🌉 California killed the two cannabis bills aimed at its own regulator

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California's legislative session ends Monday, and of the five cannabis bills operators were told to watch, two are moving, two are dead, and one is already on the governor's desk. In Georgia, a licensed hemp wholesaler is facing trafficking charges before the state lab has said what was in the truck. North Carolina's cannabis council heard the testimony every impaired-driving bill eventually runs into, which is that blood THC proves exposure and not much else. And Oregon's economists marked down cannabis revenue five budget cycles into the future, because a six-million-pound harvest sells for what a six-million-pound harvest sells for.

🌉 Sacramento's last four days
🧪 Arrested before the lab report
🚗 The number that isn't a number

Every California cannabis bill still breathing has until midnight Monday, and the sorting is mostly done. The one measure that reached Gov. Gavin Newsom's desk, Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin's definition of packaging "attractive to children," tells licensees what they cannot do. The two still alive on the Senate floor, Assemblymember LaShae Sharp-Collins's testing quality-assurance bill and Irwin's cannabis beverage bill, tell licensees and labs what they must do. The two that died on August 13th, held under submission in Senate Appropriations after passing the Assembly without a single no vote, were the two that would have told the Department of Cannabis Control how to do its job. Assemblymember Tom Lackey's AB 1826 would have written recall, embargo, and destruction procedures into statute. Assemblymember Phillip Chen's AB 2537 would have required DCC to publish a ranked enforcement policy and stick to it, unlicensed operators and public-health risks first. The California Cannabis Operators Association, which sponsored 2537, says it died because DCC did not want the legislature ranking its enforcement for it.

That is easy to believe, and hard to fault. A regulator reads a statutory priority list as a lawsuit waiting for the first case that lands out of order, and the objection is honest as far as it goes. It stops short of year five, when the same list is the only thing standing between the agency and a legislature that has decided it enforces the wrong things. Agencies resist the leash in the year they would have benefited from the leash most, and there is no regulator, this writer included, who saw that clearly at the time. DCC took the safe reading and won quietly, in committee, where nobody has to vote against a bill that passed 76-0 upstairs. The industry gets Irwin's beverage bill as consolation, and it is a real one: AB 2532 came into the year as a 10-milligram cap per container, drew an industry letter estimating the cap would erase 93 percent of beverage sales, and left committee as a multi-serving labeling bill with the Poison Help line printed on the can. Same author, same instinct, better bill. The floor votes and the Assembly concurrence have to happen by Monday night, and then the only Californian who matters until the end of September is Newsom. (Harris Sliwoski; California Legislative Information; CaCOA)

💵 The fiscal argument for legalization has a specific number in Iowa now. Democratic gubernatorial nominee and State Auditor Rob Sand told a Dubuque town hall Monday that cannabis is "a dangerous drug" and that Iowa should tax it anyway, the way it taxes beer, because the state is burning through its surplus at a structural deficit Sand himself puts at $1.3 billion a year against a budget of roughly $9.5 billion. He answered the potency objection with the alcohol-by-volume label and the candy-gummies objection with Joe Camel. Iowans are already buying in Illinois and Missouri; the only question on the ballot is which treasury gets the receipt. (Marijuana Moment; Creston News Advertiser)

🌾 South Dakota's medical cannabis administrator Whitney Brunner told lawmakers that home-cultivation registrations have grown more than 1,000 percent in four years, that the $20 endorsement on top of the $75 patient fee buys the right to four plants, two flowering, and that the lack of regulation around those grows is "a bit concerning" to her department. The state counts 19,530 registered patients as of July. Senate Majority Leader John Thune's constituents keep sending Pierre a problem that only exists because a program works, which is the kind of problem the Senate floor has not been allowed to have. (GreenState, citing South Dakota Searchlight; South Dakota Department of Health)

Nooruddin "Nick" Rajwani runs Air Distro, a Georgia-registered hemp wholesaler with a state license on file, and he is one of six people arrested after DeKalb County deputies ran a controlled delivery on August 3rd and searched his business. Four of the six face marijuana trafficking charges. The warrants describe roughly 1,000 pounds in a truck stopped in Haralson County, 13.07 pounds at the delivery, and about 16,000 pre-rolls weighing 22 pounds at the warehouse. Defense attorneys Tom Church and Whitney Scherck Baker told WSB-TV the products were THCA hemp, that Rajwani's license and certificates of analysis were shown to deputies at the scene, and that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had not tested the seized material when the trafficking charges were filed. The sheriff's office declined comment on an open case.

