📜 DEA rests its case with the other side's witnesses

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The rescheduling proceeding entered its argument phase this week, and the government chose an aggressive close: DEA built its final brief out of what the opposition's own experts conceded on the stand. Four House members sent the White House a list of questions that April's order created and never answered. Germany's insurance regulators softened their most contested cannabis rule, then reversed themselves inside two weeks. And Aurora answered a hostile takeover bid by spending money on exactly the assets Curaleaf is trying to buy. A lot of lawyering today.

📜 The government rests
♟️ Aurora shops mid-siege
🩺 Germany reverses itself

DEA's final brief in the rescheduling proceeding opens with the government's whole position in one line: marijuana "can no longer remain in Schedule I." The fifty pages that follow, filed August 17th under Chief ALJ Derek Julius's page cap, spend less time defending the HHS medical-use finding than dismantling the witnesses who attacked it. Yale psychiatrist Deepak D'Souza, called by Idaho, Indiana, and Nebraska, testified about pain management that the government says sits outside his own admitted expertise. Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal, the brief notes, conceded he has no real tie to any of the three states that called him. And DEA accuses drugged-driving witness Ed Wood of reviewing government testimony before taking the stand in violation of the tribunal's sequestration order, a lapse DEA argues taints his testimony beyond repair. The sharper move is what the government did with the experts it left standing. Harvard's Bertha Madras, pain physician Kenneth Finn, and pharmacist Phillip Drum all acknowledged evidence of therapeutic benefit for pain, wasting, or nausea, which is to say the opposition's witnesses testified to the elements of the government's case. Add the uncontradicted record that 30,000 physicians were recommending cannabis to more than six million patients across 38 states when HHS ran its evaluation, and Judge Julius has been handed a record where both sides' experts point the same direction. His recommendation comes next, exceptions follow, and the administrator still holds the pen. April's order moving state-licensed medical cannabis runs on its own track, so the live question in this proceeding is how far past the medical lane the federal shift reaches. (Cannabis Business Times; DEA post-hearing brief)

Four House members want the fine print that April's order never supplied. Reps. Dina Titus, David Joyce, Ilhan Omar, and Greg Steube, three of them Cannabis Caucus co-chairs, wrote in a bi-partisan fashion Tuesday to President Trump, HHS Secretary Kennedy, Treasury Secretary Bessent, and Attorney General Blanche with questions that read like an implementation audit: whether a patient's home-grown medical cannabis now sits in Schedule I or Schedule III, whether DOJ will coordinate with CMS on Medicare coverage, whether operators holding combined medical and adult-use licenses keep their 280E relief, what happens to businesses that decline to register with DEA, and what the agency intends to do with the registration data it collects. They asked for answers by September 30th. Every one of those questions exists because partial rescheduling drew a line through the middle of working state programs, and the states, the operators, and now the Congress are discovering how much of daily life the line runs through. Tax relief arrived by operation of law. Everything else arrives by guidance, and the guidance is late. (Marijuana Moment)

🍁 Vermont is building the desk where those answers will land. Cannabis Control Board member Julie Hulburd convened the state's new Rescheduling and Medical Workgroup on Wednesday, with monthly meetings planned, and the board has already met with its local DEA office and federal delegation staff. Operators in the room, including Magic Mann's Meredith Mann and Vermont Bud Barn's Scott Sparks, mostly wanted the same two things the congressional letter asks about, banking and the tax code. A state that convenes before the federal rules exist gets to shape how they arrive. (Brattleboro Reformer, GreenMountain Cannabis News)

Curaleaf stopped negotiating and went to the shareholders. On August 18th it formally commenced its unsolicited bid for Aurora Cannabis, roughly $272 million in cash and stock worth an implied $4.00 per Aurora share, capped at $5.00, with no financing or diligence conditions and a window open until December 1st. Aurora's board formed a special committee, told shareholders to sit on their hands, and pointed out that the cap sits below where Aurora traded as recently as December 18, 2025. Then, on the 19th, Aurora went shopping. It bought Internode Pharma, a licensed UK importer and wholesaler, and HAP Pharma, a licensed pharmacy running direct delivery to patients, for 2.1 million British pounds, less than $3 million, giving it a Birmingham distribution site and control of its UK supply chain from cultivation to the patient's door. Read the two moves together and the defense is plain enough. Curaleaf wants Aurora's EU-GMP facilities and international medical platform, Aurora says the bid prices that platform near one times revenue, and every asset Aurora adds makes the case that the platform is worth holding, or worth more. CEO Miguel Martin accused Curaleaf of trying to acquire the company "at the lowest price possible," which is, to be fair, what buyers do. The industry spent a decade learning to survive. It is now conducting a genuine contested takeover fight, circulars and special committees and all, over assets in Birmingham and Berlin rather than Boulder. That is its own kind of maturity. (Aurora Cannabis; MJBizDaily; Cannabis Equipment News; StratCann)

