Tracking legal pot in Washington



The state will soon begin issuing licenses to legal pot producers and sellers. But to keep marijuana from being sold illegally and being taken out of state, the Liquor Control Board wants to know, down to the leaf, where all of this new product is going.

BioTrackTHC, a Florida company, has designed a software system to track marijuana from seed to sale.

"This is not just plant tracking, this is not just seed to harvest," said Patrick Vo, CFO at BioTrackTHC. "This is from the moment a marijuana plant is created all the way to point of sale to the consumer."



Each plant, each strain is given a unique bar code that can be traced and followed by individual pot businesses and the state.

That's important to the State Liquor Control Board, which is under pressure from the feds to make sure recreational pot in our state can be traced, and is not diverted to the black market, sold to minors, or goes out of state.

"The Department of Justice was very clear with the state that this product can not be diverted," said Brian Smith, with the Liquor Control Board. "If Washington's laboratory experiment is going to go forward with this legalized recreational marijuana, you're going to have to control it."

The state is now working with BioTrackTHC to create a system that will do that. They say when it's in place, it can record growth, weight and strain of the plants, and even the route and time it takes to transport to a retail store.

It will be the first system of its type in the US, and could lay the groundwork for other states if and when they decide to legalize marijuana.