can't control the traffic, unfortunately, or a pandemic, which happens once every 100 years or so. Mandy, I've got a couple of related questions or similarly related questions. If I recall correctly, the kind of operator blood testing is done for all fatal crashes. Is that right? That's mandated by law, I think. I hate to say that I actually don't know the law necessarily, but I can tell you that not all operators are tested. I'm aware of. I do get some that come through that were not tested, and I think a lot of times that tends to be, well, they're not tested if they're alive. And there's no warrant. I know that. Deceased operators, I believe, are always tested. And then the anomalies that we get are those operators that are taken out of state. I don't always get drug or alcohol test results from other states for those. I can request them. I get them. I do a pretty good job of getting things from New Hampshire, New York. I hate to say this. This isn't any way. I can't get data from them. It's really difficult. And we don't tend to have a lot that go to Massachusetts, but New York and New Hampshire are two big ones. New Hampshire, I usually can get the data through the other FARs analysts and pretty quick timing when I ask for it. Can you talk a little bit about what that term suspected impairment means? Sure. How you make that determination or how a law enforcement makes that determination. So you mean in this one where I say suspected? Yeah. The reason that that state says suspected, it's more for the current year. So the current year it's suspected. The other years it's been confirmed. But because of the chart, I just leave it as suspected. But it's always suspected until we get toxicology results. So until then, a lot of times I get fatal notifications from law enforcement. Every time there's a fatal crash, or at least from state police is very good at sending those immediately. The local, the municipalities, I have to ask for it, but I usually get them. There's a field on there that's marked whether or not they suspect alcohol. A lot of times they put it unknown. So a lot of times I don't know. And that's where there's a lot of holes in that for that current year data like that four to four. Those are things that have either been marked or I've already got toxicology for all those other crashes are still marked as unknown for me. We have quite a few. So June was we had eight or nine fatalities and I don't have any data for that yet. So we definitely have a lot of a lot of data we're still waiting on for that for that year. So to me as a member of the cannabis board, it's really important to see what the impact of adult use is going to be on these numbers. Are there any other kind of baseline data points that we wish that we are collecting now or should collect now that will help us inform how the opening of retail and legal sales of cannabis will impact our highway safety? Are you asking me or everybody? That was the question for you as just kind of a person who's most familiar with the data set that you receive. Are there things that could be improved upon or data points that are not being collected that should be that you think might improve our kind of overall picture of either current impaired driving or how it might and how it might change in the future? I would for the data side of things, I would love to see, I think we chatted a little bit, but I feel like so I can get really great data on fatal crashes, but all those other crashes out there, I think it's very under reported. So finding a way to collect drug and alcohol use drug specifically because drug is harder, right? It's you know, you need to do a test and there needs to be needs to go through the toxic colleges, but some way of getting more data and and connecting it to the crash report would make the overall crash data. This report that I show you here like major crashes are pretty well reported, but I think overall like there's there's fatal crashes I get toxicology for all the time that I reach out to law enforcement and say please update your crash report because when I pull the data for things like the cannabis board or whoever that's asking for it, I feel like the only data that I can give them is fatal because I'm monitoring it because I'm getting toxicology from the MEs office. I don't have to wait for law enforcement to to provide that for me and sometimes I'm having them correct correct crash reports with it. So definitely getting law enforcement to to report this a lot more or at least even if they and I don't even know how to how to have them report it but more but definitely I don't know there's there's definitely there's some training for law enforcement out there like a ride and maybe putting more DREs on the on the list that would be great when you get more data. Yeah I mean is one of the things you're kind of getting at is and if law enforcement's not I don't know how they report data to you do they kind of look at it from a major contributing factor perspective I know you're reading toxicology reports I'm not saying anybody should drive drive it impaired or under the influence of marijuana but but you know looking at the data is there any breakouts for you know whether being a major contributing factor other drivers on the road being a major contributing factor alcohol impairment drug impairment um so on and so forth I don't I don't know if it gets that granular as opposed to just this was in somebody's system I don't know what that definition of maybe I'm making up this term that isn't even used in this context but a major contributing factor and understanding why a crash occurred. Yep so we the crash report form collects contributing factors they have an option for two for each for each operator so the operator has a primary and a secondary um a lot of times they have that they do have the ability to collect it in there so even without drug test results so that's definitely something to try to remind them that if that is a factor to fill it in what we can't do if they only utilize that and don't give us any other result information is no whether it's alcohol or drugs and what drug it is but we can get that granular in the report but if there's no test that information is not available and yes we can get more granular into weather factors um vehicle factors we have defective equipment field on here um I'm trying to think without looking at the crash report form um there's a parent operator condition so there's also whether or not they're fatigued or um impaired in other ways we you know we are that's where we get into the some of the critical critical emphasis areas in the strategic safety plan as we look at impaired driving versus infrastructure issues so roadway issues as well. Do those toxicology reports tell you the level of cannabis in someone's system? They do okay and is it like a last 30 days last seven days last hour can you get that type of reporting? That is no I don't yeah I don't believe that's on the report usually when yeah I use the toxicology only for the disease so it would would have been and and I don't know enough about it so to speak to it myself about at what point when they die along that still lasts in their system or anything so. I think our next witness might know he's he's law enforcement and he um I think can speak between the active and inactive metabolites that are tested for. Yep. Mandy are there um is there anything specific uh in the strategic highway safety plan um around preparing for legalization for for adult use recreational? Not currently um we are we're in our last year of the current five year plan and we are actually um that's the workshop I'm in this morning is we're working on rewriting that new that plan for the next five years um so we're we've got a few uh working groups that we're that we put together and I'm in the the data one. It's surprising. We we've been assigned um major Ingrid Jonas former major Ingrid Jonas to to our advisory panel and I'd love to connect her on that issue uh to you all for for that piece of it um if she's willing to if she's willing to do that and you're willing to have her as well. Yeah absolutely. That's great so I think that's it I think that's I mean that's all the I think this is an important framing for us especially some of the recent trends um and I think it kind of gives us something to think about and keep our eye on and um yeah thank thank you for joining us I don't want to take up any more of your time because I know that you got to jump back to another meeting um so but thank you for for being with us today and sharing this and and for the slides do you mind if if we put them up on our website is that okay? No do you want me to do I probably should clean them up and put our I'll probably get in trouble if I don't put my V-trans logo on it or something come there yeah okay yeah whenever they're ready whenever you feel like they're ready um just if you could send them over and I'll make sure that we get them up there um because I think this is really important kind of baseline data for us to consider. Okay great well thank you for having me I appreciate it. Absolutely thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Have a great day. So our next witness today um if uh you're with us is Jay Regan. Hey Jay. Hi can you uh folks hear me Jimmy okay? Yeah we can so so Jay um is a sergeant um with the Vermont State Police he's also the subject matter expert on impaired driving for the Department of Public Safety um you know I audited the DRE class and you literally taught the module on cannabis impairment um and so I thought it'd be really important for us to hear about how the state police and others are preparing for um you know this eventual market you know I'd love to hear a little bit about the DRE program how that works how that operates how that's filling the void of kind of the lack of kind of impairment standards for cannabis and a roadside test um and honestly I'd love to hear just about kind of some of the physiological responses to cannabis consumption because I hear more often than not that driving while after consuming cannabis is not bad it's it's safe certainly safer than alcohol um and I think that there's also a lot of folks out there that might be coming to Vermont um and once we have adult use sales that will be kind of low information cannabis consumers and how um you know consumption of cannabis alongside other impairing substances might have you know synergistic effects or or kind of some of the stuff that you know I've learned about through my work as a prosecutor and and my work uh in the DRE program it's a lot to cover but if you I'll I'll leave it to you your capable hand nothing like expectations there Mr. Pepper thanks um so I'll take just uh excuse me just 30 seconds uh to run through um some of my qualifications in the subject matter um I've been a state trooper since 2006 I worked the road up at the St. Albans Barracks throughout 13 of those years the last two years after my promotion to sergeant uh been the subject matter expert for impaired driving for DPS the Department of Public Safety um in addition to being a drug recognition expert and I'll talk about that training in a moment but in addition to being a drug recognition expert which I've been since 2008 I'm also a drug recognition expert instructor so I teach the subject matter I'm a poor qualified expert in drug impaired driving I present the subject matter throughout the state and throughout New England how presented at both regional conferences and state conferences on these types of issues as my as my friends tell me goes you know they say Jay you know your passion is not everybody's passion so please respect that and I and I totally do um but uh like everybody um I am on the roadways my family I live in Milton my wife and two young sons four and two years old and so this has my attention from the public safety um public safety uh concern the aside from that you know drug recognition experts we teach this at the core we don't have a horse in this race uh as in we are not trying to rule in impairment um no more than we're trying to uh rule out uh unimperiment it's really important that we tell the story and so let me just uh take this kind of into two parts uh for consumption here and perhaps and I'll speak slowly enough that if there are questions as we go along I think please interrupt me um and say actually I'd like you maybe to elaborate on what you just said or I don't understand that concept um please let's let's do that if you're comfortable within this kind of like small group conversation that we'll have this morning um but first I'll run down the drug recognition expert program what it entails to get that credentialing and then we can kind of parlay that into say cannabis impairment physiology and how one becomes cannabis impaired and how this is this is a chemical is no more safe than is alcohol as is to say they're both dangerous and so when we talk about combining these things with driving I mean that's what this conversation is about today um nothing in this conversation from a drug recognition expert standpoint should be construed to mean that anyone should consume less alcohol or consume less cannabis I think that's concern for other subject matters I know something that the um that your uh control board certainly would take under as you kind of work through some of your issues but for us it's about not combining this stuff with driving and so we're going to talk about I guess a little bit about kind of how we get there and where that comes from why we have that concern so the DRE program the drug recognition expert program is not new it's been around in this country since the late 70s um it was conceptualized out in Los Angeles where road officers were seeing people who were DUI but their DUI was not explained by alcohol and so they realized there had to be some type of a program that could be established through best practices through through uh non-novel scientific procedures to say is this nervous system functioning the way it should and if it isn't as I say it's impaired is it caused by medical conditions or is it caused by chemical conditions chemicals of course being drugs other than alcohol and so this was a lab tested field tested it came to Vermont in 2005 I joined the program in 2006 so I was among among the early dearies in Vermont um and in Vermont it has upheld uh the rigorous Vermont core standards by way of passing muster which is to say that this is not junk science this is not voodoo but rather this is a prescribed program that espouses to the best known practices of multiple subject matters and so that is not just in um physiology and and and law and practice but also on the technical advisory panel that informs this program sits medical doctors, optimologists, judicial practitioners, law enforcement of course but these are constantly revisited every couple years to make sure that when we talk about what it is to be so-called normal as in a normal functioning nervous system we're recognizing what the best practices are to harvest that evidence I think for the board's awareness it's really important to understand that um there's nothing that is um unique with what we do that other systems don't already put in place namely say um medical medical doctors and optimologists with eye exams we don't make diagnoses here we're not we're no practice about a medical license as we're sometimes accused we are uh using the best practice of each other industry as we attempt to make good um good decisions by way of whether or not someone needs to be charged with DUI or not or released without charge charges excuse me um in 2017 the Vermont Medical Society endorsed the DRE program here which is to say that um these uh this 12-step standardized process that DREs use to be able to uh rule in or rule out one's impairment doesn't use uh bizarre or inappropriate procedures they're well within the ability of law enforcement to practice this and and the interpretations they make as a result of their procedures can be relied on and that's from the Vermont Medical Society in 2017 I'm going to share my screen here just for a moment um we won't go back and forth too much but I want um I'd like you to see what a blank face sheet looks like um a blank face sheet looks like for our evaluation so you can kind of conceptualize what it is what we're talking about can you see this okay says drug influence evaluation at the top yep okay thank you so um here's here's what uh here's what happens in a field setting is that a law enforcement officer for the sake of the example here will say that law enforcement officer is not DRE credentialed um and I should uh I should note for the board's consideration that this is an international program it's not just in the U.S. North America but other countries in Europe as well uh less than less than one percent of police officers um are credentialed as drug recognition experts um the uh the training that gets to now uh this face sheet here the training that that goes into this is a uh two week course uh it's 72 hours of classroom uh in Vermont to even be admitted to the training one has to apply and be vetted by a board which includes a drug recognition expert instructors prosecutors and sometimes our judicial liaisons um to make sure the person has demonstrated a good field proficiency to even enter into the training it's a 72 hour course during which the uh DRE candidate we call them is tested multiple times there's an exit exam as they leave the course to make sure they've understood the basic knowledge it's a 100 question test they need to score an 80 percent or better on that and that is and that is just to access then the field training component um the field certification which in Vermont we usually in pre-covid or non-covid times use a county jail out in Phoenix because the volume of potentially drug impaired people is so much greater than it is here in Vermont um the DRE candidate needs to participate in 12 of these drug influence evaluations six of which they need to be the hands-on practitioner they can observe the other six and they need to correctly identify impairment in um in seven of the nine evaluations so that's a that's a 75 percent um accuracy rate that's minimum standards uh our Vermont DREs usually do a little better than that if they're going to be successful in their training um at the end of the drug influence evaluation process they're subjected to a comprehensive final knowledge exam which the average DRE candidate does complete this exam in maybe four hours sometimes it goes along a six seven eight hours it's a multi-part exam that is graded by or scored by two DRE instructors both instructors have to agree that the person has met the the proficiencies during which it's a real knowledge dump of what that DRE candidate has learned over their 72-hour course and then their field certification so quite a lot goes into the DRE training to maintain the certification a DRE needs to conduct a minimum of four evaluations in a two-year period and undergo eight hours of in-service training in that two-year period if there's concern about interpretation ability or proficiency that the DRE is benched and potentially uh decertified by the state coordinator who runs our program um because we need to hold ourselves to the high standards we're talking about making good interpretations which is ruling in people who are impaired and ruling out people who aren't and so to return to this we have let's say a a non-DRE trained police officer encounters a operator who they suspect to be DUI based on the results of a preliminary breath test that would be an alcohol road test roadside test they don't think that the impairment is explained by DUI alcohol they think is other drugs in play so that person is generally brought into custody they're brought back to the officer's police station and the drug recognition expert is then requested and in Vermont that is that is done by uh either knowing that a DRE is on duty in the area or done via an alert that is sent out to cell phones and emails so the first part of the DRE evaluation i'm not gonna i'm not gonna hover on this too much but just so you can conceptualize the first part of the DRE evaluation which the top part of this face sheet is really trying to understand is the person is the person appear to be impaired and is it explained by alcohol and we rule out alcohol by the breath test result which is to say that the person is under a point away but the alcohol loan doesn't explain it or the breath test is zeros which certainly means that there's no alcohol involved at all but then also is this impairment caused by some type of medical issue we've had DREs in our program identify people early on in the process that were not drug impaired they had medical concerns come to find out there was a diabetic emergency early stroke undiagnosed brain aneurysm these are cases from Vermont where a DRE has referred to emergency medicine for treatment and so not because the DRE recognized necessarily stroke diabetes or brain aneurysm but they recognized that it wasn't consistent with drugs and referred them to emergency medicine right off based on the results of this preliminary examination did the DRE considers is this person really eligible now for the rest of the evaluation which is to say if there's any medical concern I don't think that it's emergent I think that this might be chemical impairment but I'm not sure and so we have to harvest the symptomatology to say you know is the nervous system functioning where it needs to do I'm going to change the view here for a second because even when we have this conversation now but also as we continue saying to how cannabis affects impairment potentially want to like us to consider this here I'm drawing what I would say the bell curve of normal right this is where everybody in society lives this is everyone's nervous system so certainly most people here's the mean most people and their nervous system as so what is so called normal lives here chemicals affects the homeostasis of a nervous system that's the normal functioning of the nervous system and starts to dysfunction it and so that stuff is measurable and that's what DREs are attempting to identify and harvest via the evaluation and so eventually there's enough deviations from the mean and I'm going to show you what that face sheet looks like as far as what we actually seek to harvest there's enough deviations from the mean here that it can only be explained by one thing and that one thing is chemical impairment so that's impairment by drugs and then based on the shared symptomatology perhaps of what the DRE is seeing the DRE male pine what category of drugs is causing the impairment for all of the drugs that are out there in our society the DRE program has categorized them into seven different categories and they are in those categories because they have shared symptomatology so one of those drug categories is cannabis because cannabis if one is impaired by that you generally expect them to have a certain signs and symptoms of impairment so again so I may refer to in our conversation here this bell curve of normal and departures from the mean that's what I'm talking about it's not that you know every one person does not respond the same way that the majority does so may a person have dilated pupils normally yes may a person have bloodshot eyes normally yes may they speak with slur speech normally yes but at some point there's enough of those departures that when they coexist they can only be explained by one thing and that's chemical impairment so that's really a critical concept here when we talk about interpretation and so we may revisit that as we have our conversation but let's just walk through very briefly this face sheet so you can look at some of the things that a DRE seeks to harvest so we look at general indicators which include their attitude their coordination how they're talking any odors how their face looks what's the condition of their eyes and their bloodshot watery you know we say in the DRE program that you know it's it's cute in poetry let's say where people say the eyes are the windows to the soul so perhaps that's true but what eyes literally are is they are the windows to the nervous system and so much can be told about the health of the nervous system by the condition of the eyes in fact for people who hold medical degrees illnesses can be diagnosed by eye exams so when we talk about now chemical impairment the eyes tell us quite a bit about the normal functioning of the nervous system so how do the eyes look are they bloodshot they watery do they do they track together how what are the condition of the eyelids as in are they droopy or normal are they retracted is there any gaze nystagmus which is an involuntary jerking of the eye it's a dysfunction in the part of the brain that controls the muscles that lose the eye we run an assessment for that we look at their pulse we look we assess for convergence issues this is the eyes ability to converge upon a stimulus all of these by the way are directly tied to the driving task and we can talk about that a little bit about look what do what do eye crossing have to do with safe driving what does a jerkiness of the eye have to do with safe driving we can talk about that if we if we care to but as we continue our harvesting here in addition to the pulse we run them through divided attention tests where we assess can the person do one two three four co-occurring tasks the huge rub in this is that these tests are relatively simple they're designed where the unimpaired nervous system functions quite well through them but as the nervous system starts to dysfunction we start to see the clues again the clues of impairment that says that the divided attention ability is compromised uh we then uh continue with uh but vitals other vitals which includes blood pressure temperature uh pupil size estimation what's the condition of their mouth or their oral cavity the eyes reaction to delight uh condition of the integumentary system the skin as far as injection site burns and so forth and what's their muscle tone so then at the end of all this this is a this is a 10-step process um we uh as DREs make an opinion and that opinion is do I think the person is impaired do I think that impairment is chemical and if so what category of drugs is it you see here at the