Start with what the defense actually has. The certificate they produced shows 0.22 percent delta-9 THC, which is compliant, and it covers a different batch. A lab certificate travels with the product it tested and nothing else, and every regulator who has ever accepted one at face value has eventually regretted it. The same limit binds the other side. A deputy holding a bag of flower cannot tell hemp from cannabis by looking, and nobody else can either, which is the whole reason states pay the GBI to run a chromatograph. Georgia law makes total THC after decarboxylation the operative number, and THCA flower routinely fails that test even when it passes the delta-9 line the COA reports. The arrests ran ahead of the answer either way. The GBI results will settle the felony question for Rajwani and leave open what a Georgia deputy is supposed to do at a traffic stop with 1,000 pounds of something that smells like cannabis and a license that says hemp. That gap belongs to the General Assembly, which wrote a hemp law that licenses Rajwani's business and a drug law that arrests him, and has not yet been made to reconcile the two. (WSB-TV, via Yahoo News)

🏛️ Testimony in the Tompkins extortion trial turned Wednesday to the hiring program itself. An Ascend executive walked the jury through the reentry partnership with the Suffolk County Sheriff's Department that anchored the company's Boston license application and said, under questioning, that nobody told him the license depended on the sheriff's goodwill, which is the same ground co-founder Abner Kurtin covered Tuesday when he said Frank Perullo never discussed being pressured. The prosecution's theory runs through Perullo alone, and Perullo testifies under immunity. Every witness who says he heard nothing is a witness Martin Weinberg will name in closing. Judge Myong Joun has the trial scheduled through the first week of September. (Law360; WBUR; GBH)

🍁 Canada outsold California in June, $517.8 million against $372.4 million, or about $374.5 million once converted, and SFGate ran the crossover as the end of California's claim to the largest legal market in the world. One month is one month, and the Department of Cannabis Control's Jordan Traverso said as much. The durable number in the piece is the other one: Canada has 7.9 licensed retail outlets per 100,000 people, California has 3.7, and roughly 53 percent of California cities and counties still ban cannabis businesses outright. A market with half its map colored in will lose to a smaller country that opened the whole thing. (SFGate)

Gov. Josh Stein's Advisory Council on Cannabis put its Public Safety Subcommittee in a room Wednesday with the two people any state has to hear before it writes a cannabis driving law: a toxicologist and a police chief. The toxicologist, Donna Papsun of NMS Labs, told the council that a blood THC result shows exposure and recent use and does not yield an alcohol-style impairment number, and that no amount of statutory drafting changes the pharmacology. NMS already handles work for more than 100 North Carolina agencies at roughly a 14-day turnaround and offered to run a pilot that could go statewide. Roxboro Police Chief David Hess brought the capacity figure: as of June, North Carolina had about 175 certified Drug Recognition Experts among some 34,000 sworn officers.

That ratio is the story, and it will be the story in any state that legalizes next. A per se blood limit is easy to write and hard to defend, because a daily medical patient can sit above it sober and an occasional user can be below it and impaired. The alternatives are a trained officer or a lab, and North Carolina has one DRE for every 194 officers and a lab that takes two weeks. The same council is the one the General Assembly has been circling all summer, with sheriffs and prosecutors asking the House for hemp rules the Senate would not take up, and this subcommittee is where the legislature's hemp fight and any future cannabis bill will meet. "Toxicology is not the magic bullet, but the toxicology is the scientific evidence of exposure," Papsun told the council. Its recommendations go to Stein this fall, and the DRE count is the number that decides how much of them the state can afford. (WRAL)

