Legal cannabis dealers are navigating the industry as counterfeit websites trend.

<div class="block">Legal cannabis dealers are growing increasingly more frustrated when it comes to dealing with counterfeit sites. Cheddar News senior reporter Michelle Castillo, spoke to a New York City dealer who is facing digital branding issues.</div>

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Legit Cannabis Dealers Face Counterfeit Website Dilemma

Cannabis businesses are increasingly frustrated over the problem of counterfeiting Cheddar, senior reporter Michelle Cascio talks to one entrepreneur about this growing issue. Take a look. The legal cannabis market has given opportunities to companies like Peter Tanks plug play. He's done everything above board including getting his products sold in authorized stores like housing works cannabis company, the first legal store in New York State. But now his and other companies are facing another major problem. Counterfeits. We're seeing things from products that aren't even ours with our label and logos on them to products that look nothing like our product but has our logo on it. Up to 80% of packaged cannabis products on the market today could be fake. According to authentication system. Solo Sciences, while several states have legalized marijuana, it is difficult to take action because it's still illegal. Federally. We've tried numerous angles with trying to take down these sites. It's just hard to track the source. We're still going through it. It's an ongoing battle. Staten Island University Hospital's Dr Nima Maji has seen cases where additives like fentaNYL have been mixed with marijuana and that's when we see patients present to the hospital with things like seizures, right? We, we normally don't see that with marijuana where we see people present comatose with um, or breathing effort. Um, things like that, other concerns like the amount of THC in legal and illegal products have caused medical issues. I would say THC overall is relatively safe. Generally speaking, I think any time you, you ingest anything that's not well regulated, you're taking a risk. Plug play is trying to take additional steps to help consumers make sure their product is valid. But even those are being replicated. All you have to do is literally take your phone out just like this camera. QR can verify, go straight to the site. You put the code in, you have to scratch that and put the code in. But once you hit verify, it'll verify the product when you saw fake ones online or like have, what would they look like? Like would they look pretty similar? We've experienced all kinds of different types of counterfeits from ones that look identical along with can verify stickers, but they work when you scan them, it will take you to a landing page, but it's literally like a dummy landing page websites that seem like they're selling official products can be deceiving plug play has been trying to take this site down. It looks legitimate. There's flavors on here that we don't even carry anymore if you just scroll down. Yeah, they have prices you could sit here, click on it. Add to cart highly illegal. We contacted the owner of the website but did not receive a response. Tang said another major roadblock is many online platforms don't allow cannabis advertising or posts, we can't even post actual product on our feed. So it makes it really, really difficult to engage and uh share information with our consumers, whether it be how to authenticate product or new drops or basically where to buy and find us for legitimate and licensed products. It's a growing dilemma in a, in a, in an industry that's not really well regulated. How do we maintain safety and, um, you know, I'm not sure what the actual solution is to that. And as more jurisdictions including the US government loosen the rules on cannabis. It's only going to persist for cheddar news. I'm Michelle Casilla.