Germany's medical cannabis reimbursement reform has entered the phase where the regulators argue with each other. The July 30th law removed cannabis flower from statutory insurance coverage for roughly 65,000 patients and required a six-month trial of a finished medicine before extracts could be reimbursed. On August 6th, the physicians' association KBV and the insurers' umbrella group jointly softened that rule, reading the mandatory trial to apply only where a finished medicine is actually licensed for the patient's condition. This week the KBV reversed itself and said a finished medicine must come first in every case, even off-label, even though only four such products carry approvals, each for a narrow indication. Most patients would therefore start on a drug not licensed for their illness, the kind of prescription insurers reimburse only by exception. Karlsruhe pharmacist Felix Maertin, whose shop supplies severely ill cannabis patients and now absorbs clawback risk when insurers refuse payment after the fact, has given the two associations a 14-day ultimatum to answer 15 questions in public. The Federal Ministry of Health holds the deciding interpretation and has not issued it. Two details give the fight its shape. The flower cut saves about 130 million euros against an insurance deficit near 10 billion, a rounding error purchased at the price of 65,000 disrupted treatments. And the off-label-first reading happens to route those patients toward Vertanical's Exilby, a finished extract launching in September, a commercial windfall no legislator voted for and an interpretive note created. In Germany, reimbursement policy has taken over the job licensing used to do. It decides who the market is. (Business of Cannabis)

New Hampshire's medical cannabis operators can finally use the sun. The Senate voted 16-8 and the House 257-44 on Wednesday to override Gov. Kelly Ayotte's veto of SB 468, Sen. Howard Pearl's bill letting alternative treatment centers run greenhouses to cut energy costs and lower patient prices. The idea has been crawling toward this moment for a while: former Gov. Chris Sununu vetoed a nearly identical bill in 2024 and the Senate override fell short, Ayotte vetoed this one in June, and supporters then spent the summer converting voice-vote breadth into a counted two-thirds. Two governors and two years to authorize sunlight for a therapeutic program serving more than 17,000 patients. Sen. Tara Reardon's floor case was pure economics, indoor cultivation under high-intensity lighting being the most expensive way to grow a plant that every neighboring state grows outdoors. Affordability moved the votes that legalization never has in Concord, and Ayotte has promised to veto any legalization bill that reaches her, so this is likely the reform ceiling until the electorate says otherwise. (Marijuana Moment)

🧠 George F. Will devoted his Washington Post column to the argument that rising potency, heavier use, and accumulating health evidence are eroding the consensus that carried legalization through its first decade. A column is commentary, and this one arrives at conclusions the research is still qualifying. But the appearance itself is the political fact. When the flagship voice of institutional conservatism moves from prohibition nostalgia to commercialization critique, the next round of cannabis fights will be about terms, caps, and marketing rather than legality. I’d say this deserves a response… (The Washington Post, opinion)

The one-month hemp reprieve has a path, and a calendar. The Senate-passed continuing resolution moves most of the November 12th federal hemp restrictions to December 11th, the same day government funding runs out, and Speaker Mike Johnson has indicated the House plans to take the measure up promptly when the chamber returns in September, acknowledging the Senate's modifications, according to reporting from Punchbowl News's Jake Sherman. Two limits keep the celebration modest. Cannabinoids synthesized outside the plant lose federal hemp status on November 12th regardless, so the delay shelters delta-9 beverages and plant-native products while the conversion economy loses federal cover on schedule. And a delay is still just a month. Agri-Pulse reports industry groups are treating the window as a bridge toward first-time federal regulation, which is the only version of this fight that ends somewhere. Minnesota shows the stakes for the regulated end of the category: Duluth's Bent Paddle Brewing now counts THC beverages as nearly half its revenue while beer softens, a business built entirely inside a state regulatory system and entirely exposed to a federal definition written for gas-station products. The statute currently treats them as one industry. Congress has until December 11th to learn the difference. (Agri-Pulse; MPR News; The Hill; MMJDaily)

