Local News

The Seattle Times political team explores national, state and local politics.

Gov. Jay Inslee plans to give the federal government details soon about how the state will track shipments of marijuana and prevent leakage outside Washington’s borders.

Inslee said Thursday it’s still too early to draw conclusions about what U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will do regarding the voters’ decision last fall to legalize marijuana for social use.

The governor said he’s determined to show the state can develop a system that tracks the production and distribution of pot.

“The concern would be that growers somehow would have a regular leakage of their product in a U-haul to Oregon. We want to use all methods at our disposal to eliminate that,” he said.

Inslee said he plans to update Holder in a week to 10 days on what the state has in mind.

Although no details were released at his news conference on Thursday, the governor said he wants “a systemic digitally controlled system of understanding what in fact is being produced.”

In addition, Inslee said the state needs a “digital way of tracking that inventory to the distributor and then to the retailers so that we know that what leaves the farms actually arrives at the distributor and there isn’t a 10 or 20 percent shrinkage that could end up on the black market.”

The governor said he met with representatives from the biotech industry on Wednesday to discuss how they track pharmaceuticals and apply that to the distribution of pot.

“We will be the first state in the world to adopt a licensed, regulated, disciplined, distribution market for marijuana, I think in world history,” he said,