bottom with the opinion is and then the 12th and final step is a toxicology request so in Vermont that is blood so I think I might put a pin in that for now because that's like I feel like that's a lot so I can put a pin in it as far as just coming back to say the DRE program or protocol generally as far as what we're talking about before we even pivot into say cannabis physiology um physiology of that impairment if I'd love to hear your questions or comments if there are any questions yeah um so you go to the 10-step there's a determination at the end and then a request for a toxicology report so do you have any data on margin of error where there's a toxicology report requested and then the person is not intoxicated in any way so the uh in a correct opinion um is defined as a DRE say opines the person is impaired by cannabis and cannabis comes back in the blood so that would be considered a say correct opinion um in that way Vermont uh as a program uh and I can give you specific percentages but we're somewhere north of 85% accurate across all opinions which is to say that we opine that someone is impaired and at least one of those drugs comes back in the blood so for example a DRE may say I think their person is impaired by cannabis and central nervous system stimulants and only cannabis comes back programmatically that is still considered a correct opinion even though it wasn't corroborated by stimulants I think one of the important concepts here is that a DRE might be wrong about the category causing the opinion but they're still right that the person is impaired and I think that that's really uh that's a really important crossroads to understand but in Vermont we're north of 85% accurate with toxicology confirmation okay Jay thanks for being here um a quick question about about process and so I understand when that DRE she kind of comes into play so if somebody is pulled over and and an officer it makes a determination that that they're likely um impaired by some other substance and alcohol then this this takes place typically back at a police station is that correct this isn't like a roadside test that's right this is a violation done in a controlled study okay uh Jay I don't want to pre-empty you here but um you know we've heard a lot about kind of roadside saliva tests and that's you're certainly kind of a political football or lightning ride at the legislature um even if we had one we don't have any nationally recognized impairment standards like five nanograms in the blood means you're impaired like we do um have for alcohol 0.08 so to me the way I see it is we're always going to need DREs to um be able to kind of explain the signs of impairment that you know explain and then that they're explained through um you know the the cannabis or they're they're they're verified through the toxicology report so can you speak a little bit about um you know the geographic distribution of DREs in the state I mean again I don't know if you're planning on doing this later that's fine but um and also maybe some of their response times and whether that that's sufficient so yeah thanks so much for those two part questions so I think just uh taking kind of the first thing what you said is that it it is so important to appreciate that presence of a chemical in a person's blood actually tells us nothing about whether or not they're impaired so in Vermont with DUI alcohol law we have a per se limit 0.08 or more is where everyone is presumed impaired no matter what you think your tolerance is Vermont DUI law also says that any impairment at all to the slightest degree is also DUI because people do become impaired before 0.08 by the time we get to 0.08 that's where signs tell us everybody has become dysfunctioning okay so the analogy I like to use because sometimes we hear drugs and now suddenly we start to you know think that this is somehow more complicated than it really is let's let's take this in the way of alcohol still so if I have a if I'm not drinking Starbucks here I'm drinking a blood light I could have a sip of a blood light and I would be positive for alcohol in my blood I think we all can understand that pretty simply but does that mean that I'm impaired no but yet I'm positive for alcohol so when we talk about presence of drugs in addition to alcohol so we're talking about cannabis today simply being positive for cannabinoids in my blood doesn't tell us anything about whether I am impaired or not and that's where drug recognition has become a critical part of the story and this is what forensic toxicologists tell us this is what researchers who have studied cannabis and cannabinoids for a generation right tell us is that whether it is saliva or blood or urine however it is that a state chooses to harvest toxicology it tells us only that it's something is positive or not it does not tell us anything about whether the person is impaired by that when we talk about legal limits some people with cannabis show psychophysical impairment below five nanograms some people show it above right and so someone and so contrapositively one could have to have 20 nanograms in their blood and not be impaired so again like a number is only just a number and I think we must get out of our own way with that which is to say that it is going back to that face sheet I'll spare you the screenshot again but if we go back to the back to the face sheet it is the 100 plus clues and indicators to make sure that we are when we say somebody is impaired we can point to exactly how that is as far as how the nervous system is disfunctioning so when we talk about DRE involvement this becomes a great concern so in Vermont we have 48 active DREs troopers account for about a third of the program which makes sense because of the largest agency as well but there's 48 active DREs we have six candidate DREs that we've just put through an application process they have not yet started this their their classroom training on that but I will add to the 48 geographic distribution I think it's easier to talk about where we lack versus where we're strong where we lack is in the northeast kingdom which is really Orleans Essex Caledonia we lack there we are that is our greatest area of need down in the southeastern part of the corner we are also lacking although it's not as diminished as northeast which is like Wyndham County struggle and then in the southwest we're not as well represented central Vermont northwestern Vermont is pretty good as far as representation when we think about what happens here is that a DRE may be on duty or they may not be on duty but when we talk about from the time the blue lights come on is in the seizure of a human being now a DRE may not actually be involved for potentially an hour plus that 12 step process that we've talked about briefly takes about depending on the DRE speed and how much like interview they're putting into the person interviews can last a little while but generally about 35 40 45 minutes long to work through those 12 steps in Vermont as of last year or a year and a half ago we can now get blood from paramedics at a police station so we can call a rescue squad into to do a vena puncture at a this the site of the PD before we would have to go to an emergency department which then was not only not only takes in critical ed resources away from people who are there but also sometimes suspected DUI offenders can be violent and profane and that's really hard to subject people who are there for a medical crisis to that type of stuff as well so in that way it's short of the time but from a DRE from the moment of blue lights come on the time this person's actually released could be ours and so the better we can be with geographic equity I think we can you know reduce that I think when we talk about you know saliva and so forth I think the greatest the greatest benefit I think a saliva would give us even from a from a roadside model is that you have a non-drv trained officer who is seeing someone who's not functioning right maybe it's mental health maybe some are the medical issue or maybe it's drugs and the saliva can help them rule in or rule out is this chemically based or is it non-chemically based by way of if I'm seeing all these signs of impairment and we're positive for drugs then I think I have enough now to take the person that will keep going but absent that ability to rule some and rule somebody out then I really have to continue custody and get a DRE because I don't know I don't know I don't know what to do so there's certainly some great value to that I am looking at my notes here as far as other did I answer your question there Mr. Pepper? Yeah it sparked another question though which is you know you've got the medical rule out and then you've got the alcohol rule out does that I can't remember quite from my from the course does that alcohol rule out occur even if there's suspected chemical interaction as well other than alcohol like so someone if a DRE suspects alcohol and cannabis but they blow 0.08 do they not perceive with the DRE evaluation for cannabis? That's that's right and so and that and that is not a DRE program standard that's really a say legal streamlined consideration would just say if they're over 0.08 on a data master we tend to just pursue alcohol even if we suspect other other chemicals are in play so in that way these numbers are really underrepresented the Vermont forensic lab did a really interesting analysis recently which was when someone is taking a custody for DUI alcohol they're afforded the opportunity to have an independent blood test so alcohol is through breath testing but after they're released the the suspect is able to go to a hospital and get blood for their own purposes now once they get that blood it gets stored at the Department of Health here in Waterbury and it's not tested unless they actually complete that process so there's a lot of samples that sit here and never get tested so they just so they our lab is able to get some funding to test those samples that were just just they use that term loosely just alcohol DUI cases to see what are we missing with other drugs and I don't have the results in front of me be able to speak intelligently about that they found though I think quite intuitively that we are missing other drugs as well through just alcohol cases and I think what's really interesting is that we I think we we don't arrest our way out of the DUI problem okay I think we can appreciate that when we're talking about DUI arrest we're arresting a symptom of a perhaps an underlying issue I think we have someone who is DUI on on above a point away but there's also a cannabis involved or also other drugs involved well that does nothing to help us as far as a system intervening within that person to for counseling and substance use and abuse and things like this that's of education to try to understand how far does this if there's a problem how far does it go and what is it caused by because whether it's opioids or cannabinoids or alcohol treatment models are slightly different here depending on you know what the substance is I think it's easy for someone to admit oh yeah I'm just drunk when really it's drunk on alcohol and also other drugs are causing the story as well and so that's that's only two proposals as a as a concept I don't know that there's a there's certainly not an easy fix here but I think that it's we don't necessarily do ourselves any favors if we're not really tracing as the best that we can unfortunately the only time we tend to really get into the into the meat of this is in a felonious investigation which is there's a serious crash somebody's life is irreparably changed because of injury or death and then we tend to roll out the resources then but now we're even responding even now to something that is unfortunately it's already been done so that may have been a little a little long-winded very helpful can I go back to the geographic distribution for a second yes when it goes to the class is it the sending town or sheriff's department that sends that pays for that how is that paid for for that officer so the the DRE program will cover salary of the person who's there but and this is where it gets complicated is that but now I've left the vacancy at the I'm making up Orleans county sheriff's office and so that requires some type of ship coverage often which then which then goes against that place's budget so money is always of course a concern there I think you know I think that chiefs sheriffs in our own BSP administration they'll go shoulder that burden I haven't heard of a chief or a sheriff or any of our command staff balking at one you know needing to do that however or it hurts a bottom line you know it's not it's not it's not free thank you yeah go ahead I've said a clarifying question so I think what I heard you say from this like roadside saliva testing perspective at least where we are now from a technology standpoint that's that could be another tool in an officer's tool belt to identify whether or not a DRE test is appropriate but it's nothing more than that right now it's it can't be used like the breathalyzer test can in a sense to automatically I understand what you're saying you know clearly enough I think that the idea is that because that you know the research certainly does not support a per se limit for any drugs cannabis or other drugs a per se limit I don't think we should ever go down that road and the data and the research doesn't support that in a way that it does for alcohol but certainly it's another tool in that officer's toolbox as we say to make a good roadside detention decision you know there's there's there's two fatal errors there are cardinal sins as a DOI instructor of when I teach that whether you're a DOI basically officer whether it's the intermediate program which is so-called a ride advanced roadside and pair driving enforcement or the DRE program two cardinal sins can be made one is we taking the custody somebody who isn't impaired right but worse is we release somebody roadside and let them keep driving who is impaired right at least on the front end we have an officer who made a decision based on what they thought was going on a DRE can come in and and evaluate and then rule out to say that yep I think this is a medical issue essentially or they have some cognitive issues or so forth not caused by chemicals but what mustn't happen is that an officer not be afforded say every tool every element of training to make sure that they're making good decisions roadside is that people who are brought into custody are ones who have some legitimate concern not explained by medical or something else I think that the saliva thesis helped that for officers who don't have the elevated level of training that said no test is perfect you know I think that's really important understand that so like I think there may be some people leaving on our call who will eventually watch this video who will say my gosh the Vermont DRE program has 85 success for that's not actually not what that statistic means right we're talking about toxicology corroboration is what that you know percentage means if we're asking any scientific test or law enforcement test or or educational test to give us 100 success we'll never get there and the analogy I like to use to try to maybe bridge the gap with some of the eye rolling maybe I get sometimes is that the PSA test which is the prostate specific antigen test for prostate cancer it's a number result for for for men and for prostate that might be a prostate cancer or not that is notoriously bad as a test for both false positives and false negatives and I'll I'll share you know a personal a personal background here is that my godfather died from metastasized prostate cancer a few years ago and he was a false negative case now he had symptoms of prostate cancer but his PSA was low he's like oh I don't have prostate cancer he didn't get the help that he needed and he ended up metastasizing and sadly he passed away when I talk about false positive rates I mean that 70% of people have a fall who have a high PSA going for a biopsy now and come to find out they actually don't have prostate cancer but here's why I mentioned that because society tolerates the PSA it's the best thing that we have it's the best thing that we know and no problem right no problem it's a system doing the best that they can and so in the DRE sense from both the laboratory settings and the field settings where this program was inception we're talking about a 90 plus accurate rate that's that's 92 that's 92 and a half percent in a field study we made correct arrest decisions based on drug impairment and then actual drugs came back in seven and a half percent of the times they made an impairment arrest decision and no drugs came back in toxicology so then the question is this is where it comes unknown is that because the person was not drug impaired or because toxicology was below reporting limits it was some type of you know fancy substance they wouldn't test for things like that but I think what we focus on is the 92 and a half percent success rate with this program so again it just speaks to the need for the training not every officer can or should be a deerie but certainly officers in a patrol function can or should be a right trained right that gives them that advanced UI stuff so maybe we're pivoting the conversation there but I don't know if anybody you know cares have that conversation but training here is so so so important because I think if I can you know be a little bit philosophical for a second I and others really do believe I'm like a disciple of nasolos hierarchy and people familiar with that you know and it's this at the peak of the pyramid is that self-actualization that's people achieving their best you know some of the a few great years before I was promoted I had to give it up as I was an adjunct faculty at community college at Vermont and I taught a couple courses over there and I was gifted with a teaching excellence award based on some student nomination so I was quite touched by it and and what I've been quite taken by in my life is that the need say for the human spirit to be the best that they can so I think about law enforcement role in our society we can't necessarily really help with that first rung which is physiological needs talking about food and water and things like this but where law enforcement comes in is the next rung and that is safety and security and so what we are trying to do is not about arresting or getting people in trouble that's not it at all it is to really identify perhaps symptoms of a problem to then divert to another system for treatment models so forth to really help that person not just not be a potential threat to other people on our highways but for themselves to be able to kind of elevate escalate themselves to that self-actualization the best that they can be for themselves sometimes these substances get in the way of that and so unfortunately we're fortunately going to look at it law enforcement might be that first piece to get there and so dearies can't and it's like won't be everywhere but boy you know a right people can perhaps to try to get this system you know funneled in the right direction in the absence of the DRE and so you're still here so I guess you don't lose you with that particularly but there's a little bit of philosophy here but what I see is our role out there it is as essential to rule in somebody who's impaired as it is to rule out that they're not and dearies are not trying to make either case we're simply following following the symptomatology where it takes us can I can I ask you just two related questions about the roadside saliva and I just it's only because I've followed this conversation so so many over the years so closely over the years but but one where if you had that tool in your tool belt should it come into play because you I mean you certainly don't want kind of confirmation bias or whatever the kind of biases of that result influencing the rest of the test but you also want to be able to rule people out early if there is no impairment and then two um if the presence of the substance cannabis does not correlate to impairment why do you need that tool at all and I know you've touched on that a little bit but if you can speak to to both of those and then maybe we can move away from saliva testing because it is kind of not a decision for the board certainly it's not in our jurisdiction at all so the Vermont law is fairly clear about say preliminary testing in general so that's a preliminary breath test a handheld test we do roadside and then of course roadside saliva something that you say the nuclear football but the on the front end of this the pulmonary breath testing really should should or shall shall only be done when there's a suspicion of impairment already and so the point is I guess I can confirmation bias I think I'm pretty sensitive to that certainly which is um I administer a breath test the person is a 0.18 BAC therefore everything I see must be because they're alcohol impaired or now more concerningly because it's not as clean as alcohol they're positive on a cannabis test oh everything I see means that they are impaired by cannabis like that's devastating and leads just into those cardinal sins I talked about a few minutes ago so they so if there ever were to be a thing it would be at the end of a process when the officer already has observed certain signs or symptoms of impairment and now was wondering well what's the cause of it um it would be presumably post even preliminary alcohol breath test because again alcohol I'm explaining what I'm seeing um and therefore is this a medical issue or is it chemically driven and so I think that that test helps us helps us make that um get off that decision-making fence when we talk about why and who cares what's the point anyway because it doesn't mean anything well because there are conditions out there that may be emergent medically emergent and so if we're delaying this a half hour 45 minutes for a DRE to come along and then say whoa we have an emergency here like we got a we have to you know get them to a hospital that may be a literal matter of life or death and so um there's a screen splitter on me but so that might be a literal there we go um it might be a literal matter of life or death so therefore an officer can say look I see these signs of impairment I'm not sure if it's chemical or medical um and they're negative on a saliva test and that may indicate that officer that okay this is something medical and I'm going to go this other hospital route um so I think again it just helps to frame the picture of what what should I do with this person next um does that make sense yeah I have another since you've brought up philosophy so I'm not quite sure how related this is to the conversation but you were talking about philosophy earlier and I do think there's a level of public trust that has to exist in these programs right and you've explained these very well you touched on this a little bit do you see the DRE and A-Ride as sort of the the guardian approach to law enforcement in terms of those the pillars of community policing I do in fact and I um in the term that I use and probably overuse it is the capable guardians and I say that you know you arm you arm a human being with the knowledge skills and abilities of say identifying impairment and therefore um you know being a guardian is in like putting yourself between this and that is a guardian but the capable guardian is somebody who now okay now I make good decisions as a guardian and I think that I do see yeah I see A-Ride as a function of that and the DRE being being in our what we know right now with our stuff is simply it is the best training we can afford some we talk about impairment detection A-Ride by contrast I'm not sure how familiar everyone is but A-Ride is a 16-hour course with no prerequisites and in my opinion should be well it is mandated for all police officers hired post-2015 so the academy already mandates that but in BSP land we take it so seriously that all of our road troopers are trained as A-Ride people whether or not they were hired before after 2015 because again it is about um it is about arming our guardians to make them capable guardians with the knowledge skills and abilities to make good decisions and that's not just those cardinal things we talked about allowing an impaired person go away I always think you know my my parents are snowbirds they only live in from on a few months out of the year now I grew up in Montpelier um they how would I want my mother treated you know who's tired at the end of the night coming back from babysitting who two grandkids and she encounters a police officer you know I want I want to treat with respect of course but also would not want her brought into custody um because of something medical she may have going on like she needs help and it's not handcuffs she needs help and I think that training really helps us make sure that we go the health route the capable guardians not this other way um and I do think as a trainer here of course this is a self-aggrandizing statement as a trainer I think that we are an instructor cadre who really believes in that philosophically it's so essential um and I know I'm getting worked up I'm using my hands now too much so I'm gonna try and go thank you that was okay okay okay before we move on to kind of the other thing that I ask you to talk about which is a kind of physiological response the central nervous response um could you just briefly say uh so 2015 a ride became mandatory at uh the academy right yes right so every officer um whether they're vsp local um you know county sheriffs um they're all a ride trained if they graduated the academy post 2015 that's right and and uh you may or may not know but there's also a mandate to the criminal justice training council to um figure out how to train anyone who might be involved in a roadside stop with um a ride training I forget the day I think it's like five to six years out or something like that is that a good kind of backstop to the uh dre program because I know that um I've seen I've had the conversation many times about uh having kind of on-call dres and how difficult that could be for these smaller departments for these kind of underserved underserved areas but is that a ride training kind of a good backstop for