At IgniteIt’s Market Spotlight: California, Treasurer Fiona Ma told a packed room what many licensees have been saying for years — then laid out where the fixes need to happen.
Tracking is clunky and duplicative. Operators maintain internal systems, then layer METRC on top. The result is redundancy, cost, and confusion.
Leakage is real, tax capture is not. California still produces at scale. Newer markets are thriving without matching in-state production. The product is coming from somewhere, and too much of it bypasses legal channels and taxes. On how Prop 64 has played out, Ma was blunt: “Ten years later, it is a failure.”
Reliable state programs are thin. Asked what cannabis can actually count on at the state level, her first answer was stark: “Nothing. … Not much.” She noted that only one state loan program is currently accessible to cannabis businesses. An audience member flagged OCAL under CDFA as a bright spot, and Ma welcomed highlighting anything that works.
Banking remains a choke point. Ma backed financial institutions that chose to serve cannabis and said many charge high due diligence fees. Support helps, but cost and coverage remain uneven.
Budget context is real. California faces a structural deficit of about $20 billion a year. Ma’s argument is fiscal as much as philosophical: fix the legal market, grow the taxable pie, stop pretending the illicit delta is invisible.
