Amazon were among the first to tout home deliveries by drone, but would they be the first to deliver medical cannabis by drones?
Not today, and not tomorrow is the answer, especially if California’s Bureau of Cannabis Control has anything to do with it, as they just banned the move, for now.
It’s all down to regulations which state that cannabis and medical cannabis products, “may not be done by aircraft, watercraft, rail, drones, human powered vehicles, or unmanned vehicles.” But that’s only in California.
The whole concept of medical cannabis delivery by drone, whether by Amazon or by others, while a good one, is fraught with problems, especially after last year a drone was captured on camera delivering cannabis to a jailhouse in London. Another issue is airspace, and the fact that for drones, it’s unregulated as of now.
The regs in California state that medical cannabis has to be delivered by a human, from an enclosed and secure vehicle. Furthermore, all deliveries must be traceable by GPS, in order to ensure that produce doesn’t end up in the wrong hands.
For now the new stringencies in the California regulations means that cannabis delivery by drone is out of the question, at least in the short term.
While history has shown that companies like Amazon have also been denied drone licences, due to FAA regs relating to pilot’s line of sight, consumers increasingly want their medical cannabis delivered, and drones are certainly very convenient.
Everyone thought it was a different story in San Diego, as MDelivers, a drone delivery company there, allegedly recently received a federal and state licence to deliver by drone. That turned out to be a prank, and that leaves the option of cannabis delivery by drone as nothing but a pipedream, at least for now.
But then again, while Amazon, at least for now, is preventing companies to list medical cannabis in Amazon’s mega-shop, a simple search for CBD will show the real nature of things, so Amazon might begin deliver medical cannabis products by drone sooner than later…
[Image credit- Pixabay]