um for the kind of dre program uh I think it is a good back I think it's a good backstop I think that um you know we have a couple of uh from our supreme court decisions on the books one of them is state b rithken um which which identifies that if evidence of impairment is going to be admissible it has to be done so be an expert and so absent a dre that evidence may not be admissible which means that case can't be prosecuted effectively um a ride training now the way that the statute was was adjusted in this last uh this last session um affords for both a ride and d r a ride train people and d re train people for their testimony to be admissible in court from a statutory um at a statutory level which which actually is incredible I think there's only I think main is the only other state that has it written into statute so yes so yes um Mr. Pepper that is exactly I think a good backstop for when a d re can't be available um an a ride a capable train a right person um can respond that said um d re's uh there are a few of us who do d re work post incident so we call that d re reconstructions I won't go into that too deep except to say that if the evidence is harvested from the beginning by a capable a ride train police officer we can look at that evidence body cam reports and so forth to then apply some of our d re knowledge to say you know to either to either again rule in or rule out that we think that this was chemical impairment um and that and that has been um allowed in courts as well so um but we can't get there unless we have the a right people who are supporting that thank you anything else on d re's um or a ride I think so okay jay we have about 15 minutes left can you uh is that does that work for you it is yeah let me tell you everything I know about cannabis in 15 minutes this is gonna get this is gonna get violent put our helmets on um so let's just give like a 30 000 foot fly over here um which is uh simply under the big macro concept that there's whether it is simply things that I hear but it's not shared by the majority of the public or I'm not sure cannabis when we talk about driving is no more or no less safe than is alcohol and driving that's really important to understand that and if people are saying look actually using cannabis makes me a better driver like that's not true I think I actually know where that comes from and I think I'd like to speak to that here a little bit and we talk about the physiology and so forth or occasional users versus chronic more frequent users something actually happens with brain chemistry there um and we talk about a little bit but uh again I I love this stuff but I'm gonna stay focused here on the physiology piece which is um the I'm assuming not necessarily for the board here of anyone who may watch this later I'm gonna assume for a moment say like no cannabis knowledge just for just for a second as far as where I'll address this at which is um uh the platform that I'll speak to so the endogenous cannabinoid system is essential to our critical survival functions this is a widely predominant system that affects many of our our major systems which is our hunger body temperature memory fear it's a major body system the uh it is critical with our functioning homeostasis that's what keeps us feeling normal and when I say functioning normal I mean unimpaired right so it's a really critical system the concern is that cannabis stimulates this system and really and it has the potential to hijack it away from this normal function and it does that because it it cannabis it combines the two different receptors one is a psychoactive receptor psychoactive means feeling the effects of that's where impairment lives there's cv1 and cv2 so delta 9 thc delta 8 uh something we were learning more about this binds to cv1 and cv1 has the psychoactive effects and I'll talk about kind of the wide predominance of this in a moment of why it's deleterious to the driving task but cv2 that's where really cbd cannabidiol that's where the oil uh binds and that is not known to have any psychoactive effects so cv1 when that's when that is when that is uh bound to by cannabinoid chemical it activates this endogenous cannabinoid system and it is widely distributed in our brain there are so many brain systems that have cv1 receptors and if I have a cannabinoid chemical that binds to receptor now it turns that on this case it releases these chemicals that now starts to dysfunction the nervous system so that includes now I think about some of the medicinal reason uh applications of cannabis which let's say stimulating appetite with people who suffer from um anorexia or people of um uh negative side effects from chemotherapy with nausea and so forth the reason that it helps with that is because the hypothalamus that controls our appetite has a lot is dense with cv1 receptors the brainstem the cerebellum back here um that are the brainstem and spinal cord that controls nausea dense with cv1 receptors so that may help with some of the side effects from the medicinal uh medicinal benefits potentially but now we're talking about driving and think for a second about the incredibly intense needs that driving requires look everybody here who has a uh uh driver's license was at one point a new driver and think about whether it was your your mom your dad your aunt your uncle your family friend who was teaching you to drive what that was like in that parking lot however many years ago that was which was slamming on the brakes fast accelerator jerking up the wheel any dad grabbing the oh my gosh bar right at least that was my experience because we are trying to teach our nervous system all of the things to do this well which is feeling the steering wheel feeling the pedal being enough pressure not enough pressure inputs outputs seeing and feeling the environment around us the light that turns from red to green yellow this the stop sign the kid in the crosswalk when we're driving home today think about my gosh all the things i'm keeping track of while i'm driving now parts of our brain that are so dense with the cb1 receptor and again cb1 is a psychoactive receptor with kinabinoids is the basal ganglia basal ganglia controls motor control and planning the amygdala which is where anxiety our emotions our fear lives our fight or flight fright uh part of our brain now we don't uh i'm very well connected with our vermont drivers and traffic safety educators these are our driver's ed instructors we don't want anxious drivers driving around but when we use cannabis and we feel relaxed as a result of that what's actually happening beneath the integumentary inside the brain chemistry is the amygdala now is dysfunctioning right we want actually drivers who care driving around we don't want scared drivers want drivers who though are attuned to the potential that bad things may happen i'm going to respond effectively to that like that's what our neighbors want that's what our families want so the that that that is that is dysfunction the neocortex that's where cognitive function sensory data integration that's all that all that happens uh hippocampus memory and learning all dense with cb1 receptors the idea is that someone who's using cannabis um an unimpaired person uses a very small part of their brain to work through a problem but when someone is impaired by cannabis because these it is so widely uh affected it takes a large part of the brain to work through that same problem therefore it leaves less of the brain available to deal with co-occurring issues so as you know as for the trainings i've been through and i've i've spent um a week out in california in addition to my theory basic training i've had many many hours of advanced training since then i've had a 24 hour forensic pharmacology course i've been through a week long drugs and human behavior course in california taught by the world's experts of the sub of the subject matter uh had the opportunity to sit through an eight-hour society a forensic toxicologist workshop by the world's experts just on cannabinoids and what they all agree is that you may drive one may drive safe nine out of ten times being impaired on cannabis because during those nine times something unintended didn't happen but on the tenth time that's where the deer runs out that's where the um that's where the gentleman in the crosswalk dropped his keys and that was unanticipated and now i hit the person right so this idea that i drive somehow safer i think i know i said in the early in the beginning i think i know where that where that comes from which is that there are driving studies quite a few of them as a matter of fact the talk about um cannabinoids and safe driving or is it deleterious to the driving tax and one of the uh highly studies and by the way i'll take a sidebar here to say that the people whose names are on these these studies people dedicated their professional lives to this type of subject matter they all are they had this panel it was really interesting to hear them kind of talk shop they're quite disturbed that whether you're pro cannabis or anti cannabis both parties like the hijack little sentences of what they say to fulfill their ex right so that got my attention i think that's really interesting right take little pieces just to make it work but here's what they all can they all kind of agree on right which is that when we are talking about the acute effects they're they're felt when one is inhaling it so that's smoking or vaping the acute effects are felt start to feel within a few minutes and peak about 30 minutes impairment tends to persist two to three hours and then starts to the subjective high the person feeling the high starts to then uh starts to then uh return to normal now i said earlier that bell curb of normal not every one person responds the way that the majority of people do to cannabis and that's depends on their dose their tolerance their age or gender what they've had to eat right perhaps their mood that day it varies from time to time uh from use to use and so therefore not every one person responds with the majority does however they say that the majority of people remain impaired for about four hours after use and here's the thing that I think has really complicated consequences for Vermont if we want to espouse to this or prescribe to this type of thinking the experts all agree when asked how long should someone refrain from the driving task if i'm using cannabis they all agree 12 to 24 hours so how do you do that in a place like Vermont with no meaningful public transportation or if i'm out at a you know some future decade from now a place or i don't know what the technical term would be for somewhere to use cannabis you know in a bar or something how would i get home right versus having alcohol earlier in the day alcohol linearly metabolizes it's absorbed at a known rate and it's eliminated at a known rate that's a critical difference between alcohol and and cannabis alcohol is an affinity for water cannabis has an affinity for fatty tissue the adipose tissue and that lives in the brain and so when we talk about blood results of cannabis it leaves the blood very quickly as it crosses the blood brain barrier very easily and lives in the fatty tissues in the brain and that's why impairment tends to linger even after the even after the user uh two to three hours uh after post-acute they start to return to a feeling of normal but they have residual effects of the impairment and they're not aware of it that's the concern is that users who are three four five hours post use are still showing signs of impairment potentially up to 24 hours some studies are showing not for everybody you say that to a jury of 12 people they'll at you out of the room you know that's that's you know but simply for some they that it tends to linger all right uh some of the studies show that we talk about with cognitive um dysfunctioning a slowed down response to the nervous system can linger for chronic frequent users for two to three weeks again try to explain that to somebody who who needs to go to work on Monday like Australia as far as a country who has medicinal cannabis as a country the Australian government recommends that if you're a medicinal cannabis user refrain from driving for 24 hours so that's Australia it's interesting whether such a return to this idea but where'd this idea come from if there are studies that get hijacked to say in the state driver is that out in Iowa there's a beautiful driving simulator it's a massive massive driving simulator and they study various effects and to include cannabinoid effects and driving and there it's not ethical to dose people to street level amounts and so they relatively low poems ethc studies um below what the person may even take as far as the recreational use they find that person drives slower so that one little piece tends to have gotten hijacked to say oh look i use cannabis on a slower driver well meanwhile it's still slowed reaction times it's we interlain weaving they call it standard deviation of lateral position that's science for weaving just call it weaving forgot to say so weaving right and that's where i wonder about like our fatal crashes where like why are people who are driving impaired on cannabis if they're crashing why is this data perhaps overrepresented in our fatal crash statistics although compared to other drugs and i'm just wondering i don't know i'm wondering first of all in an enforcement setting we find that if people are impaired in cannabis they're driving much faster it's high speed stops and weaving and so my friends who i work with who are crash reconstructionists they tell me look jay you know if someone's going to not survive a crash it's not the impact it's the deceleration that happens next and so if you have a moving object that hits something head on and decelerates quickly like our organs can't survive that and so i think about any type of chemical by the way alcohol also results in speed driving by the way and weaving and so forth right like both these things are dangerous the takeaway here is we mustn't be combining this and driving i said the very beginning on the onset none of this should be construed to be that the state police need people to refrain from using cannabis with legal or not that's not that's nothing we're talking about driving we're talking about combining the two and driving that's so important the the as far as just the the functioning piece of this the when somebody starts to metabolize the the active metabolites out of their blood but they tend to linger with the impairment effects that's called a counterclockwise hysteresis and that's what cannabinoids do so it's as the it leaves the blood the effects are felt after it's actually out of the blood because it's lingering in the brain i think it's really important to appreciate that so when we think about blood levels of thc again it doesn't tell us anything because we're not talking about a level in a blood we're talking about we're talking about observable symptomatology of impairment and so i think that when we have observable symptomatology of impairment doesn't matter what the number is this person on this day is impaired this is not a character assessment or some type of characterization about what their habits are no we're talking about what you did on this day was it was unsafe and rendered you a dangerous driver and that's how this happened and by the way the opposite is also true um we trained police officers to be very clear that you smell the odor of burnt cannabis in a car that says nothing about cannabis a person tells you that they smoke that says or used it says nothing about whether or not they're impaired like don't go into the rabbit hole as i like to say with them that's not this is nothing but if we're seeing the dilated pupils the bloodshot eyes the slowed reaction the slow speech that's a concern and so to kind of tighten it up in our last few moment here about why this is impairment you think about what cannabis does to the nervous system it's both a it's almost both a stimulant and a depressant to where it does elevate some of our vitals and the acute impairment elevated pulse elevated blood pressure but slows down our thinking that if i'm driving down the street and my system is slowed down because of cannabis i'm perceiving that i'm going slower than everything else around me and so what do i do to compensate for that i go faster and that's where in my professional experience i find i find people going 80 in a 40 where people on here say 120 and a 65 right and they really don't they really don't understand that they were speeding because again it's a hijacking of the endogenous cannabinoid system that is widely dispersed in the brain that affects the ability to perceive to perceive the environment around them so i know it's 11 o'clock so i'll stop there again this is you know cannabis alone is a i think it's a three-hour block in our dre course i did in 15 minutes uh yeah so uh i apologize for anyone i gave a bloody nose to there but i tried my best oh always leave them wanting more right oh there it is that's right yeah well thank you for joining us thank you for all your work in this in this realm thank you for being an instructor of our dre program i think um you know we got the crash course but the it's just endlessly fascinating um and we didn't even get to kind of the poly substance and the interactions between cannabis and other substances um but um maybe that's a topic for another day so so thank you so much and i forgot to mention just like our last witness uh today is jay's day off so he joined us uh on his day off because this is um such an important issue um for i'm sitting i'm sitting at uh headquarters in waterbury my wife thinks i'm getting a gallon of milk make sure she doesn't watch this video all right all right well thank you very much for your time i i really respect what um you know what we're doing uh what you're doing here so i thank you very much for your time i really appreciate it thank you jack likewise thank you thank you everybody bye right so next on our agenda um robin are you are you with us i think i saw your phone number pop up hello can you hear me we can hear you so so robin um let me make sure i get your title right you're the director of research at the crime research group you have a jd you have a phd um i've worked with you very closely over the years in the racial disparities in the criminal and juvenile justice advisory panel um crg is a objective data analysis um service for the state and i stress that objective because in the cannabis policy discussions that i've been a part of data gets thrown around a lot and statistics get thrown around a lot to either disprove or prove a point and um with your background and your knowledge we thought it'd be important to hear from you about kind of what crg does the data you can go collect what's important for vermont and then also you know if there is i guess i'd like to hear a little bit about some some racial disparities trends as well because you know what we're likely to see is more aride trained officers more um potential highway enforcement um and what that could mean so um i know you shared some slides with me um nelly i think uh is going to manage that on your behalf um but uh i turn things over to you okay thank you and um so i do apologize that i can't do video um but that means i can't see who's in the room and do you mind introducing yourself i know pepper's voice but i don't know anyone else's voice uh this is julie helberg another board member and kyle harris another board member and we have uh meli marvel is our um uh program technician and we have orca media here as well and bring hair is kind of coming in and out a little bit okay great thank you so much for introducing yourself so on slide two who we are um so we serve as what's called the state statistical analysis center under a contract with department of public safety every state has somebody like us we are the only one that is a nonprofit outside of state government sometimes they are at universities but mostly they are within the department of public safety or some executive branch office um what we do and what our job is is uh to provide information to people so um we have on our um computers about 30 years of court data all filings and dispositions for criminal court juvenile court judicial bureau and civil suspensions and so some of the things that i do for example as i sit in the sentencing commission and somebody wants to know what's the sentence for burglary and i just look it up on my computer and i tell you um we also are collecting um so nibers the national incident-based reporting data um that's submitted by law enforcement agencies to dps um we get that uh submission and are able to answer questions about crime that is reported under that system uh and that includes so you know um how much of a drug quantity was found at a at a um uh in a crime um whether or not they suspected the offender of using a particular drug or alcohol during the commission of an offense so it's a very rich detailed data set that we have and we can continue to uh use as you go forward especially with um the commercialization on a project needed basis we have access to vermont criminal history data and this is the rap sheet of a person and we use this to come up with two things we look at recidivism rates for programs so we have for example evaluated the um DUI courts down in um Windsor and the drug courts and the mental health courts uh to see you know what the recidivism rate is for those participants versus you know control groups that we try to create um who didn't have the benefit of those programs um we also use it to come up with a typology of offenders so right now i have a project where i'm working on um um people uh who were charged under our vulnerable adult statute so people who have used vulnerable adults and uh looking to see how their criminal pass is different than a control group and it's much different um so this gives insight into how people offend and what policies we might put into place to um uh you know work with that population the department of corrections has on the state website a public use file and this is everyone who is under control of the department of corrections from 2015 forward um and this is a great uh data source we can track people across the systems to find out you know what was their original charge in the court data how much time did they spend on pretrial detention uh how much time did they spend on probation etc and then we also often work with um emergency department and hospital discharge data and these are also public data um that are posted on the department of health website and this includes the idc 10 codes um and that's the billing uh that people that the billing agencies you know put into your insurance companies this is helpful um and may be helpful going forward colorado use these data sets um especially in relationship to emergency room um discharges uh surrounding edibles and i understand that we're not going that way but to think about what you might want to see um and i can say from working with human trafficking and with domestic violence that if there's an idc 10 code that you are interested in in um following um these years that a training program of some sort for the ed folks um so that they know when that should be used and how it should be used so that we can accurately track those um emergency discharge data we also provide technical assistance like this or helping people create databases or assistance to various legislative boards um where uh you know we just use our expertise in the in the field of criminal justice data in vermont and try to um you know help people make informed decisions and we also act as research partners for agencies and organizations so i mentioned for example where the research partner for human trafficking task force where research partner for lond's um family services where we're looking at a substance use program that they're you know delivering to families who are at risk of losing their kids to dcf and we're evaluating whether this is a better option than business as usual so um that's quite a lot of what we do and then so i just stopped there for now since that was a lot and ask if there's any questions any questions robin robin i know the nibers data in the doc data um can be delineated by certain kind of characteristics of the of the person uh is that true some of the other data points that you get yeah so the court data includes the race and uh age of the defendant or the date of birth so i calculate the age of the defendant um and now begins to include the gender it didn't in the past um but i can get that through other sources you know i can i can cross i can cross reference i think one thing after listening to the sergeant's presentation and to mandy's presentation i want to just kind of put a footnote somewhere the police incident number is the thing that i need to track people and this sounds awful but to track the to track that case across the system so if the sergeant as a dre expert makes a stop and says that it's um you know they suspected a pot you know there's the police incident number that police incident number i can track into the court data and tell you what happened to that case um because as you know our courts our um our uh statutes don't distinguish right very well between whether somebody was you know just under the generic driving while impaired um dui drugs but what what type of drug um so because we don't have that clarity in the statutes for research purposes we have to have those incident numbers to track back so one thing i kind of am recommending um is that if you want that sort of tracking that we begin the process of finding out that data flow information now um so especially we can you know test that that data sharing out um but that incident number can can track us all around um and from the incident number i get the docket number the docket number i can track into doc or into the criminal histories um and get all sorts of information that way as well yeah thanks for the footnote yeah that's important yeah so on slide three types of data and sources um so the data that i just talked about is largely administrative data and this is created collected and captured by administrative units for the purpose of carrying out their mission and that's really important