Missouri has hired thousands of marijuana jobs since legalizing weed

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."“The bill proposes the same level of background check requirements for all facility owners, employees and contractors regardless of the type of facility licensure,” Cox said.

Essex said the challenge she sees is that there weren’t enough vendors that take the fingerprints to keep pace with the employees for medical marijuana, particularly in the larger cities like Kansas City and St. Louis.

“Hopefully if they do implement the fingerprinting again,” Essex said, “there’ll be more providers in the state of Missouri that will be able to deal with a large quantity of candidates.”

Columbia-based attorney Dan Viets, who helped write the language for Amendment 3, said he doesn’t remember anyone intentionally removing the fingerprint requirements for employees from the recreational marijuana program.

But he believes it should be left out.

“The motivation, frankly, was to draft something that would meet the concerns that some voters might have about people with criminal history being involved in the industry,” he said of the 2018 constitutional amendment. “If we had to do it over, we might not have required it for medical employees either.”

During a Senate floor debate, Sen. Holly Rehder, R-Sikeston, said the fingerprinting measure was “a federal requirement.”

“So it’s putting us in line with federal regulations,” she said, regarding the amendment on her background checks bill.

She was likely referencing the Cole Memo, Payne said, because the federal government doesn’t regulate marijuana at all.

Barbour agreed.

“There’s $32 billion worth of commerce happening…right now in the U.S. that is all technically federally illegal — racketeering of the broadest scale,” Barbour said. “So what that means is that state legislatures… are trying to figure it out as they go. This is pretty uncharted territory.”

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