White House Recommends Classifying Cannabis Businesses Alongside Smoke Shops
The White House OMB described policy recommendations for NAICS
The marijuana industry will “continue to grow,” a federal economic committee said in a new series of recommendations, and that means steps need to be taken to ensure that it’s tracked more diligently under a system that enables analysts to follow markets and publish statistical data.
In proposal published in the Federal Register last week, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) described policy recommendations for the 2022 update of the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), which is used to categorize businesses and compile data on markets across the U.S, Mexico and Canada.
The suggestions include a proposal to move cannabis retailers out of a miscellaneous category and index them separately under a new category where they will be grouped with tobacco, e-cigarette and smoking shops. There were further recommendations on indexing cannabis, hemp and CBD agriculture and wholesaler companies into specific NAICS categories as well.
These might seem like nominal moves—and they doesn’t represent the broader change that industry advocates wanted to see—but it demonstrates that the federal committee behind these recommendations is acknowledging the growing legitimacy of the marijuana sector and wants to make it easier for economists to research it just like any other business category.
The U.S. Economic Classification Policy Committee (ECPC)—which is comprised of OMB, the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics—took into account several previous public comments that had urged it to restructure NAICS with respect to cannabis retailers.
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