um because sometimes we want to use their data for other things but they're not collecting it for that purpose they're collecting the data to carry out the mission of the agency um and it's just something that we have to be aware of when we're working with the data and when we say can't you collect more data um that you may not be within the mission of their agency or you may not want that particular agency collecting that data you may want it you know to come from somewhere else so administrative data is what we largely use um and what is available um qualitative data is observation interviews focus focus groups and sometimes surveys and then other quantitative data can include surveys um and observations of quantitative quantifiable events so the date and time um mandy talked about vehicle miles traveled uh the season right so these are things that i know affect for example uh you know crashes right so we have different types of crashes in the winter time um at night um so those are things that you know just a objective quantifiable data that we don't need to rely on an administrative data source to um to get so slide four when to use administrative data um so again administrative data is is best to measure the business of the agency because that's what they're collecting it for how many times did you provide programming um in the in you know in the northwest correctional facility for this um i want to talk about crime rates and data um so an increase in crime rates in the data may not actually indicate an increase in crime um we have we did an audit of the law enforcement data and you can see uh that's on our website but i'll just tell you that one of the things is data quality right so a switch in how an officer um learns to code something can change the crime rate there was some problems in in you know the early part of uh 2014 um with a computer system not speaking correctly to the fbi and it looks like our like we solved domestic violence we had no domestic violence that year which wasn't true it just it just was a computer error um so that's one thing to keep in mind um there could be workflow issues so the the court data this year is obviously going to be much lower in volume than it has been in particular years and that's because of covid it has nothing to do with um the crime itself right or what happened and then uh one thing that um is always interesting to me when it comes to um police data an increase of crime that's reported uh to police may be a result of a an agency actually building trust within a particular community um so for example i have a study right now that's looking at url and rural and urban injuries in domestic violence cases and i have one urban domestic one urban agency whose domestic violence is very very uh injurious so they have very serious injuries and it's not because that city is more violent it's because the police are filling out a particular form that's looking like they have more violence so they're they've built up this relationship with the community um to really go to make sure they're capturing the data for the state's attorney so it's not that they are necessarily more violent they're just documenting it better and then on the next slide i'll show you some policy changes and how that affects data so these are misdemeanor charges disposed from 2010 to 2019 and i've highlighted um you know the big policy changes so if you look in the category of drugs from 2013 and before right so we're we're you know about 1800 cases uh charges sorry a year are being disposed and then we decriminalize pot and it drops so crime went down because we made we made a crime go away likewise if you look over down at weapons the asterisk means that there's less than five so for a long time very few weapons charges and then in 2016 our weapons charges start increasing and that's because we invented a new crime so carefully looking at what's causing these numbers to increase um so it's not that we necessarily have more weapons um involved in our in our crimes it's that we made a new crime about it and this increases our rates so i'll just stop there and ask if there are any questions any questions about this this slide or the i i do have a question maybe you're going to get to it about qualitative data yep next slide okay oh wait i'll hold on that all right all right so the next slide is when to use qualitative data and um qualitative data is when you want to hear from a particular group about their experiences or perceptions so once everything gets up and running you may want to hear about growers experiences in the licensing um uh going through that bureaucracy or how to retail workers experience um their personal safety while working um in the retail shops for cannabis um very small population of people that you're interested in their perceptions and modifying public policy because of that they're not captured in the administrative data so a lot of the administrative data again it's capturing the business of the agency it's not capturing how we necessarily interact as citizens with that agency so um when you want policy solutions that won't be available in the administrative data and i'm going to give you two examples for those of you that have been to the very courthouse there's a bus stop in front of that very courthouse and when i interviewed victims of domestic violence um that bus stop is a inhibiting factor for them seeking release in the courthouse because their abusers can sit in that in that bus stop legally so they have to there's no way to get into the courthouse without passing that bus stop um and that's not something you would get out of administrative data they would like the bus stop moves there are people working on moving that bus stop um another um you know policy issue came again with domestic violence and in bennington county they piloted an rfa relief from abuse order um uh procedure where they staggered the arrival uh so there was no bus stop issue they staggered they staggered the arrival of um the the defendants and the victims and then placed them in separate rooms until the the time of the hearing and this was to make victims feel safer but that's like a how do i measure whether victims feel safer i had an attorney who worked in both bennington and rutherland and when i was interviewing him he said yes victims feel safer in bennington and i know this because they don't ask me if it's safe to go to the bathroom in rutherland they asked me if it's safe to go to the bathroom because they're afraid that he's going to find them on the way to the bathroom and and they didn't have that fear in in bennington so again things that aren't captured by administrative data are never going to show up in any statistical analysis um but are really powerful concrete policy suggestions that that people can empower can then you know can then implement to make the experience safer for victims in that case of domestic violence um and that's also because you know for a lot of you know there's going to be little empirical data for a lot of your topics especially here um i'm going to say that it's going to be about five years after the first door opens for you to have a decent number for quantitative analysis and you don't want to wait that long to get feedback and it's also to ensure that the stories of the underrepresented are analyzed with the same rigor as the quantitative data and i'll just go to the next slide to show you from criminal courts two things so this is dispositions of unique dockets by county by race and if you look at the highlighted portions what i was highlighting here um was was mostly just to this was for another presentation but what i want to draw your attention to here is how few for example indigenous defendants went through the system in five years um and so in any statistical analysis you can control for this you can you know there's certain things when your when your isn't your distribution isn't normal etc but a lot of times it just gets it gets you know overrun um or the experience in chitenden county overruns everyone else's experience and here's where um you know spending time talking to people as they experience the system um in a rigorous manner gives them gives that experience an equal weight as the statistical experience um that's the the predominant um population gets to have and then on the next slide you'll see this gets to some of the disparity so and why sometimes the math you really want to augment the math if you know with the um qualitative so this was sentenced distributions again for those same five years and chitenden county sentenced no white defendants to incarcerations for 2.5 grams or more um and 12 charges for black defendants so that's a disparity that needs to be further examined but because of the small numbers a more qualitative analysis and that could be looking at case files um you know talking to people about why these decisions were made and about that um and windham county um chitenden and windham both sentenced nine charges of black defendants to incarceration um and you also still here have really small numbers um where this is again over five years so um if if you want a more um recent picture then talking to people is um what you really want to do and if you go to the next slide i'll just talk a little bit about the difference between qualitative analysis and testimony um because we do hear from people a lot in testimony uh and testimony to public bodies is different it's not for one not focused on the witness rights um comfort or harm reduction it's a very public it has to be that's that's right that's the law um it's often limited in time activists can provide canned speeches which which remove nuance and that's the point right so we march everybody in there say these words and the legislature or whatever public body hears this is what we're saying um and there's rarely a systematic analysis of these stories or an analysis of whose stories are missing um and you compare that to actual qualitative research uh first of all this is overseen by an ethics panel to protect participants so we are in in the process of interviewing victims of sex trafficking and so in order to protect them you know we have uh we we you know planned out to have space um in a network the domestic violence network um in one of their satellite offices you know so a safe space that's already secure we have on standby um their case managers if they want to take a break and talk if they're if they're feeling emotionally overwhelmed right so we create this atmosphere recognizing that we are talking to people with trauma and how do we we don't want their conversation with us to add to that trauma um they're analyzed for themes by multiple trained researchers often using computer software um and this is designed to check our our biases about what were how we're coding things to make sure that we are coding things across um researchers in the same way we have more freedom to recruit participants we pay them um and again so we have protection on um trauma and confidentiality and so i'll stop there and ask about qualitative research questions um robin how uh what are the best practices about doing this qualitative research other than what you just said i mean should we be thinking of specific questions that we want answered um and then uh designing a qualitative research program around that i mean you know yeah that's that's usually what we do well so well it depends sometimes like with the survivors of sex trafficking we want to know about their experience so we started with the population and then started with what questions do we want to ask from them um and also by centering the conversation around the population um you're centering the conversation around their needs i'm instead of saying these are my needs and what can i get from who right and so this allows it to be a um a little bit it centers the protection of the victim which is what we're you know what we're trying to do um and even if it's not a person who's a victim of a crime um my profession as a researcher i'm sure most of you know has not always been kind to participants in research studies uh so that's why we we focus on the comfort of the participants um and what and to let their stories kind of you know drive the questions in some ways does that make sense it does and um you know we have about looks like 20 or so 25 participants today these are folks that you know have expressed an interest they found us um but how do we overcome any sort of kind of selection bias in developing our qualitative research you know how do we make sure that we're actually hearing from the folks that might not trust the government for instance might not uh want to come forward with their stories might not know that we want this we want to hear from them yep so well we what we look at is um ways to well actually advertise um and any advertising materials are approved by an ethics board um and sometimes we use snowball sampling right which is just you know um the old i'm gonna really date myself the old brecht commercial i told a friend and you told a friend and and they told a friend um to to gather participants we make it you know we have been fortunate enough to um have been put into um the shortlist for an earmark and we are working with the NAACPs down in windham county and kurtis's group um to begin to identify if we're lucky to go forward with the study this will be a qualitative study of descendants of color in the southern part of the state um you know to talk about their experiences in the criminal justice system so sometimes it is reaching out to the advocacy organizations um but sometimes it's also reaching out to the defenders um and making sure that we can protect um protect uh the participants from subpoenas from um you know anything that might happen um uh you know hearsay statements etc um you know so again focus on the protection but also um trying to work with folks to make sure we're getting the widest amount of possible people and then when you're doing your analysis you recognize who was excluded and that's just as important as recognizing who was included yeah thank you sure um and next slide please so the next slide should be a note on surveys um and this actually gets to a little bit what pepper was saying sampling is an issue in vermont and i'm just going to put out there if anyone's listening that has a say in this the castleton polling institute was a really great resource for vermont and it went away um so for the cannabis board what i would what i recommend is explore buying questions on surveys where statisticians have already done the math and um i used to years ago buy a question on the uh the behavioral risk survey um that went out to vermont done by the department of health and it was about your fear of being caught for driving with dui right so one of the things about um um you know um deterrence is that i have to believe that i'm going to get caught in order to be deterred uh and so we were interested over the years and this was many many years ago of you know what did how many vermonters thought that they were actually going to get pulled over for dui i don't know if buying those questions is still an option but it's something to look into um and it is a way to like just kind of you know glom on to somebody else's hard work and then you just want to pay for a question or two on those surveys if you're going to do your own surveys um have a survey designs or looked over by a professional researcher for inconsistencies privacy etc sometimes you know surveys seem like this easy thing to do but if you change the scale um from one you know question to another your answers aren't going to be valid and the next slide um so colorado's research experience and i've linked here to their reports this is my counterpart in colorado and um every time she sees me at a at a conference she's like you want to talk about pot again don't you i was like yeah i do i want to know what you're doing um they have been um obviously one of the states ahead of the curve here and have been working on collecting data and you guys don't have a mandate thankfully so far to collect particular types of data um from the legislature but you know we should think about what um what metrics you want to use um the legislature mandated and this is a problem that didn't they mandated data that didn't exist or have no meaning uh so for example they mandated marijuana initiated contacts by law enforcement broken down by judicial district and race and ethnicity and their response was this isn't a term used by any law enforcement agency nor is it nor is contact data for any purpose actually collected systemically by law enforcement agencies um they also didn't you know say how somebody was to determine a person's race whether it was going to be self reported or going to be officer perceived so they just can't answer that um so working with um working with folks to make sure that we agree on definitions and what people want is uh important uh and the next slide on they were also mandated to collect information that wasn't defined or essentially collected so crime near a marijuana retail establishment um so they didn't define near um and how do the police these are questions you want to ask how do the police capture that call in their data system can the system extract that information and i'll just say if this is something you want to do you're going to need a committee to decide and agree on this and then an agreement to revisit this because someone is going to put a put a store where you didn't think they were going to and now we have to redefine what near is um so my point here is you know that is that it's an ongoing process data collection and data management um somebody's always going to do something you're like oh didn't think that that was going to happen and here we are um and so approaching this thoughtfully and with stakeholders community members etc involved is the way to get a meaningful report that can um measure what you want to measure over the years other information that was difficult for DUI in their court data like ours they don't distinguish the type of drug um there was no central repository for postal crime so that was pot sent through the mail and a lot of probation data were not available and that's going to be the same here and then as i was thinking about this on the next slide what about your data and approach that your data systems as a cannabis control board and data collection about your activity with an eye about equity and transparency and mapping to other systems and to make sure that when you design your forms and databases um that you're doing this with for future evaluation uh this the government the legislature has put results based accountability which is a trademarked name um in statute so you're going to have to answer those questions when you go right before the the legislature any type of equity analysis you want to do and other appropriate necessary evaluative measures um you should also be actively thinking about as a board how you are going to collect your own data and then finally what can we do um this is the last slide um proof of concept so in 2017 i was teaching a class on crime analysis and crime mapping and i actually took the earlier colorado report and my students and i went through and identified all the all their data sources and can we replicate this here in vermont and we can for the most part um we have access to all the same data a lot of it is national mandated data um and so you have that report um not all of those things will be relevant for vermont because of our rural nature but happy to sit down and go through that and say this is easy to do this requires more work and this is ways you know like i was talking about you know taking that incident number across the the um the system um these are ways we can improve in that data collection form you know plan for qualitative research by identifying questions funding sources and researchers um and i was also thinking that you might also consider a process evaluation at some point of your process so a process evaluation is what's considered action research by the feds now and that's actually a year or two into your process um a researcher comes in i you know interviews you about the process documents things um this is useful as as a living history document for you it's useful for other states who are going to go through this like hey these were the problems these were the things that worked these were the vermont court key things um former stakeholders group i still spell practitioners wrong um former stakeholders group um for data metrics and you want to include early on the tech folks from from the agency of digital services or wherever practitioners researchers community members absolutely have to be at the table um and then what do you want to measure can we what'll the cost and then finally be flexible creative and start now now's the time to really put the effort into deciding how we're going to measure and what we're going to do and so that is my presentation thank you for that that is obviously um eye-opening for us about you know maybe it's something that was a blind spot in the legislation honestly um i know massachusetts for instance has built in i think similarly to colorado uh department underneath their cannabis control commission to collect and report data a whole kind of sub department um so uh i don't think we're we're going to be able to pull that off anytime soon but um any questions for robin i just i think the first um takeaway that i have from this robin and and tell me if i i've kind of summarize this in my head correctly is that we really need to find out what kind of data is being collected statewide now and you know where that is i mean that seems like a really big project but like we need to find out what kind of data is right there right it's in my head i can come out and tell you fantastic um so and we either there are lots of organizations there are lots of initiatives right now that are mapping that so um pepper said our dap um you know so we mapped out and i can send you like you know what i've sent to them as far as who's collecting what data and what's missing um the national criminal justice reform project which pepper was also on they're working on a data integration initiative um so it's not as overwhelming as it may seem as far as what data are being collected and who has it i promise thank you well can i can i ask you about that a little bit too robin because um what i what i've noticed over the past few years is that kind of a data collection and analysis it's kind of an iterative process you know we had that report from i don't know 2015 maybe 2016 that showed these racial disparities in the incarcerated population and that led to the question of well why is that happening which led to you know more data collection and more analysis more identifying gaps and then you know to me that process ultimately um led to kind of the Bureau of Racial Justice Statistics proposal and um i'm wondering if we're even qualified i think you know you mentioned you had some good tips for us to even know what questions to ask in order to um get the data to collect the data that we need to kind of um present to someone and should we be partnering potentially with the Bureau of Racial Justice Statistics if that is to take shape um as our kind of primary collection or repository and analysis center well i think that um that is probably farther away than actually the first opening of a retail cannabis store that's just my own kind of um there's a lot of you know on the executive side and the agency of digital services a stuff that needs to happen before you get to the point that even part of the data that the that they want is is available and so i don't know um the answer i just don't know that it's going to be a viable answer by the time you want some answers i think for your research questions i think your community members uh i think you know the public have a lot of research questions that they want answered uh and so starting with their questions um until you're able to see some policy questions uh arise on your own um or that you hear enough from people going through the process to say this is a question that i keep hearing and i'm trying to you know think of an example of you know i live um in barry town we just recently gone through a reappraisal so my representatives are hearing quite a lot from residents about well what is this and how come it happened now and why is it fair so it's fair to say that you know the very complicated reappraisal process that burlington and barry town have just gone through nobody really understands it um and that they feel kind of blindsided by it so that's right that's the question because this policy happened and now everyone is kind of in shock um so that's what i mean like you have to wait for something to happen sometimes um but you're you know working with your community stakeholders and your others in your advisory board to come up with questions that they think they might want to know the answers to someday um is a good you know is a good place to start yeah thanks for that yeah well um robin i know it was kind of short notice i'm so thankful uh that you were able to come and join us and and help us kind of think through these initial questions and really get us prepared for when these retail shops are open and the kind of making sure we're keeping track of uh the important aspects of it so thank you for joining us and i know we'll be in touch um are you all right with us posting your slides is that okay on our website that's fine okay yep great well thanks so much great yeah sure bye bye bye so um next on our agenda is uh public comment period um we're gonna start with the folks who joined via the link um and if you have a public comment you can raise your virtual hand we'll then move to the folks on the phone um so anyone with a public comment or anything that you'd like to share with the board please feel free to raise your virtual hand all right and if anyone on the phone would like to give a public comment um you can unmute yourself uh by hitting star six well we'll take a quick um lunch break uh we'll be back at 12 30 and we're gonna shift our focus more to um some of the banking concerns and and safe banking issues uh in the cannabis industry um this is the cannabis board uh it's