🌱 The federal government is about to ask Americans why they use cannabis. The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics published a Federal Register notice August 20th proposing to add a current-use frequency question to the 2028 National Health Interview Survey and, for users, a reason-for-use question with options for recreation, pain, nausea, anxiety or stress, sleep, and other medical reasons, with CBD-only products excluded. Comments on the draft close October 19th under Docket CDC-2026-1387. The federal drug survey has counted use for decades; this would be the first instrument at that scale to sort medical intent from the rest. Expect the answer to be argued over the minute it exists. (Marijuana Moment; 91 Fed. Reg. 53869)

🍄 SAMHSA published a report Wednesday, PEP26-01-004, telling state mental health directors to plan now for the fiscal, legal, and operational consequences of an FDA-approved psychedelic therapy, including whether Medicaid would have to cover the multi-hour therapeutic session along with the drug. The report calls the evidence base uneven and notes that most trials excluded the seriously mentally ill, low-income, and complex-trauma populations state systems actually serve. It also says the question in every state is whether people will use these substances in regulated settings or in underground networks, since they are already using them. That is the medical cannabis argument of 2010 with the nouns changed, arriving from the same building. (Marijuana Moment; SAMHSA)

The Oregon Office of Economic Analysis cut projected cannabis revenue in every biennium it forecasts, starting with $9.9 million off 2025-27 and growing to $20.7 million off 2033-35, and the reasoning is arithmetic more than policy. Last October's harvest topped six million pounds. Usable cannabis sold at retail for about $3.17 a gram in early 2026, down from more than $8 in early 2017. Consumption has plateaued. The Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission's own market data, drawn from what licensees enter into Metrc, tell the same story from the other side of the counter: more product, fewer dollars per unit, and a tax base that shrinks even as the plants get taller.

Think of a farm stand where every neighbor on the road decided to grow tomatoes the same year. The tomatoes are fine. There are simply too many of them, and the price tells everybody except the grower who planted first. Oregon licensed without a cap for years, put a moratorium on new producer licenses only after the price collapse was visible, and is now living inside the outcome. Sen. Lisa Reynolds's 10-milligram edible cap, which she said last week she will bring back in 2027 with a lobbyist behind it, goes after potency. Oversupply is a separate problem, and the state owns fewer tools for it. The forecast describes the market and does not predict which farms fail, which is the honest limit of the document. The 2026 harvest comes in this October. The OLCC's next market report will say whether six million pounds was a ceiling or a floor. (Portland Business Journal; Oregon Office of Economic Analysis; OLCC)

🍺 Float House wants to pour its hemp THC beers on site. The Windsor, Connecticut brewer applied August 6th for special-use approval under the town's Section 8.6V to run a taproom at its 6,000-square-foot facility on Hayden Station Road, and the Town Planning and Zoning Commission hears it September 9th at 7 p.m. The lowest-dose product carries 3 milligrams of THC and 3 of CBD under 0.5 percent alcohol by volume. Windsor decides land use; whether Connecticut lets anyone serve a hemp THC beverage for on-premises consumption is a question the state, not the zoning board, has to answer, and nobody has asked it out loud yet. (Patch; Town of Windsor)

🥤 Texas beverage makers have a month of proof that the July 31st change was narrower than the headlines. The Department of State Health Services reinstated its 2021 definitions of tetrahydrocannabinols and marihuana extract on the state schedule, noticed July 10th in the Texas Register, which pulled manufactured delta-8, delta-10, THCP, and their relatives into Schedule I. Delta-9 products at or under 0.3 percent by dry weight were never inside the notice, so Community Beer Co., which has sold THC beverages since 2023, is still pouring 5- and 10-milligram cans in Dallas. The federal date in November reaches products the state rule did not, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has not stopped trying to reach them first. (Dallas Observer; Texas DSHS)

🚨 Pike County Sheriff David Greenwood's office, the Illinois State Police, and the Secretary of State's bomb squad cleared the Ascend Wellness cultivation site in Barry after a Tuesday hotline call claimed explosives were on the property. Management evacuated, the canine sweep found nothing, and the source of the call remained under investigation Wednesday. A cannabis facility is a licensed building with cameras on every door. That makes it a poor target and a decent place to find out who called. (Muddy River News; WGEM)

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