The transition to the new cannabis tracking system in New Mexico is leaving some businesses unable to sell products, leading to steep financial losses, Source NM reports. The new system, New Mexico Seed to Sale (NMS2S), launched September 1 but retailers have experienced issues making the transition from the old system, BioTrack, to the new one. When BioTrack went offline on September 7, it crashed and did not properly add inventory to NMS2S.
Matt Kennicott, executive director of the New Mexico Cannabis Association (NMCA), told Source NM that one retailer had about 50,000 items that failed to transfer over from the old system, leaving “hundreds of thousands of dollars of inventory” unsellable by the retailer.
Another retailer had $150,000 worth of its top-selling product erroneously labelled as a different product, which prevented further sales; while one of the state’s larger retailers had $460,000 worth of product miscategorized, all of which it was unable to sell.
One retailer told Kennicott that they had so many issues they will likely have to hire one full-time and one more half-time employee to fix the errors.
Sabrina Aragon, chief operating officer of High Desert Relief, told Source NM that the new system requires testing results for products that were transferred from the old system to be manually entered, which means customers will have to trust that retailers aren’t accidentally, or purposely, entering numbers incorrectly.
Aragon gave the new system “a 4-out-of-10 on functionality right now, just from an operational standpoint.” She noted that the new system also requires dispensary employees to manually calculate the three different levels of taxes – county, state, and excise – on each sale. Kennicott called that “a deep, deep flaw within the system” that regulators told him would take “at least six months” to fix.
Kennicott indicated that businesses may revive a lawsuit that sought to allow businesses to continue using BioTrack until NMS2S is proven to work properly. He said the plaintiffs dropped the original lawsuit but that, given all of the problems, the plaintiffs could show a court “actual quantifiable harms, dollar amounts attached to them, things that actually happened because of how this rollout has occurred.”
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