uh about 12 30 right now we're gonna shift focus today our kind of overarching theme was uh public safety we heard a lot about highway safety this morning we're gonna turn to safe banking um and we have the commissioner of the department of financial regulation who's here to give us a covid update uh just kidding of course but uh no um commissioner p check thank you for joining us um i know you're on a short timeline uh you're in the middle of about six different things right now so i was wondering you know i worked uh previously with your um with the former commissioner uh commissioner donigan on some banking and insurance issues and i'd like to hear just kind of i i know your office was heavily involved in the governor scott's marijuana advisory commission tax and regulate subcommittee and just like to hear kind of an update from dfr on how banking is progressing in this area and some issues and concerns that we should be thinking about um and uh we're gonna be hearing from vsccu after you um and then we're going to be hearing kind of a federal update uh on what the legislation that um kind of the house and the senate are looking at so i'll turn things over to you but thanks again for being here yeah great well thank you thank you very much for having me if it if it's if it works for you and you're able to see it i had uh just a few powerpoint slides that i think might help um you know just sort of lay the framework about the sort of dual regulatory structure that exists in banking and what and you know why there's some of these challenges and then sort of how our banks um how our banks sort of addressing the risks that exist how are they minimizing them and then how are we working with banks to you know and credit unions to to help them uh you know minimize the risk as well so so maybe i'll just i'll just share that um yeah that's great i think yeah i think if you you probably have permission right now but let us know if you don't i think i i think i am good here so there you go we see that excellent so just you know again very broad background but i think for the the members of the board it might be might be useful just to level set here so um you know there are banks and and credit unions they're the primary sort of uh you know entities that are in the uh you know the sort of banking financial services space uh they are a little bit different uh you know creatures in terms of their organizational structure their tax treatment you know traditionally who their um who their populations are that they're banking what kind of services they can provide uh bank is generally thought of as you know a more robust organization that can you know provide a whole array of financial services to individuals to banks to sorry to corporations to other uh you know entities a credit union generally serving a little bit different population generally more individual members less member banking although they can do small business banking and the like but ultimately you know they need to get a charter in order to organize and do their work both banks and credit unions can get either a state or a federal charter if they are getting a state charter those are issued by departments like the DFR in Vermont but other state regulators across the country so there are 50 51 including DC 51 entities like DFR they're all a little bit different but you know that will issue a bank a state bank or a state credit union charter and then there are federal charters that have developed over time as well there's not a single federal entity like there might be at the state but the office of the comptroller of the currency would provide a federal charter for a bank a national bank and the national credit union association the NCUA would provide a federal charter to a federal credit union so just again for example in Vermont we have all of these four different types of entities if you will operating in the state we have you know the national bank of Orwell the national bank of Middlebury that are national banks under the office of the comptroller of the currency we have larger regional banks like People's United Bank or TD Bank that would similarly be under the office of the comptroller of the currency we have federally chartered credit unions like the New England Federal Credit Union Vermont Federal Credit Union and then we have state chartered banks like Union Bank Northfield Savings Bank state chartered credit unions like the Vermont State Employees Credit Union so they are a state chartered Vermont Bank so there are all these different sort of structures that a bank can take or different regulators that they can have but ultimately they all do flow up to a couple of different federal entities one is on the deposit insurer side and the other is on the central banking side but just taking the deposit insurer side for a second so both banks and credit unions are required to provide some level of assurance insurance to their customers to their members that the deposits that they have at those institutions will be protected even if the bank you know fails and there's an issue with the bank or the credit union so ever since the 1930s that has existed in the United States for banks with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation the FDIC so the FDIC will ensure both state and federal chartered banks they are all members of the FDIC and they will ensure deposits for individual depositors up to $250,000 so if you have $50,000 at a bank whether it's People's United Bank or Union Bank here in Vermont and something catastrophic financially happens to that bank and the FDIC has to take over the organization you have protection under this system up to $250,000 for what you have on deposit same thing with the credit unions although it's a different organization the National Credit Union Association is both the entity that gives the charter to credit unions but it's also the entity that provides the deposit insurance as well so again this is even if you're a state chartered bank this is a situation where you run into a federal entity because you're required to cover carry this kind of a deposit insurance so if you're a bank you'd be a member of the FDIC if you're a state chartered credit union you'd be a member of the National Credit Union Associations the NCU the NCUA and then similarly when it comes to the central banking system that we have here in the United States the Federal Reserve plays a number of different roles it controls monetary policy in the United States it is itself a regulator of bank holding companies it also provides financial services to banks themselves banks and credit unions so some banks like federal chartered banks are members of the Federal Reserve they might hold stock in the Federal Reserve state chartered banks if they meet certain standards can also be members of the Federal Reserve but that's an optional membership but across the board whether it's a federal chartered credit union or a state chartered credit union or state chartered bank they all rely on the Federal Reserve for this sort of interstate banking this ability to have a check that was written from a bank in California being able to deposit that in Vermont and have those funds sort of end up in the right place when you look at your checking account and there's sort of that nine-digit number that goes before your banking account that nine-digit number is the the master account that your financial institution has with the Federal Reserve so it's able to account for all of those different transactions that are happening across the country and sort of play you know play air traffic control if you will make sure that the deposits and the withdrawals and the transactions are all landing in the right place so it's another critical component to the interstate banking system it's another critical component to our state chartered banks even though they are primarily regulated by the Department of Financial Regulation the Federal Reserve plays a really key role so I think you know that's sort of the framework of the regulatory system and I just really wanted to try to get across the point that even a state chartered bank here in Vermont is really dependent on these federal regulators whether it is the FDIC the NCOA or the Federal Reserve as well so although they need to be mindful of the regulatory approach that we have at the department and the statutes and regulations that are enforced here in Vermont they also need to be cognizant and and conform with the federal statutes the federal regulations and the federal approaches that these regulators take outside of Vermont's jurisdiction also so you know if a bank is a bank or a credit union you know is deciding to enter the the space and bank cannabis related businesses or marijuana related businesses in particular you know they they they really can think about what are the most dramatic things that could happen to our organization what are the worst case scenarios that could happen since marijuana is still classified as a schedule one drug and and you know has criminal liability that attaches to that for those that transact and sale of it you know a bank or a credit union could potentially face um criminal liability for banking a business engaging you know in what is this federally uh illegal activity um now this is very unlikely but it is sort of the worst case scenario that a bank or a credit union would think through before deciding whether to operate in the space um a regulator could pull the banks or credit unions charter so the office of the comptroller of the currency the ncua could pull a an entity's charter which basically would would end that institution it would have to merge with another institution or go into basically liquidation the fdic the ncua could terminate the banks a credit unions membership it could terminate their ability to get deposit insurance so that would also put those organizations in a really tight spot if you were a bank you probably would need to merge with another bank or liquidate um if you're a credit union uh there are some private options available for that deposit insurance but they're not necessarily widely available it would really put the institution in a tight spot um they could lose access to the federal reserve master account which again would pretty much be um fatal if not close to fatal for an organization that relies on the interbank and interstate banking system um and then of course there's the possibility that an individual um you know member of the bank or an individual customer of the bank could also be prosecuted um and funds that are held at the bank uh could end up in a forfeiture proceeding that could be both labor intensive and time consuming for the bank and could have negative impacts on the bank's or credit union's balance sheet as well so these are risks that are put in the category of negligible they're not they're not things that you would expect to happen but they're also not in the category of zero risk you know there's no indication that the federal government is planning to prioritize uh you know banks or financial institutions that engage in uh in marijuana related businesses for criminal activity there's no indication that federal regulators are planning to pull charters or end memberships certainly here at the Department of Financial Regulation we are uh doing everything we can to work with our state chartered banks and credit unions to help them develop a compliance system uh that works and that uh will be uh compliant with the federal guidance that's been laid out uh so we certainly are not in a position uh would never be in a position I would say to take such action but but the the risk is not zero and that and that's the kind of thing that banks and credit unions think about what's the risk what's the reward uh when getting into this new uh industry there's some other sort of considerations that are beyond those worst case scenarios that a bank or a credit union you know would think about as well and certainly Vermont state employees credit union can go into more detail here but in order to to sort of make sure they have a compliance program that is not going to make them run a fowl of state or federal uh guidelines you know there's certainly a lot of compliance costs that go into that in terms of uh doing due diligence on your uh customers on the upfront part of the relationship so when you're onboarding them as a customer and then also ongoing um uh focus on those customers as well to again make sure that they're complying with the guidance that has been issued in this space uh legal costs certainly are a result of that as well as banks and credit unions think about what's the liability if they do face any uh you know any actions from uh from from uh state or federal regulators certainly something that would drive up legal costs educational costs of the bank and the credit union themselves of not the not the legal or the compliance issues but just the industry itself how does the industry work um how do you effectively provide services to the industry you know not all institutions are um as familiar with uh with the industry and would have considerable internal education that they would need to do to enter the space so it's just another consideration for a financial uh organization uh logistical costs you know what does this mean if it's a highly cash industry what does it mean um for that bank do they need to have more armed guards do they need to have more armored vehicles do they need to have more space to store uh you know high amounts of cash that maybe they don't see regularly so there's some logistical costs and then you know every credit union and bank will tell you there's also reputational costs or reputational considerations I would say you know not every member of a credit union or every customer of a bank would be happy uh with a bank or credit union um providing banking services in this space uh so it's just something that a bank or a credit union has to think about so these uh you know are not the um the worst case scenarios that are that are not likely to happen but do exist these are more of the you know everyday considerations that a financial institution would have to think through before making an affirmative decision that they wanted to enter the industry and provide financial services to the industry um in terms of that compliance piece you know I think this is this is probably just probably the most helpful slide uh for folks to get a sense of you know what um you know what needs to happen for a bank or credit union when they decide to accept deposits or or customers from the cannabis industry or the marijuana industry so everyone's familiar with the with the coal memorandum uh and uh and uh you know the fact that it was promulgated originally in 2013 repromulgated in 14 um even though it was rescinded uh the uh financial crimes enforcement network which is the entity that provided uh guidance in the space still refers to the coal memorandum uh the guidance that our department uh uh issues and works with banks and credit unions on if they're interested in working the space still refers to the coal memorandum uh the federal government hasn't really expressed a an alternative viewpoint on its prosecutorial discretion so everyone as you know sort of continues to um uh operate in the space as if the coal memorandum is the is the defining you know federal guidance to consider so the bank secrecy act is a federal act that is really focused on um criminal activity anti-money laundering activity trying to get at criminal organizations it requires banks and credit unions to have a sense of who their customers are what type of activities they're involved with when they think when they see things that are suspicious it requires them to issue these SARS the suspicious activity report so that bank secrecy act really is um a driving a compliance um framework uh even outside of cannabis marijuana it's a it's a framework that uh is critical for banks and credit unions to understand and to comply with um so when the coal memo was reissued back in in 2014 FinCEN the financial crimes enforcement network they issued guidance on the same day about how a bank or credit union that's working with customers can um avoid uh the pitfalls can avoid the priorities that were identified under the coal memorandum in terms of um areas where the Department of Justice might actually be interested in uh bringing prosecution so uh basically they require financial institutions to do due diligence on their customers um do due diligence on their operations um if they believe that a customer of theirs is uh you know they know a customer of theirs is in uh a marijuana related business and that they're taking uh deposits or transactions from that business uh they know that but they also know through their own due diligence that they are uh are complying with the coal memorandum that all their activities within that business do not implicate one of the coal prosecution priorities uh then they file a marijuana limited suspicious activity report it's a pretty low profile event to basically it's just accounting for the fact that the activity that's occurring is is you know de facto illegal at the federal level but it is a really limited priority because it is compliant in compliance with the coal memo and and not implicating one of the you know one of the priorities that was identified in the coal memo if in fact the inverse is true if they if the bank or the credit union believes that the activity that's being engaged in does violate one of the priorities within or implicate one of the priorities within the coal memorandum then they're required to file you know this priority SARS that would indicate why they believe it is in violation of the coal memo what a prosecutorial priority is being implicated and described that in detail and then if a federal or state chartered bank terminates their relationship with a business within the industry they'd also have to file a suspicious activity report marijuana termination that lays out the reason for the termination and of course really what you're driving at here is did the bank or the credit union end the relationship because they had concerns about the company's ability to meet you know meet the the the priority set out in the coal memorandum or they weren't able to track where the money was coming from or they're worried they're involved in some broader criminal enterprise so it's not a situation where you're you're leaving the bank for another bank it's really the bank has terminated the relationship for some reason that might be a regulatory reason that that the federal government the the FinCEN would want to know about and or potentially other financial institutions would want to know about as well if that organization goes to another another financial institution so you know there is a road here you know it's it's not it's not without its challenges it's not without its costs as well I mean basically every time there is a transaction within a bank or a credit union a suspicious activity report needs to be filed that can that doesn't need to be a labor intensive process you know again Rob Miller can explain that in more detail but it is a activity that has to occur you know every time per the guidance and that can be in the aggregate somewhat labor intensive and and certainly doing the due diligence that goes into making these affirmative statements that that the transactions the activity is not implicating one of the cold memorandum priorities is also not a you know not a not a it is labor intensive I mean it really is to make sure that that is the case and that you can stand behind that as a financial institution so that's where our department will work with with entities trying to develop that internal compliance structure that will allow them to meet the fins and guidance allow them to meet and avoid any of the priorities that are underlined under the cold memorandum we've been working with the Vermont State Employees Credit Union for some time in this space we've worked certainly with any other organization that is state chartered that's interested in entering the space as well and we try to do that in a way that allows them to be successful in the space you know ultimately for the industry what are the what are the solutions for this what are the solutions to bring more people into more banks and credit unions into the space to allow for a diversity of of options when it comes to financial services you know either removing you know marijuana as a schedule one drug or passing some sort of safe harbor the secure and fair enforcement the safe banking act would have provided a safe harbor for financial institutions to provide financial services to those in in the industry so either one of those you know certainly would allow you know banks and credit unions to no longer worry about those risks that might be slight but would be you know something that would potentially you know end the bank or the credit union causing them to merge with another organization you know the fact that those risks are out there that they're not zero does make a a board of directors of a bank or credit union really weigh that risk reward calculus if there is a determination that they can you know they can in fact move forward they can meet all of those compliance objectives and they can do it in a way that won't unduly put the organization at risk then again that's a decision that that individual banks and credit unions have to make and and when they make that decision and move forward then our department is there to help them in terms of ensuring the appropriate level of compliance so that they don't run afoul of the FinCEN guidance or the coal memorandum so that's a commitment that we've had for for many years and one that will continue to have and work with work with those within our industry you know there's some other approaches that states have considered and I don't you know happy to talk about these as well but you know California did a study about the feasibility of a state bank devoted specifically to the cannabis industry Nevada has talked about sort of tokenizing and almost like a cryptocurrency creating a payment system that is outside of the traditional payment system and and I think at this point you know there's a there's a whole host of complications that have been pointed out both in the California study and and I think you know Nevada I believe was piloting this right before the pandemic I'm not sure actually where they stand today but you know I think at the end of the day some of the issues that both a state bank or some sort of cryptocurrency would have is that eventually it needs to meet back up with the broader you know financial apparatus that we have here in the United States it has to meet back up with the federal reserve it has to be able to bring the cryptocurrency into you know into US dollars and to other currency and and they'll have a really difficult time establishing a relation relationship with the federal reserve if that is their primary or sole focus so there really hasn't been a silver bullet or a great fix other than to say you know when a organization is ready willing and conceivably able to move forward with the banking those in the cannabis industry then our department is there to help them and guide them in developing a compliance program that will work for them and that will again make sure that they are in compliance with the with even our state regulations obviously but state and federal regulations so that's sort of where we stand now and you can sort of I hope get a flavor of why why there has been a limited movement not just in Vermont but across the country in terms of banks and credit unions moving into this space ultimately those first two action items there I think would cause a lot more organizations to come and be willing to do banking services and absent that we certainly need regulators to be in this space providing guidance and assistance at every turn so that so that organizations that decide to do this can do it successfully so Mr. Chair maybe I'll stop there and if there are any questions I'll turn I'll stop sharing my screen if there are any questions I'm happy to I'm happy to answer them well thank thank you so much commissioner P check for that I know you know you and I spoke you have kind of a hard stop in a few minutes you're in the middle of a different meeting right now if there are questions from the board that couldn't be answered by via TCU or would be maybe better directed towards VCU via TCU I'd encourage you to save them but if there's any for commissioner P check you know he's got maybe a minute I got a question about it I do I do I do I do have a few more minutes Mr. Chair I did the the last meeting I was in ran late so we're not getting back together till one 10 or so 115 okay um well I'm gonna assume that there's no dumb question um oh no because it seems like a dumb question in my head one of the recommendations in the tax and regulate subcommittee of the Governor Scott's marijuana advisory commission report was to require licensees to have a deposit a deposit account in a bank we're going to have to make that decision before we're really going to know you know the credit union to appetite for this to take on this kind of risk so if we had that as a requirement and then no credit unions no financial institutions wanted to get involved in this industry what is that where does that leave you know the people that are seeking licenses yeah I know it's a great question so you know right now you know as you know they're the Vermont state employees credit union has been has been public about the fact that they've made the that risk analysis and have moved forward in banking cannabis related businesses and and maybe you know maybe we've had conversations with one other you know organization that maybe has some interest as well but hasn't moved forward and it's a little bit chicken in the egg because you know there's only really you know a handful of possible clients at this moment for those institutions so they might have interest but you don't really know how real that interest is until there are more clients and there's more industry and then you can see that materialize or not so to answer your question directly you know if you required a deposit account and there were no or no organizations that were willing