Control Commissioners and OLCC staff have reviewed about 500 cannabis strain names and will now deny the inclusion of these names on pre-approved packages and labels. Rob Patridge, chairman of the commission, called the new requirement “a common sense approach.” The agency also won’t allow strain names that refer to illicit drugs, such as LSD and Blow. For the meantime, banned names include Blow, Bruce Banner, Bubblelicious, Candyland, Charlotte’s Web, Cinderella, Deathstar, Dr. Who, Girl Scout Cookies, Grape Ape, Jedi Kush, LSD, Skywalker and Smurf.
In their common sense approach to deciding which names are inappropriate, a quick perusal of Oregon’s own Phylos Bioscience’s “Galaxy,” a dimensional database of strain names and genotypes, would have revealed a trove of potentially more appealing and/or dangerous names like Cotton Candy, PEZ, Orange Crush, Animal Cookies and Jelly Bean; Pink Champagne, Jager, Green Crack or Agent Orange off the top of my head. We suggest, if the OLCC is spending time and money “regulating the industry”, at least they do the basic research, so that it doesn’t look like they are pretending to work, when it comes to a matter as serious as protecting our children. At the very least, these lackluster efforts call into question their recent and potential ability to regulate the cannabis industry, if not their every effort pertaining to alcohol regulation since their formation in 1933.
