🧪 The COA, on request. Virginia's $250 fine

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Tomorrow's episode of The Hybrid features Jeremy Berke of Cultivated Media, who built Business Insider's cannabis coverage before starting Cultivated Daily in 2022. Yesterday, Cultivated opened a paid membership at $100 a year, or $12.50 a month. Members get at least one exclusive feature, analysis or investigation every week, and the free daily newsletter continues. Jeremy says the money will go toward hiring more journalists. Serious reporting on this industry is expensive to produce and there isn't enough of it, so I'd count this $100 as money well spent.

As for today’s news, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a testing bill that lets a California customer ask for a product's certificate of analysis and lets the state buy product off the shelf to check it. A University of Mississippi study shows how the number on that certificate can drift in a warm stockroom. Virginia is set to raise its public-use fine from $25 to $250 on the morning its stores open, and a youth advocacy group brought the joint commission its citation data. Connecticut starts serving other states' medical patients Thursday, and New Mexico's enforcement officers cleared 21 hoop houses in Estancia.

🧪 The certificate, on request
⚖️ $25 to $250
🏥 Other states' cards
🌵 Twenty-one hoop houses

Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 1965 on Sunday without a message, and California's testing law now runs from the lab bench to the sales floor. Assemblymember LaShae Sharp-Collins's bill makes every product on the market subject to testing or retesting and lets the Department of Cannabis Control pull product off retail shelves for its own analysis. A retailer has to hand over a product's certificate of analysis when a customer asks for it. Labs face performance testing, which the bill says can include blind proficiency samples and round-robin rounds. The same Sunday list carried Cecilia Aguiar-Curry's AB 2250, her clean-up of last year's AB 8. It moves CBN isolate out of the definition of cannabis concentrate, bars businesses that sell tobacco from selling cannabis, clarifies seizure authority, and writes cultivation through delivery into the scope of the state's track-and-trace program.

I think the certificate line changes behavior before the shelf program does. Off-the-shelf sampling needs DCC money and lab time, while a customer who asks for a COA the store can't produce, or gets one that doesn't match the label, can photograph the problem on the spot. Round-robin testing goes after the other half of the problem, because a lab that reads high on every sample stands out once every lab tests the same one. The next move is DCC's, which has to decide how often it samples, who pays for the lab time and what it does with a result that misses. (Marijuana Moment; Office of the Governor; California Legislative Information)

🧊 Researchers at the University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy stored flower, extracts, oils and isolates at room temperature, in a refrigerator and in a freezer, then tracked potency over time. In the paper, published in Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research, THC-rich products lost THC to CBN at room temperature, while CBD-only products held steady even on the counter. A shelf test that comes in under the label could mean a generous lab, an optimistic label or a jar that sat somewhere warm, and the certificate only describes the day of the test. The authors' recommendation, a freezer at minus 20 degrees Celsius, describes a research lab and almost no retail stockroom. (AZ Marijuana; Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research)

Virginia's maximum civil penalty for using cannabis in public rises from $25 to $250 on July 1, 2027, the same day licensed retail sales begin. A second offense also costs $250 and requires substance-use education or treatment where available, and a third is a Class 4 misdemeanor. Valerie Slater, executive director of RISE for Youth, told the legislature's joint commission on the retail transition last week that Black Virginians make up about 19 percent of the population and 47.7 percent of public-use citations in her group's analysis. Juvenile Justice data she cited show marijuana-related intake complaints falling from about 2,700 in fiscal 2019 to 1,904 in fiscal 2024, while the share originating at school rose from 17 to 54 percent. She asked lawmakers to keep the fine at $25 or exempt minors. Del. Paul Krizek, who co-chairs the commission and carried the retail bill in the House, said raising a fine that hasn't worked would only double down on it.

Supporters of the higher fine can point to liquor, where licensed sales come paired with open-container penalties, and to a $25 figure set when Virginia's priority was ending arrests. The citation numbers don't establish cause, and the Virginia Mercury's reporting says so. They carry more weight after the Criminal Sentencing Commission counted possession charges falling from 31,837 in fiscal 2018 to three in fiscal 2026, which by my reading leaves the public-use citation as the main way an adult Virginian meets cannabis enforcement. I expect the General Assembly to exempt minors in the January session and leave the adult fine alone, since a carve-out answers Slater's school data without reopening the retail bargain. If the commission's recommendations leave the fine out entirely, I'd drop that call. Krizek also raised the collections problem, where an unpaid fine can land on a family's credit before the child turns 18. (Virginia Mercury via Marijuana Moment; Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission)

🎨 The National Institute of Standards and Technology opened a post on scientific accidents with Bob Ross and his "happy accidents," then told the story of chemist Tara Lovestead's headspace method. She built it after 9/11 to help electronic sensors do the work of bomb-sniffing dogs, and NIST now uses it to study how THC behaves in human breath. A dog can smell a joint, the agency notes, but the smell comes from other compounds, and THC is a heavy molecule that is hard to find in breath. Lovestead calls it the hardest measurement challenge of her career, and industry is building breathalyzers for police and employers anyway. I wouldn't bet on a roadside THC breath number holding up in court before NIST says it can measure one. (Marijuana Moment; NIST)

Beginning October 1st, Public Act 26-8 lets patients and caregivers with a valid medical cannabis credential from another state buy and possess medical cannabis in Connecticut on the same terms as Connecticut patients, at dispensary facilities and hybrid retailers. They have to carry the home-state credential whenever they have the product in Connecticut, and they can't take it back across the state line. Home cultivation stays tied to a Connecticut primary residence, so a visiting patient can't grow here. The same law raises infused-beverage THC caps and ends the concentrate potency cap that day, and both dates are on our Deadlines, Decoded tracker. Budtenders at the hybrid retailers along I-95 and I-84 will be the first to learn what a valid card from another state looks like. (Connecticut Office of Legislative Research; Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection)

🏚️ Zurich UK says fire crews attended 54 suspected or identified cannabis farms in 2024, up from 17 in 2015, with 50 more last year, based on freedom of information responses from 21 fire and rescue services. Its claims unit has handled 17 cannabis-farm losses since January 2022 totaling £9.4 million, mostly rented and vacant commercial units rewired to carry grow lights. The London Fire Brigade's own count fell from 19 incidents in 2019 to 10 in 2024, and the insurer publishing the loss data also writes the landlord policies. Zurich's answer is tighter tenant checks and routine inspections, which moves the enforcement work to the landlord's leasing office. (StrategicRISK; Insurance Business)

The Regulation and Licensing Department's Enforcement Bureau and the New Mexico Organized Crime Commission served a warrant Thursday at 102 Howell Road in Estancia and destroyed roughly 6,300 mature plants, an estimated 21,000 pounds, from 21 hoop houses. The bureau's certified peace officers exist because the Legislature passed House Bill 10 in 2025, giving RLD its own investigators for criminal violations of the Cannabis Regulation Act. Torrance County has been here before, when regulators revoked two licensed farms near Estancia in January 2024 for growing far past their plant limits and keeping plants out of track-and-trace. Nobody has been charged, and the next step belongs to Organized Crime Commission chair Sam Bregman's prosecutors. (Albuquerque Journal; KOB; Cannabis Equipment News)

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