to do it then it would really put them in a tight spot because they wouldn't be able to get you know they'd have a it'd be impossible for them to get financial services um what I would suggest um you know as a as a solution to that or as a way to address that um is uh you know in this process to having uh to having you know a pretty open dialogue with um not just the Vermont state employees credit union but with the banking industry and the credit union industry broadly to get a real sense of of what organizations what entities might be willing to come into the space once it opens up more broadly for for tax and and regulate and we'd be happy to facilitate those conversations and discussions and a lot of their questions might be around compliance and uh and uh and our department's role in that so we'd be you know ready willing and able to be at the table to help provide some assurance to them and then you know another another thought I have is um you know if you start uh if you start slow and steady in terms of the in terms of the um the number of industry participants so if you if all of a sudden there are 25 um entities trying to find a deposit account you know maybe that can be handled within within even the Vermont state employees credit union but within the organizations that would be interested in providing banking services but if all of a sudden there are 250 organizations across the state all at once trying to find those kind of services it might be a real challenge to do that it would overwhelm uh uh you know it would overwhelm um the demand would overwhelm what was available in the Vermont marketplace at the moment so I think those are the two considerations I would think about to try to solve for that is um how can you how can you you know start how can you have a slow and steady approach so that it builds up over time and making sure that um you get a sense of the of the real interest from the financial service entities you know leading up to leading up to any decision that you make yep thank thank you for that and thanks for the invitation or offer to help facilitate those conversations I think we should start having those sooner rather than later um any questions yeah commissioner agreed I can hold my question for you guys I have one question about cryptocurrency and how it fits into the regulations and the regulated system that you were talking about in your first two slides I think there's a number of cannabis businesses or it doesn't fit into that um I think there's a number of cannabis businesses in other states that have used that to sort of get around this I'm not sure how well that's working for them yeah it's a great question um so I was kind of smiling and laughing because you know there there are some ways in which cryptocurrency fits into that structure and then there's other ways where it's just really much more outside of that structure um the way it fits in most directly is that entities that that buy and sell and exchange cryptocurrencies so coin base or other organizations like that they have to be registered as a as a money transmitter or it could be some other type of licensee in Vermont or elsewhere but generally it's a license that they get from a state regulator like the Department of Financial Regulation so for example we regulate those cryptocurrency exchanges here in Vermont we don't regulate the cryptocurrency themselves necessarily but we do regulate the exchanges and they have to you know meet certain due diligence standards and and the like as a result of that and knowing who their customers are and and that kind of that kind of work so there they are regulated to a degree but there's not the same sort of robust regulatory framework that that fits in around them and I think the challenges that they face and it's deep it's somewhat detailed in that California banking study is that eventually as you try to move from cryptocurrency to a fiat currency and and the source of funds is unknown or the source of funds is you know is federal is still some activity that's federally illegal there are going to be challenges with that and if you only keep your assets within that cryptocurrency there are challenges around you know what functionality you can get out of using that cryptocurrency so I think you know I think it's a it's a good possible workaround in some ways but eventually as you try to reconnect with the the banking system that works with fiat currency it becomes a challenge thanks thank you commissioner I'll let you get back to your day job but thanks for joining us really appreciate it and this is an incredible level setting for us and kind of a again a little bit of a wake-up call on on where things are federally and what the impacts on Vermont are yeah I mean again that that's the the ultimate solution we've been you know through our trade or through our membership associations our national membership associations we've been encouraged and advocated for the safe harbor act to provide some clarity in the space we'll continue to do so we think that's one of the best approaches but whatever we can do to be a resource or supportive to the to the board you know we are we're there and ready to be supportive thank you so much thank you we'll be in touch ready sounds good well we're going to move on our next witnesses are here in person we have Rob Miller the CEO of VCCU and Greg Hausman and you know you all have been banking with our dispensaries you have kind of a long history with them I'd love to hear your thoughts on kind of some of the challenges that you face there and you know maybe just following up on some of the points the final points of what the commissioner mentioned around banking and compliance and what it means for VCCU sure I'm struck by the commissioner's presentation first of all thank you for having us I'm struck by the commissioner's discussion and you know you must be thinking to yourselves other than that this is easy right or why would anyone want to do this so I'll do my best to answer that and Greg runs our business lending and services he's also his group is the group that leads many of our efforts in our cannabis related businesses marketplace so he's here to keep me honest and answer questions I'm gonna have another answer and provide you with further insight as well but I'll I'll go ahead and get started maybe some high-level insight you know let me step back a little bit just provide you with a little bit of background to kind of level set about the SEC we are a state chartered credit union the credit union structure is a structure where the credit union is owned by its depositors we refer to them as members not customers because they actually are owners of the credit union and we are governed by we are primarily regulated by the Department of Financial Regulation but because our share insurance is the NCUA share insurance fund we are also we get the benefit of having two regulators so and that subjects us to the variances between those two as well size-wise we're just over a billion dollars in assets we have 70,000 members throughout the state we have nine branch locations throughout the state credit unions are defined by what's called a field of membership so in order to belong to a credit union you have to qualify for membership historically that was based typically on your place of employment it's changed substantially since then to also include places where you live or work or worship or otherwise and as well as your family for the SEC our field of membership is it's easiest to think of us as anyone who lives or works in brahman as well as if you're a member of other certain associations that may not necessarily be geography based you can be a member of the SEC our mission is to improve the quality life for our members you'll know that it doesn't talk about financial performance or otherwise we are a tax exempt entity so we don't have necessarily the same profit motive as for-profit organizations we define quality life on really three terms we use environmental social and economic well-being as our means by which we identify or measure if you will the quality of life and whether we're being effective against our mission that makes us or at least we view ourselves therefore as somewhat of an agent of change if you will within our communities in brahman for the benefit of our members and because our members can be all residents of the state of brahman plus so we very much view ourselves in the context of change agents within brahman more broadly that's part of the reason and then so we we are provider of both depository as well as lending services to the current medical marijuana market as well as other cannabis related businesses where the temp cultivators or producers or resellers or retailers we do that not necessarily for you know traditional business reasons for profit or for margin I guess it would be a better way to think about it from our standpoint because it just aren't that many for it to really be all that relevant and even if that were the case I'm not sure that that would be our primary motivation our primary motivation was one of financial inclusion we believe that everyone in brahman should have access to basic financial services at a minimum and if we can do that in a reasonable responsible way without the rest of our members of this then we're going to do that we have the same view of other areas of our society as well we're just talking about this particular one today but that's why we're in the business and we will always work to try to stay in the business and I know that sounds weird but given the risk and cost and compliance that you heard from the commissioner p-check that probably went to a little bit more context you know I won't I'll I'll roughly go through some of the same risk I mean I don't want to duplicate what you've already heard from commissioner p-check I mean I think the risk that I will also talk about which may be implicit in the commissioner's comments is being in this business subjects us to just a greater level of scrutiny and oversight that is in and of itself a cost you know in terms of working through that and I think it's also important to acknowledge that the landscape is one that is constantly changing and so I like in it if I can use the probably improper sports analogy it's like the field goals tend to move quite often and that's not to sign blame on anyone everyone's kind of going through it at the same time and so as we learn and as we experience a more in this business both from a regulatory perspective as well as from a financial services perspective things change they may not change dramatically but they change enough to sort of influence how we how we do what we do and we've experienced that in the past with regard to the to the oversight that we're subject to and have had to make some barely dramatic changes in the time that we've been involved in this business and had an impact on the businesses that we serve you know it is a schedule one drug you know it's therefore it is viewed as a high risk activity by the regulators and has a high risk of activity it's subject to enhanced regulatory oversight the worst-case risk that the conventional laid out are I think almost verbatim the worst-case risk that that I was prepared to lay out for you so I won't get into those let me talk a little bit about the cost of being in the business both from our standpoint but also from our members standpoint over the business standpoint it can be sure mentioned and it's accurate there is an excess compliance cost we have to dedicate specific resources to conduct the due diligence to conduct the daily monitoring of accounts the filing of of the SARS that you heard about as well as the currency transactional reports because those tend to be a more cash-based business you know we also report quarterly to our board on this business so the board is more engaged in this aspect of our business than any other aspect any other business line that we're involved in we also have to engage third-party vendors to provide us some of the services that we require in order to do the daily monitoring those services cost money of course as well as additional compliance activity on our part because we have to conduct the due diligence on those on those vendors as well so it has a bit of a compound effect we engage education training last gauge changing we gotta stay on top of it and we gotta continue our skills and knowledge there are the potential legal expenses if we're sued or prosecuted to defend ourselves there are potential operational expenses we're not currently at a scale that necessarily requires that but certainly an expanded market more than likely would lead us down those paths whether it's armored car services or or the like if you will um and then there's the I wouldn't they're ill-defined in terms of how you measure them but there's the potential cost associated with reputation oversight for our members we charge them what I think well I don't know if the board's in their mouth but if I were them I think I would think that there were pretty high fees on their deposits we base those fees on the maturity and size of the market and we benchmark them somewhat to what we see or at least what we understand to be the fees in other marketplaces ours are basically right in the middle as the market grows and becomes more mature and by mature I mean more participants more financial institution participants in the market as well as as more dispensaries and cultivators and growers and so forth then I think it would be reasonable to assume that those fees will come down as the nature of the competition goes up and the market becomes a little bit more attractive from a scale standpoint they will more likely pay higher loan rates as you heard the businesses are subject to federal search and seizure that makes them unsecured lending unsecured lending is the most costly form of lending even if we have equipment or we have facilities we can't count 100% on that collateral and banks and credit unions tend to rely on collateral as the primary means to pay back loans so you know we may not price them at a pure unsecured loan rate but more than likely we will price them higher than what we otherwise would because they do involve additional risk that again is difficult to quantify but we know that it's there and we subject lending to these businesses to an aggregate lending limit so there's a limit even though it's not a cost per se there's a limit on on our capacity in terms of what we do so I you know a million dollar question of course that that I tend to get asked all the time is would you be there for our businesses so let me give you how we're looking at it today because I don't have a I don't have a solid answer for you in terms of number of businesses or or certainly not an unqualified response to that we're in that process today of developing ultimately a recommendation that will go to our board to be approved by our board that will dictate to what extent we will expand our current our current level of participation in this marketplace that process involves understanding the legislation also understanding the forthcoming regulations so there is a little bit of a chicken and egg catch here it'll also involve informing and educating both our internal management team that will ultimately decide what to bring to the board and it will require information and education at the board level as well so there is a process that we'll have to go through to get there but ultimately it'll take form and a set of recommendations to our board I think that we'll be prepared to deliver that set of recommendations probably no later than the early part of next year or later later in the year this year in terms of so let me just practice everything I'm going to say now but I don't really know yet because I don't have an interval for my board but I'll tell you what I what is my sense of what I think we're likely and unlikely to consider as we move forward um so I think I think it's likely that we will need the needs of our existing medical marijuana businesses who enter into the recreational market I think that that is likely that seems to be a natural sort of continuum that I think that we would probably follow down and I also think that it's likely that we will provide services to a yet undefined number of new businesses so I think we will likely enter this expanded market not just with our existing business members but with new business members as well the key question becomes how many and how fast and that's really probably the those are the two most important variables that we're dealing with you know absent the broader objectives you know the fewer and slower the more likely that we will be involved but there's a wide middle ground between that that I understand the world we're on the rest of our approach regardless will be probably one that has been our approach all along which would be measured and so we will want to ease into this market over time not not go from point A to point Z all in one shot and you know that not only the other I think I think that essentially leads to what is possibly the worst-case scenario from a banking safety standpoint which is that we're unable to be we're unable to serve all the licenses that are provided and that's my worry I'm sure that that's your worry as well so that's the that's the sort of the piece that we that we would like to work with you on to try to figure out because we don't want to be in that position either because that puts us in a position A where we have certain businesses in the state of Vermont that don't have access to financial system that's contrary to our purpose as an organization it also puts us in a position where we have to decide who we're going to serve more relevant the risk don't really change they just change in scale so the native the the specific risk will remain the same absent some action by the federal government but they increase in scale right so if we go from whatever it is number of counsels say to have a dozen accounts to also a hundred accounts you know our risk has gone up exponentially maybe not at exactly the same proportion but but it certainly goes up some some level extra potentially a change of size so what would what can you do to help you know I think I'm going to state the obvious the commissioner already stated any role or advocacy role you can play in the you know the ultimate answer would be de-classification of marijuana as a schedule one that not only reduces the legal compliance risk but it also will probably fundamentally change the nature of the compliance cost as well the state bank will eliminate I just didn't say limit I'm not sure that that's actually the case but it will mitigate the risk but the same measures are likely I think are likely to remain in place so the compliance cost and the oversight and due diligence and all that stuff that we do that we've explained and the commissioners explained I think still stays there in a safe banking act so I'm not sure absent the market becoming really attractive from a business standpoint that that will necessarily lead to a huge number of new entrants into the market so I'm just I want to manage your expectations on the safe banking act and that by no means I would love for the safe banking act to be passed into law because I would address a major concern number four as you've got mad as the commissioner sat down and went through those risks for a volunteer board like mine that's pretty intimidating so something to think about yeah I would encourage you to at least think about and engage in dialogue with perhaps other regulatory agencies within the state about what what you know if we were starting over and starting from scratch how would we actually conduct the oversight as a system of this industry and how you know you can point to other industries as examples whether it's alcohol and liquor with liquor control or whether temp with the agency of agriculture we're not really doing that here we've we've pushed a lot of those what I would consider somewhat unusual compliance burdens upon to the financial institutions and kind of pulled us into areas that we're not we're not typically pulled into when I think legitimately you can look at those and ask yourself the question those are functions that actually shouldn't best be performed by an independent state agency as opposed to a non-profit or for a proper bank or credit I realize it's like changing it's it's changing the nature of the game in the middle of the game but if there's a time to at least take a look at that and that would be the time to do that then we'd be more than happy to work with you on that. At a minimum though I think as the state develops and takes on a tracking system the seed-to-sale tracking system that I think will be required creating mutual access so that we're all operating on the same dataset will be really important it also will reduce the duplication of effort that could occur between ourselves the control board or other the tax department other entities so creating that common access will be I think really really key and important and it'll actually help us streamline our processes at the same time and then you know I'm going to say the same thing that the commissioner said is an option which is I would encourage you to take a measured and deliberate approach and not look to try to issue all the licenses all at once but to do that over time so that we can do our best to stay in the market if we do it all at once and I understand the pressures to do that it's just I think it's reasonable to expect that we're not going to be able to meet the entire needs of the industry from day one and then finally what you're doing today and what I hope you'll continue to do which is to keep an open line of communication you know we're easy right we're right down the we're right down the road and we're based here in Vermont we're a state regulated entity we have a commitment to the state not just in terms of our location but in terms of our actual purpose for being so we are going to be willing to enable partners yeah in that conversation so before I answer any questions do I leave anything out or anything you want to correct me no I just just one one sidebar as far as you know keeping the throttle back if we put if it happens too quickly and businesses that have legal right to a license or given a license don't have a financial institution option that's going to push them to the cash side and it's going to be even harder to for the state and for the financial institutions that the trackers won't track it does represent a risk for the state not just the public safety risk but also a risk to actually understand what's going on in those businesses and that includes paying taxes and cash which is kind of important you're right if we turn to some questions absolutely I guess a question well I have a figured question first question though I know we have a lot of folks listening on the phone I know that your organization hasn't made a determination in certain terms how you're going to move into this new market I think you said at least right now you have a clearer picture in your mind from the five dispensaries that are already doing business with you what would be an appropriate time for folks that are interested in this adult use tax and regulate market to contact these vsc you yeah I you know I'll defer to Greg formally but I think that they can contact us today okay at least we'll have you know a list if you will of interested parties that we can follow up on and share at least share our contact information also allows us to communicate with those interested partners when that becomes appropriate great my other question and I realized it may be a challenge to answer hopefully you haven't found yourself in the scenario that I'm going to put before you but I appreciate you too indulging me so from this sar perspective a marijuana termination sar more specifically I would imagine if an organization your organization any organization has to file that FinCEN does some type of analysis or investigation into what's going on I'm wondering about liability on your end there versus liability on the business there and how liability on your end maybe you didn't maybe a organization didn't detect you know suspicious activity quickly enough we heard about the worst case scenarios but what other penalties for lack of a better term with FinCEN put on an organization that might change your risk assessment for for being a part of this industry more broadly I guess to boil it down does one bad apple kind of spoil the whole thing because if there's only one organization that's really out in front of being a part of this right now I'd hate obviously I think we all would that one bad situation kind of ruins this security for the whole industry yeah when you reach there you know when we reach the SAR termination point that's where you identify someone that is adversely against or or or counter to the coal menu and coal mellow and and the FinCEN so usually that's a reason point where the finance institution has realized that these folks are not abiding by the law if you will and we've decided to terminate that relationship so that is you know basically letting the the FESA at that point that you terminate that relationship so in in some manner it does take on liability off a little bit because you're already actively closing that membership because of your termination one step back you've got the ongoing limb bizarre and then you've got the SAR that's a priority the SAR priority once you send that in it may continue to spark more interest from the FES it's good and bad it's showing that you're doing your due diligence so you're catching stuff that requires SARs but it is highlighting to the FES that that there is some sort of issue that is not again that is against the offensive work for coal mellow yeah let me let me bring it up a couple levels though because I think I think what you're getting at is I'm going to call it the psychological effect of you know bumpy road surface right you you come up against a difficult situation that may or may not be problematic but but you know you got to work through it if you will and then you know we have closed accounts before and so we've been not exactly in the situation you described but but in a situation where we are uncomfortable continuing to service those