Northern Mariana Islands protect home growers while filling licensing gaps

Home growers in the Northern Mariana Islands received explicit protection against delays in the registry system when Governor Ralph Torres signed an amendment on 21 August 2019. Adults following the cultivation rules could continue growing while registry regulations were unfinished, provided they obtained a card once one became available.

Legalisation had left fees and taxes unsettled

The 2018 legalisation law created a regulated market and allowed home cultivation. Torres approved it while vetoing several financial terms, including a proposed five-dollar annual homegrown fee and flat charges for commercial licences.

He argued that the fees should reflect the cost of administering and enforcing the new industry. He also rejected the proposed excise-tax terms and asked lawmakers to clarify which taxes would apply to cannabis businesses.

The 2019 amendment supplied a fuller set of fees and taxes as the commission prepared its licensing system.

Growers could continue while waiting for registry rules

The amendment set the annual homegrown registration fee at seventy-five dollars per person. It required the commission to implement the registry immediately and to make cards available to adults aged twenty-one and over.

It also expressly protected compliant cultivation during the period without registry regulations. Growers had to follow the statutory limits and obtain their card when the commission made it available.

Torres’s signing statement still called for clear regulations. His concern was that the transition protection could be read as leaving home cultivation outside regulatory controls.

Businesses faced different fees and cannabis taxes

Commercial fees varied by licence type and production scale. A small Class I producer faced a five-hundred-dollar application charge and a thousand-dollar annual licence fee; the largest producer class faced higher amounts.

The amendment set a fifteen-percent cannabis excise tax and a retailer surtax of fifteen percent of gross revenue, reduced to seven-and-a-half percent for revenue from medical marijuana. It directed cannabis taxes into a separate account, with a quarter of the relevant appropriation going to the public school system.

Rules and licences followed the amendment

The law also specified an exception allowing licensed sales to patients aged eighteen to twenty-one with a valid medical recommendation. For nonresident patients, it recognised recommendations from their country of origin.

The commission adopted emergency business rules in March 2020 and later began accepting applications. The first retail shop opened in July 2021, turning the licensing work into a place where adults in the Commonwealth could buy cannabis.^[1][2][3]