Gov. Kate Brown Says You Can Buy Legal Weed in October

It's official, Oregon. Legal pot sales begin in October.

After weeks of caginess in which both she and her spokespeople declined to comment on the matter, Governor Kate Brown this morning signed Senate Bill 460. That means, come October 1, adults 21 and up will be able to purchase up to a quarter ounce of pot from the medical dispensaries that have been popping up all over town.

No edibles, no tinctures, no ointments. Just dried pot. But it's something.

Right now, of course, there's no purely legal way to purchase pot, even though recreational use has been legal since July 1.

The ability to buy from medical dispensaries is seen as a short-term solution until the Oregon Liquor Control Commission sets up a recreational dispensary system next year. But the early emergence of medical shops as part of that market will undoubtedly help shape how it looks, and may give medical operations a leg up as Oregon figures out legal weed.

Some had questioned whether or not Brown would sign SB 460, noting that the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program doesn't have robust "seed to sale" tracking the federal government has indicated it wants to see if it's going to allow recreational marijuana programs to continue.

In fact, Brown has raised fears about that very thing in the past. In a letter to lawmakers in May, the governor wrote that changes that were being mulled to the OMMP "have caused me some concern. I fear that a self-reporting system of tracking is not sufficiently reliable to enable state agencies to enforce the regulations...

"Anything short of a strong tracking system may result in too much leakage outside of the legal marijuana market, which will run our state afoul of federal guidelines for legalization and result in a less successful recreational market."

Lawmakers did enact tough new regulations on the state's medical market in the legislative session that just concluded, but they won't be in place by the time legal purchases begin in October.

Brown's office declined to comment on that situation, or whether the governor was concerned that early legal sales could upset the feds, or her signature of the bill in general.