accounts and the answer to your question is it absolutely causes you to reassess no question about it because you have to ask yourself the question is our you know and go back and reassess you know are we acting in a responsible way for our members you know now we have a real-life example of a situation that the risk got to be more elevated than we're comfortable with is that a trend or is that an exception in which case you know based on your answer to that you'll you know you'll decide how to move forward we obviously decided to move forward by continuing to stay into the market and and we have a that's our base case is to do everything we can to stay in the market but that doesn't mean that that we may not ever get to a point where our board says you know it's just too much no I appreciate it I understand that an exception is an exception but too many exceptions can change internal calculus sure and the nature of those can vary dramatically so thank you how are ancillary businesses affected if they bank with you or anyone else and they choose to contract with you know cannabis establishment yeah we've grouped all of our cannabis businesses into one policy and we've come up with a tier system to break those downs depending on how close they are to touching actually cannabis they're the highest tier after there were sort of two three tiers basically and the third day more just the hemp and farmers and the tubing all the producers and beside one thing that we need to determine and close back to the trickiness of the regulations is to what percent of businesses revenue this it hit where we should count it as moving up a tier or not in the tier you know if you're a pizza delivery guy and one lunch a week and it's 2% of your weekly bill but if you're a major supplier and 50% of your revenue comes from sale federally legal cannabis where does that put them in the in the term so I know the safe act I believe they say that we're one of the other acts that's currently there are more outline as to what those kind of relations are which will help but right now we're still unknown so something we have to struggle with we're looking at right now as we figure out what we want to do for the coming future so if I were a label printing company in Burlington and I wanted to print labels for a cannabis company how much of my income like if I switched 100% to cannabis labeling that would matter if it was just 10% of my business right well but if it was all CBD you know if it was all hemp stuff then it would have been mattered at all because it's federally you know it's 100% fine but if you're doing 100% of your labels for just one of the dispensaries then that's something we have to look at as ancillary business yeah you can think of our tiers as risk tiers right and the more your business is focused on on the schedule one marijuana activity you're more likely to be involved in a first year whether you're a dispensary or not if you're deriving fair to say but at least the majority is probably less than that and again we haven't formulated that exact policy yet but somewhere between 10 and 100 when we're talking about banking services for these tier one organizations are we talking about uh it's lending yes yeah banking is uh lending's got more capacity constraints to it than banking but there I wouldn't say either one of them are with our current tier ones we have 100% of their deposit business and we've done any small piece of lending to them it's a very small piece of our overall portfolio and our limits on there it's very small compared to our overall size and so are you know the most of our business is just the trial and the transaction side we also have limits on I believe it's just tier one all the tiers I think it's just for lending for a deposit that's on the fee-based tier one could you talk just a little bit about the evolution of this relationship because I remember it starting out largely cash and now I think it's mostly debit card is that right it's still a lot of cash and it's some debit card um there are one of the things that we need to figure out and what the industry needs to figure out and goal is what payment systems should we allow which ones should we eliminate um there are pros and cons to many of them I just wanted to go to a cannabis conference at the last last month and there's all half day just on different payment systems and different options so the industry is talking about a couple different options but that's really a puzzle a little bit because some things right now are completely off the board you know visa cards can't do the credit card my payroll folks won't do anything for them my merchant services won't do anything for them so there are lots of pieces that we can't do and then a big enough to fix one bigger side if you're just a restaurant you've got a million options that does create cascaded fees for the businesses which will become a lot more relevant for the small businesses that I think some of the intent of the legislation was aimed at without I I don't know how public any of these decisions are your board meetings probably not um but can you talk a little bit about at least broadly about the decision to to get into the dispensary banking you know what that was like was it 2013 yeah uh-huh yeah the issue came up in my very first board meeting I told Graham to drive over uh seems like this and one other piece of our business I seem to be somewhat expert in I'm not sure how that happened but um so yeah I I don't remember the exact month but it was uh some I think it was near the end of 2014 and and we started with one right and so we started slow um and I think we actually um if I remember correctly we started with one dispensary we actually didn't expand from there until we had actually been through an examination cycle we literally took our policy and our folders our new diligence we we volunteered we never do this right we volunteered them to the examiners when they came in and I said look at this um because we wanted to know um how how that would be viewed and over again we wanted feedback on our policies um and then as we went through got through you know our first exam to the nation cycles then we gradually added uh additional clients um you know as I said we've hasn't been 100 percent through sailing by any stretch of imagination um but that's it um you know I will reaffirm that um that the department has been reasonable to work with um we also have to deal with the NCUA um we don't have necessarily the same connection with them that we do with with the Vermont department uh because it's a national group versus a state regulatory agency but um but I would also say that our region of the NCUA has also worked with us in a reasonable manner um I'm told by some of my colleagues in other parts of the country that the NCUA is an entirely consistent in how it looks at or or or receives uh this business from region to region but I can say from our experience that the NCUA has been has been reasonable yeah that doesn't mean that they all and everyone always does what we want them to do but um but we're reasonable this is certainly some way I would describe it this question that I have you might be crossing a line if it is please you know you'll be better equipped to let me know but um you know of course all of the dispensaries have now sold to multi-state or international companies how involved were you in that decision I mean did you obviously call memo is the backstop for a lot of the decision making and there's some prescripts in there about ownership just curious um whether you were involved there uh or you just kind of had some documents you needed in order to check the boxes yeah well we had some conversations when stuff was going on the works um but it was pretty much out of our control I think out of the state's control really um as long as the you know the back due diligence was was done um you know we'll have once the transaction is complete there'll be other beneficial parties that we'll now have to look at um but we really didn't have a gate at the front to prevent it we had a good conversation so we had an open conversation with our with our folks it was pretty much their business decision yeah and then I've got a related question to that this one's much more general which is um we as a board have been directed to be somewhat more permissive when it comes to criminal history records about how we're supposed to evaluate them for potential license holders but you all if you're going to bank and you have to you know abide by the coal memo and kind of this provision in there about you know making sure that there's no kind of criminal enterprise or you know I don't know how much that shades or provides guidance to to you when you think about banking with a potential license holder yeah um so I think at a high level um we have essentially a consistent um mission right we want to make sure that we're inclusive of particularly uh groups that have been and populations that have been historically disfavor as a result of the legalization of marijuana as an example of groups that were going to be inclusive so we will work to try to find ways to also um I wouldn't say you know to to be more permissible if you will um but that said we're not you know there are lines that we can't cross and we'll certainly look to those lines as be very clear about those but I don't know if you have anything for that yeah I mean I think it's it's a lot of it is the degree of disparity of the offense I'm not going to do it along with the wide range of what could be a record and what would be problematic from a financial institution's viewpoint and what's you know knowing what the history is of in that you know in that sphere that may be more understandable if you will so it's a case by case evaluation essentially I think we'll be a little bit more formal than that as we as we get a little bit more okay as we get a little bit further along our process um certainly it's subject to case by case analysis because you can't anticipate all the cases uh up front the policy but but we will dedicate policy talk to that in our process okay yeah we should continue to talk about that I mean if we're going to require banking if we're going to or some sort of cash management policy then um we might want to have some consistency you know we don't want to set people up for failure go through our process only to find that we're not going to get down to yours yeah makes sense um that's those are all my I mean those are all my questions for now you have her email yeah exactly I really do appreciate you being here I do I am going to take commission with P check up on kind of having an early conversation with all of the credit unions um and trying to see if we can kind of find chart a path forward um and give you kind of open up our playbook to you I mean we do a lot of our work out of the open we have to and so um you know as much as we can involve you to make sure that you're giving us the guidance and the input that we need to get this right to get to kind of alleviate or mitigate whatever risk we can or develop a system that actually works for you that cuts down on the compliance costs on your end that's that's the only path forward here please put us going forward yeah we'll do yeah likewise we'll reach out to you and and totally support that effort you know to reach out to the banks and credit unions this is a collaborative effort where this is one we're all in together it's been my impression of of you specifically in vsc vsc usually generally yeah you know I've seen you walk in the halls of legislature getting grilled many times and you've always been in there for Vermont living up to the mission I appreciate that great well thanks for being here thanks for having me there we have I think three minutes but if um for before our next witness is scheduled but if he is on we could you don't see him on so why don't we just um just take a quick stretch break and we'll come back you're 145 so thank you so much for joining us I'm James Pepper um this is uh Kyle Harris and Julie Hallward we are the Vermont cannabis control board um we've been meeting all day today around public safety issues um we haven't we haven't quite turned our focus actually drafting recommendations we actually just um are in the midst of negotiating contracts with vs strategies and we're thrilled to be working with um you know you all I could literally listen to Jordan and Andrew Park all day long but today we're doing public safety issues we we heard about some highway safety trends and and how to respond to them earlier today we've uh in the afternoon we've shifted to safe banking some of the concerns around that we heard from our um commissioner of the department of financial regulation here in Vermont we just heard from kind of the biggest credit union in the state about their appetite um to get into this industry and how they would like to kind of what they'd like to see federally in order to kind of mitigate some of the risks and I thought it'd be very helpful for us as a board um to round out the day hearing about some of the federal like legislation that exists um and maybe um if we could kind of educate ourselves on that and what it would mean for Vermont as we're on the precipice of entering kind of this adult recreational market um and safe banking you know how we how we can thank you definitely um well maybe I'll start out the quick intro too um for it's really nice to meet you guys and thank you so much for for putting in the work and I'm really excited for you I'm sure it seems like a very daunting task but fortunately you guys have a lot of uh you know learn from a lot of the uh the things that were done well the things that were maybe done not so well and and really excited to work with you and obviously you know Jen Flanigan being a a former regulator who is there to help build uh what they've done in Massachusetts you know she's going to be great so um my background I started the firm focusing entirely on cannabis and cannabis issues uh back in 2010 right after Colorado passed their law and just that's a medical comprehensive regulatory system that passed and we had 18 days to get applications in and up to the local level and then another 30 uh at the state level so I know you guys are under pretty tight tight timelines but uh we can definitely you know the work can get done and and again we have a lot of uh a lot of things to to help different countries we've worked with different states and you know my role with the firm has always been on implementation and helping with uh states starting with Colorado when the governor uh appointed me as the first person to his task force uh for implementation Governor Hickenlooper now Senator Hickenlooper um and that was back in 2012 2013 right after the election so um just really excited to be able to work with you guys since then I've been doing you know everything and now I've progressed I do a lot of work at the federal level I just stepped down as chairman of the board of two trade federations in the district of Columbia that focus entirely on cannabis so I have quite a bit of uh knowledge and experience with with cannabis banking and Ed Perlmutter Rope Congressman Perlmutter here in Colorado and I have been working on his say banking bill for seven eight years really proud of the work he's done so know quite a bit about that I actually have a comprehensive memo that's uh that I'll send you guys after but didn't want to distract you too much that kind of goes through the history I'm sure you guys got a lot of this really quick but since you just mentioned highway safety just wanted to let you know that um the United States cannabis council which is the federal trade group that uh that I'm I'm now the emeritus chair I always mispronounce this name I stepped down as chairman of the board and I'm I'm now the you know the sort of former chair so I get to to weigh in and pontificate without having too much responsibility which is great um but we when I was there we set up a partnership with responsibility dot org which if you're familiar with responsibility dot org I'm happy to talk to your you know your public safety folks about it but it was put together by really by the alcohol industry and by the distilled spirits council but it's a very well funded 501c3 that has a board independent of has some alcohol industry representatives but has a board that um you know focuses on on drunk driving and on on responsible use by adults responsible you know limiting access to teenagers and we signed a formal partnership with them and the the council to really take what they've learned with highway safety and the alcohol industry kind of reacted after the fact and be very proactive about it so really excited about about that partnership and happy to share more information and their resources with you guys too that's great yeah absolutely the big issue yeah yeah and there's some really exciting stuff going on and you know some engagement at the federal level too on when they do that the highway bills and these things there there's some innovations coming out and it's definitely an issue people talk about but we know it's as important as anything making sure the streets and the highways are safe so anyways I digress but back to banking so I thought I do just I mean does a general overview help again I've got you know really I can give you the general overview where we're at I just don't yeah I know I know a lot of these bills more act and the Schumer bill do a lot more than just banking but you know our focus today mostly is on the banking issue cool yeah so you know essentially right now there's the FinCEN has created a there was guidance that was given that was actually withdrawn by the Trump administration but Treasury still has guidance through FinCEN that creates a very pretty pretty detailed structure I call it it's not a safe harbor I call it a safe inlet for banks and credit unions because it's it's not the full safe harbor you'd want with something that was actual federal legislation but what we have is a pretty pretty robust compliance toolkit that they've given in terms of how you found it again there'll be a lot more detail in the memo that I send you but it gives the banks and credit unions financial institutions the ability to they say you know this is how you can work with the industry this is the types of things you need to do when you're doing reporting on any transactions and this includes suspicious activity reports if you guys have heard about those how you file the different suspicious activity reports it actually classifies businesses in sort of in different ways are you primarily generating all your income from the sale or transfer of cannabis or cannabis products stepping back from that are you providing services to the industry and are the services you provided is the majority of your income coming from you know people who are selling cannabis or cannabis products to other businesses or to consumers and then you have people that are kind of another layer out that have some business in the cannabis industry but are not generating the majority of their income so our law firm for example we fall into that second bucket we all of our revenues come or the majority of that vast majority of our revenues come from cannabis businesses or you know and then we have other revenues that come from you know working with local governments where we've represented some cities and counties working with some you know federal governments in other countries so that would be the thing that's not really implicated because that's all just helping with public policy but but because we're in that second bucket we have the same challenges with bank accounts that a lot of our clients do maybe not quite as much because we are a law firm and where you know but we do you know we've actually I've actually had the pleasure not so much pleasure of of losing several bank accounts over the years because we've always been 100% transparent since 2010 but you know banks sometimes get skittish and their reasoning is everything from we're going to very strictly follow the federal law and even though there's been some safe you know some safe inlets or some some some guidance given about how we could bank with you word is not there yet you know and so we lost a couple of banking relationships we now have several banking relationships across the country with banks that know what we're doing transparently doing it and they also work with a bunch of clients so one of the other resources we can provide for you is banks you know I know the credit union talked to them about you know any compliance issues they might be you know really show them what a robust compliance package looks like that can put them in the same sort of status as a lot of banks around the country and credit unions around the country that are doing this and doing it well again if they you know there's that initial hump they have to take that well we're going to still take a chance because we know it's not 100% protection right so the way we get to 100% protection is through the safe banking act or through the more act as you mentioned or through the Booker Schumer Widen package now the safe banking act has passed the house now twice and it passed back in 2019 went to the senate didn't go anywhere senator crepo from Idaho was working on some things but really was not Idaho's I think you know really has very very very limited if any cannabis activity and and so he's a that's his home state his constituency so you know even though he we had some good conversations it didn't move anywhere in the senate now that it's changed to democratic control even though it's by you know razor thin margin there's definitely more conversations and the committee leadership has changed but really so in 2021 that the safe banking act passed again in this congress and it actually passed by a margin of 321 to 101 I believe and that the real cool thing there is that we got both we got it we have a majority of both republicans and democrats a super majority of democrats voted for it and a and a majority of republicans voted for it so that was a really important you know step forward because it obviously shows really strong bipartisan support at least on the house side unfortunately in the senate not unfortunately but because of the package that senators booker senator schumer booker and widen put together that the banking bill the safe banking bill as far as the senate goes it's in a it's in sort of a a pause point right now while we go through the process of giving comments on on their package now those comments are due on september 1st and they released that bill to the masses and said if you have comments here's how you can get comments back they're going to take those comments and try to reincorporate them into a new draft even with their package there is some concerns about around banking that just you know it's not as robust as the safe banking bill so that will be something that will be commenting on as a firm and and the I imagine many people in the industry will be coming on commenting on one of the primary challenges being what about legacy cash is what we call it you know these businesses that have been operating in all cash how do they bring cash in the system there's not as much clarity as we'd like and you know this is part of the issues that some of the folks american bankers association others have raised about the safe banking package itself is there is just some finer details that could be put into the legislation that would be really helpful so that you know whereas the booker schumer widen package really focused on a very robust regulatory structure a lot of really interesting and I think positive things on social equity and diverse you know making sure there's diversity reflecting the diversity of country in the industry but I think on the banking stuff you know there's definitely some some nerdy robust comments that Jordan and Andrew you know would pontificate about that we need to get in there but Cory Booker during that during that press conference actually said I don't want banking to pass because it's going to be beneficial just to a small number of people as opposed to getting the whole thing done which would really address all these policy issues that are really important to me we had a subsequent conversation a smaller group of us with him about about some of the things he was talking about in light of that because look if we can't get senators you know schumer Booker and widen's bill to to move because we can't get enough republicans on board and frankly there's a couple democrats that are still on the fence you know what we need to we need to think about public safety and we need to think about particularly small business because frankly 80 you know in Colorado 80 to 90 of all the businesses have bank accounts and really around the country we have a very robust even though a lot of the messaging out there is that everyone's operating in all cash it's not that you know it's expensive the bank accounts are expensive because of these additional compliance burdens that are put on people but you know for the most part every made you know all of the larger companies have many bank accounts and do not have a problem finding those bank accounts it's when you get to the smaller and smaller companies that are just mom and pops in particular where we've seen some challenges but we have found solutions for them to particularly through credit unions and so around the country in every state where where there's a functioning adult use and really medical program a few a few notable kind of exceptions where Nevada's had you know some challenges with just having a very limited access to banking banking services in terms of the number of banks that are that are willing to do it but that's gotten better but besides that around the country you know there there are a number of banks that are very interested in in servicing this industry have have done so in their home state or actually moved into other states to do it and are are interested in doing it as the market progresses but I think in a place like Vermont too of getting you know talking to the the state you know banking commissioners or you know the finance people that you guys have referenced and also just just speaking with you know the the credit union that any