It's official: legal cannabis for all adults and war for water underway in New Mexico

The Cannabis Regulation Act was signed by Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and became effective June 29, 2021. On Tuesday the New Mexico Regulation and Licensing Department's Cannabis Control Division announced that the rules for businesses to manufacture, sell and transport are now in effect. Sales are expected to start by April 1 and more than 300 applications for licenses have been submitted. 

Here in the Land of Enchantment supporters are lauding cannabis legalization as a way to diversify New Mexico’s economy, bring in tax income and address inequities left by the war on drugs while balancing the state's water crisis with growers who must prove they have valid and sufficient water rights. But groundwater is notoriously corrosive in much of New Mexico while prolonged drought bleeds supplies to critical and coveted acequia rights can literally be to die for. 

In September, Bureau of Indian Affairs officers confiscated nine, yes nine, cannabis plants from a home garden on the Picuris Pueblo that was tended by a local resident who is enrolled in New Mexico's therapeutic cannabis program but is not a member of one of 23 federally recognized tribal entities in the state. Picuris has been battling with irrigators in the Mora Valley for water since 1820 when the first diversion from the Rio Pueblo de Taos, a tributary of the Rio Grande, became an acequia into the Mora, a tributary of the Canadian and Arkansas Rivers.

The New Mexico Department of Health will continue to maintain the patient registry for the therapeutic cannabis program while ensuring sales remain tax-free.