advocacy organizations or lobbying organizations you know there's that there's the American Bankers Association which we partnered with on this legislation that can bring some you know some some very good information to bear for their for banks and the credit union association as well but you know certainly there's opportunities to to talk to any banks local state banks or you know others about you know what a program looks like and I'd be you know we've done this in I've presented to the American Bankers Association annual meeting and state meetings around the country as has we have a banking practice Sahar is our in our LA office is really as focused on fintech and banking you know so we have a roster of banks too that are more than happy they're federally chartered they're more than happy to work with you know some of the you know with businesses and in emerging markets where we have some time I think we can also help educate some banks and give them some comfort but at the end of the day I always tell people this is a decision you know you guys are really gonna have to make and a lot of times it comes down to the board and risk tolerance and again you'll see in the in the memo it talks about not just the legal risk but there's you know there's reputational risk you know my Wells Fargo bank account won't let me trade canopy stock which is a federally legal Canadian company that's not even doing anything other than it's selling cannabis in Canada legally under their federal law and it's traded on the New York Stock Exchange but Wells Fargo's taken the position that we don't want any cannabis stuff you know and I don't know if it's just sort of a institutional I can I chalk it up to what what I call reputational risk right they just they don't want to be seen as banking industries they might they're worried they're gonna lose some customers that might think cannabis is a bad thing you know or just you know so it's simple for these big banks in particular it's just simple to kind of stay out for now Wells Fargo even took it a step further and then there's the increased diligence requirements that's why we see costs associated with these bank accounts so a lot of times a bank account for a business you know I don't know the last time I paid that monthly checking fees years and years ago right but in this industry the banks that do provide accounts they charge anywhere from 500 to 1500 a month because they have to have these you know increased reporting requirements increased due diligence requirements and frankly they're taking a risk so they probably want to make a little money there too right and right now even with all those banks very very very few of them if any are giving loans which is why safe banking that's another big part of safe banking that's you know in addition to providing all these protections that banks can't be penalized for banking the industry they can't be discouraged from regulators all the stuff that's in the the safe banking law you know which I think is is really important but the big thing too is getting being able to get loans from your community banks to start a small business you know right now that is a bridge too far for everyone because it goes from just saying we're taking deposits helping the regulated system succeed for tax collection purposes and for transparency purposes but if we start loaning to people that looks a lot more like aiding and abetting an illegal business so most banks don't do it now we have seen some insurance companies that have you know that have a lot of assets that are loaning money for real estate to the cannabis industry but again it's pretty it's pretty limited and you know what we tell people is you know overall you can transparently bank if you're a cannabis company and we we strongly recommend if not require any client you know it used to be you'd have a funny name that sounded nothing like cannabis and you just cross your fingers and hope your bank wouldn't figure out that you're a cannabis business that was like five six years ago now everyone who's banking is transparently doing so and to not do that is just you know you're setting yourself up for all of a sudden you get a letter saying you got 30 days and your bank account's going to be shut down and that no one wants that right because you have to find a new one if you get a check from your current bank and you have nowhere to deposit it it's not really a very valuable check so I'll pause there for a second you know I know I jumped around quite a bit there but hopefully that helped a little bit question um are you aware of any of the credit unions in in any recent years I mean our we got a rundown of sort of like the highest level risk like losing your master account with the fdic like are you aware of any banks that have have been shut down in that way if they're banking with cannabis establishment nope not one and and you know the um we have you know so if you're federally chartered you have a primary regulator of the office of the comptroller of the currency which is staffed by you know typically it's staffed by southern senators and or former sorry former southern senate staff and more conservative people and it's a more conservative body the fdic insurance that everyone needs we've not seen anyone we've seen audits we've seen when we've had auditors even five six years ago come in and do do deep dives into how they're keeping their records and are they keeping all these SARS reports you know and and and we've had banks get through these audits and these reviews by their regulators um I'm trying to think of anything the only time we've ever I know I remember there was a bank maybe that was very heavily like all their assets were cannabis assets and there was just concerns of being a single sort of industry bank that if there's disruption in that industry it was more of a reserve requirement issue or a you know it was a different issue than we don't like cannabis it was just more like your your the risk tolerance when you're so heavily involved in one industry creates some regulatory concerns now the credit unions have had more flexibility because they've been they you know they have a separate regulatory structure and so there's been you know quite a few credit unions that have gotten in and it's been a little bit more friendly um in terms of the the regulators but I wouldn't call it unfriendly from the other regulators we're not seeing you know people aren't just sitting pins and needles worried about if the regulator finds out their bank and cannabis they very much know about it they might have a heightened audit you know when they go through their their annual audit or their quarterly audits or whatever it is but no one shut down that that we've seen and the only I think if the only time it would happen is if you saw a bank that was involved in or rose negligence involved in nefarious activity you know I guess just bouncing bouncing off of that have you seen banks or credit unions that have entered this space and then you know decided that while they're in engage that it's just not something that they want to take reputational risk anymore or they've you know not hit those doomsday scenarios from uh um you know losing access to FDIC so on and so forth but like you know a thousand small cuts still equal that yeah it's a lot of it I've seen it it's just been you know you've got a due diligence program and the main person decides to you know jump ship and go to go in-house with uh you know a compliance company or something and then it that puts them in a bad spot because they don't have that staff and so business decision or just you know they mispriced it and so uh you know a number of banks too have just kind of said we're only going to take this many customers because we just don't want to that's the number that we think we can manage and we're not trying to make a huge splash here so I've seen some limit the number I'm trying to think of any I don't think anyone has started doing it and then exited it unless they were doing it with just a few people right and it wasn't really known maybe it was known in a region or a specific bank but then when kind of the national sort of said we're gonna have a new policy they shut they said we're not going to do this anymore but it was because they in the absence it wasn't because they entered the market and then exited it was because they were kind of in it with with a few customers and then they formalized their policies and decided not to do it at this time um we've seen that but I'm trying to I'll check with Sahar too um who I think will be a great resource uh for you guys but she you know she tracks these things she has our list of 20 to 30 banks which when people are looking for bank accounts we can say here's you know east coast west coast midwest and and again some of these are federally chartered and so they can you know enter into new states relatively easily without going through the the state banking system but a lot of a lot of these banks too are state chartered banks so it's really about getting uh you know the here was the department of regulatory affairs that we worked with it's now congressman now congressman Jonah Goose from Colorado but he was the head of the department of regulatory affairs before he became the he took over jared polis's seat in united states house representatives and he helped us really move the ball forward and that was about seven seven eight years ago so we you know a lot of states have have really addressed these issues if you have a friendly banking commissioner in particularly you know an attorney general that understands these things we you know you guys were talking about public safety before this obviously this is a huge public safety issue and so we work the attorney generals really hard on this too to you know it's just public safety and the irony of not having not allowing banking is that that you know having an all-cash business if i if the the cops came to me and said why do you have an all-cash business christian i'm like oh i just prefer that you know that's like a huge red flag right when you have banks and you can match up all of your receipts and these these programs these compliance programs you know it's matching all of your receipts with all of your sales and all of your cash and doing that that balance and then also doing these suspicious activity reports on everything that you know says you know this business is is in compliance and then when you have certain types of suspicious activity you escalate them to a higher level of those suspicious activity reports and you know we haven't seen many of those but when they do then there's action taken those accounts get shut down and it's become pretty you know relatively uh uh easy to work with and there's actually a few service providers out there ones named HyperHYPUR that's created a bank compliance you know uh former guys from like visa and other things that have created some bank compliance stuff and there's a few others out there like that too that are specifically you know will work with uh you know the banking industry and the states to uh you know to to really help make sure banks understand what their compliance obligations are and automate a bunch of that reporting stuff i'm not pitching them by any means i'm just throwing them out there is one tyler there is a good resource for me because i always you know he's always telling me when there's new banks coming coming into the system and that's how we just continue to increase our roster of banks um for the industry christian um i hope i'm not misrepresenting what the credit our credit union just said but i think they said that you know the the Schumer um Booker um uh what widen bill would both eliminate their risk and it would eliminate their compliance costs that they then pass on to their customers um the safe banking act would eliminate their risk for the most part but it would not eliminate their compliance costs um do you explain where the kind of um or the the blooming hour mclintock lee amendment um or even the kind of skinny one that relates only to banking would fall on that spectrum so you know really what they're talking about is so the bank you know safe banking bill it sort of codified these heightened due diligence heightened reporting requirements um but it also creates a bunch of safe harbors and actually creates more business opportunity because you can loan to the industry and this industry has you know the rates you can you can definitely probably charge a premium hopefully not too much of a premium so the off that would offset some of these costs i think that the current Schumer Booker widen package it does it would do what what they said which is really eliminate at least initially some of the compliance costs but there's a number of industries that have a hard time with banking not candidates typically can businesses that are a lot of cash are also businesses that are used for money laundering right so you know uh car washes there's like these notorious you know i'm not just using that from Breaking Bad but they did that for a reason there was a there was a thing called operation choke point back which was designed to identify 30 industries that are very historically used to money launder and do other things and so even if the bill passes that doesn't mean that you know because people still are going to use a lot of cash when they go to dispensaries maybe they'll use credit cards more maybe they'll use but like you know if you don't want it to show up on your credit card because you're afraid you know it might you know it's in the public record that you're a cannabis consumer um you know people tend to use cash so this will probably remain a cash heavy business just because of that fact going forward maybe a lot less so if people can use credit cards and ATM cards and and whatnot but it's still going to be a compliance issue because you know if banks you know are banking this industry they're still going to have to do all of the reporting that is otherwise required of them and in a cash intensive business which would be slightly less than what we have in FinCEN and safe banking but it's not going to be a magic bullet that all of a sudden it's just going to be like you know the the customers are like a a typical you know store that's that's a mainstream current mainstream industry does that make sense yeah you have any thoughts on Blumenauer McClintock yeah just the enforcement you're talking about the the amendment that would be so right now it's it limits the federal government from spending money on enforcing in states where uh you know where where there's a legal cannabis program medical or adult use and the state did they extend this to banking and the the justice department you know there is still because of the FinCEN guidance and you know I think there's a lot of conversations around you know and and look we don't know that that you know that that we've never gotten it to extend to recreation or you know to adult use cannabis we're hopeful this year that that we can do that but you know it's it's not and and with everything going on with the infrastructure stuff and everything else a lot of the some of these things have been put to the to the back burner so I don't see that as as a a super viable solution at this point I think we're gonna be under the FinCEN sort of model for the time being I'm hopeful that you know the the enforcement uh you know the taking away enforcement dollars for adult use I would love to see that in there but even with that currently not in there we haven't seen enforcement except for when people are not following their state laws even under the Trump administration and you know early Obama there was some enforcement issues later Obama administration there was very little unless you were doing something totally wrong um this is for businesses and banks and anyone else and then during the Trump administration you know Secretary Mnuchin kept in place the FinCEN guidance even though the attorney general sessions pulled the other guidance that gave people you know the Cole memo we call it which gave us a lot of what we we felt was a lot of you know some protection but even though that Cole memo is gone having that FinCEN and Secretary Mnuchin keeping that in place is a very meaningful distinction you know to make sure everyone understands but even if we don't get the McClintock Blumenauer amendment with with these additional protections for adult use I don't think the risk profile changes much it would just be a nice win to to kind of keep saying let's spend our money in the right place but already those are limited resources inside the federal government and they you know these these programs are typically very intertwined anyways medical and adult use thanks for that um so we also heard from our credit unions that their decision on whether or not to bank and the is not going to be until we're well into our rulemaking process and possibly well into our licensing process but at least if we are able to kind of maintain the timelines that are in our enabling legislation yeah so what does that mean for us uh you know if we essentially have zero banks that are willing to bank in this realm at the outset well what does that mean for the marketplace well to one answer that question would be I think that there are other banks that would be more than happy to to service Vermont and businesses in Vermont even though you know the the program might be smaller in comparison to some states there's people that just really um you know there's going to be um there's just an interest in this and some of the banks and credit unions that are doing this you know they really enjoy this as a business and they like the entrepreneurial nature of it and so we've seen there's a bank in Oklahoma that's now open branches in several different places and are doing a great job um helping out the industry and doing a really competitive price point so I do think that other banks might might look at it or credit unions but also I think that you know you can't really uh you know until you have a license and until you're actually engaging in the sale of cannabis you're not violating federal law so you could have your your application company we've had this we're bank you know we use a more traditional bank account we say hey look when we do switch over you know either we'll leave the we'll our relationship will end at that point because we will then be engaging in what amounts to you know uh something that's illegal under federal law but we've had success with banks saying yeah that's fine you can do it now while you're waiting but I also think that one of the check boxes that's the most important one is that you're operating legally under state law and so you know a lot of you know bank accounts will do the front-end work saying you know we're assuming that when you get there you'll be operating with a license and legally under state law and if you don't we will terminate our bank you know if you don't get your license you're probably gonna close up shop anyways and let you know I doubt if you're like well I'm gonna keep selling I'm gonna sell marijuana anyways without a license they'd probably that'd be a good time to shut the bank account down so that won't happen but I do think that we could work with the credit union too to see if we can help them answer these things and you know have that say you know planned out in a way that would not be detrimental to businesses that are trying to start up the big issue is always legacy cash if there's any caregiving in you know in Colorado we had these caregivers that were transitioning into this legal market and they really didn't have bank accounts and so they had all this cash from their previous you know operations and they tried to account for it and show in California this was a huge problem as well and it's something that's really important in the safe banking that's a big part of the discussion around safe banking and any banking discussions that are happening at the federal level is what do we do with legacy cash and you know I don't think it'll be as big of a problem for you guys but it could be an issue you know and also when cash you know if there's someone I mean you know kind of an investor or someone who's putting in some money you know just making sure that that money's vetted and where did it come from if it came from another cannabis program you know there's all sorts of of sort of private market solutions that have come up from that in terms of people that are trying to help help when new programs are opening up but you know we've got Georgia we've got a bunch of new programs that you know that you know Georgia just announced some new licensing you know New York and New Jersey and I just think that you know the banking issue when it used to be every single day it was an hour plus of my day now it's maybe an hour a month because we have banks that are that are willing to come in and solutions that are willing to do it and if you're if you're starting up a business in Vermont and you're saying look I'm not doing anything illegal we certainly have banks that will bank people in the at the front end here while that's happening and I'll find out if there's any banks I mean again I would love to just support Vermont banks and Vermont credit unions that are willing to do it it's like you always want to help support local the local economy so I'd love to help them and I'd be happy to talk to them individually and you know consider us a resource obviously too for anything happening at the federal level I will keep you guys you know we'll keep you 100 in the loop on on any advancements or any you know scuttle but that we're hearing but in the meantime too we're happy to talk to banking institutions or connect them with other banking institutions that have done done this or the the folks at the ABA that have that have supported some of their banks or the you know it's the I forget the name of the NCUA is the credit union insurance equivalent to FDIC but there is also a national trade association for credit unions that have done a lot of good work on this that might be able to provide some resources and comfort to them but look I appreciate that they're being so thoughtful about it honestly yeah some some people are just like let's do this and then they're like oh man I had no idea that I had to you know do all these forms and hire someone but fortunately because of you know just economic activity there's been a lot of of solutions that have come about and these are people that came out of big you know financial services industries big banks and stuff that are just really excited about being a part of this this new economy great well thank you so much for joining us today and giving us that update and being a resource for us we're thrilled to be working with BS strategies thrilled to be working with you yeah and you know our credit unions absolutely want to have that conversation with us and want to make sure that we're all kind of jumping together or at least speaking the same language so I think that's a huge help for us yeah and and I'll send you guys this memo just it probably has a lot of stuff that you've heard but it just has the fin set you know just it's a shorter it's a longer version distilling some of what I said more you know just in a more organized fashion but I really appreciate what you guys are doing and you know we always you know it's not easy it's not an easy thing to set up any new program or do anything but like I said fortunately you guys have there's a lot of a lot of trial and error that's gone on but also a lot of successes that have gone on and the way you guys are approaching it and primarily focusing on public safety is definitely you know an important thing and you know to the extent your attorney general has been involved or not um phil wiser here in colorado um is definitely a good resource in the western attorneys general uh I think it's usually called western attorneys general it's now called the ag alliance it was everything west of them of the Atlantic is what I joke about it became pretty much every ag in the country but they've they spent they had their big conference in hawaii a couple weeks ago spent a whole day on cannabis issues related to public safety including banking so there's there's some really good engagement by some attorneys general which are kind of you know for the most part consumer safety and public safety oriented so that could be a good resource too awesome yeah thanks for joining us today I really appreciate your time anytime yeah it's great to see you guys hopefully I get to meet you sometime soon and uh thanks for all the work that you're doing it's really it's really uh appreciated thank you thank you all right take care everyone all right you too um so last agenda item is public comment um we will do public comment um the same way that we have been if anyone joined via the link um and you'd like to make a public comment today please raise your virtual hand and we'll call you in the order that we see them quite group today okay uh it looks like uh maybe we have one person that's joined via the phone if uh if you had a public comment you'd like to make um feel free to unmute yourself it's star six um keto um so um yeah to I I'm actually would like to make a comment um about something I heard um last week on last week's meeting um it was um one of the processor uh gentleman or one of the lab gentlemen and uh he was he was saying how we really needed to have the big players come in and and really just have the uh the the local growers kind of um serve to just add as an accent you know and and fill in the gaps and you know I I really just want to say that the the Vermont Vermont growers can really accomplish a ton and if they had uh if all of us if we had the same advantages that the dispensaries were getting um I think that uh I think we we would all really really impress uh everyone thank you anyone else uh would like to make a public comment um please feel free to raise your your virtual hand okay um well uh we haven't quite uh decided uh about a meeting next week we might take a week off um as we kind of move into a new phase of our work um but we will uh one way or the other um update our website and let folks know and um with that I'd take a motion to adjourn uh move to adjourn seconded uh all in favor