🧩 StratCann interviewed Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission research chief Julie Johnson, speaking personally of course, on what states can learn from each other, and she makes a fair case for data and adaptation. She built that research office with my full support, partly because the statute required one and partly because I believed we owed the public, and history, a real record of this experiment. So this is friendly, from the person who signed the allocated the resources. Research tells you how the last decision worked, using data already dated by the time it publishes. The decision in front of a regulator today rarely waits for it, and most of those calls get resolved by something no dataset supplies, a commitment to public service and to getting it as close to right as the moment allows, which may not be what researchers want to hear. The record we kept is for history. The steering happens in the present tense. (StratCann)

Michigan's Cannabis Regulatory Agency filed a formal complaint against Weber Family Ventures, doing business as The Plug New Buffalo, alleging among other things that management refused regulators access to surveillance recordings. The allegations are unproven. The leverage behind them runs from fines and restrictions up through suspension, revocation, and nonrenewal. What makes the filing land harder is the pattern around it. This summer alone the CRA has closed Zaza Recreational through consent orders, fined Mint Cannabis $8,000 over a 34-day surveillance gap, and pursued 100 Shafer after products surfaced off-premises, each action announced by press release. An agency that publicizes its complaints wants the whole market watching, and the message to licensees is deliberate. Surveillance footage is the evidentiary backbone of a tracked market. A licensee who contests the agency's access to it is contesting whether the license can be regulated at all, and Michigan has spent all summer showing what it does with that argument. (Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs)

The number of American adults with alcohol use disorder fell from 28.8 million to 27.1 million between 2021 and 2024. The number with cannabis use disorder rose from 15.3 million to 19.4 million. That divergence is the finding in a new JAMA Psychiatry brief report from NIDA's Beth Han, Wilson Compton, and Nora Volkow, built on 186,823 adults in the national drug-use survey. Cannabis use disorder among men climbed from 7.3 to 9.3 percent, moderate-to-severe cases rose in both sexes while the comparable alcohol figures held flat or declined, and moderate-to-severe cases among women 50 and older increased sevenfold. The sharpest table covers young adults. Among 18-to-20-year-olds, cannabis use disorder now outranks alcohol use disorder even though half of them drink and fewer than a third use cannabis, and more than half of the young users who develop the disorder land in the moderate-to-severe range. The study is cross-sectional and self-reported, and it cannot say whether legalization or potency caused any of it. It does not have to. These are the numbers that will sit on the table at every potency, prevention, and marketing hearing for years, Ohio's included, and the authors close by arguing the data undercut the idea that cannabis carries low addiction risk. The industry's oldest talking point just lost its biggest dataset. (JAMA Psychiatry)

🏥 Utah opened applications for one more independent medical cannabis pharmacy, the second additional license authorized under last year's legislation. Applications close September 2nd and the license must issue by January 1, 2027. With 15 pharmacies statewide, a single new door changes real geography in a market this tightly capped. (Gephardt Daily)

Ayr Virginia opened a medical cannabis dispensary in Frederick County on Wednesday, the first serving the Shenandoah region, after receiving the area's pharmaceutical processor permit earlier this month. The geographic hole it fills persisted for years after Virginia built its medical program, the kind of gap that looks abstract on a licensing map and concrete to a patient driving ninety minutes each way. The name on the door deserves a second look, though. The Ayr Wellness that assembled this position no longer meaningfully exists. Its shareholders were wiped out, its Canadian parent is winding down under court supervision in British Columbia, and its senior noteholders took the operating assets through a foreclosure sale last fall, with Virginia the first state handed to the lenders' vehicle, Arboretum, in April. The creditors kept the brand, closed a $275 million exit facility, and are now expanding, including a pursuit of dual-use authority as Virginia builds toward adult-use retail in 2027. Owners who arrive by foreclosure are stewards with an exit in mind, and every new storefront and dual-use approval makes the Virginia platform more valuable on the day they sell it. For the patient who has been driving ninety minutes each way, none of the capital-structure history changes a thing about the counter finally being close. For anyone reading the market, it is the cleanest illustration this cycle has produced. Companies die. Licenses live on. (Virginia Business; Business of Cannabis; MJBizDaily)

📱 A peer-reviewed Public Health Institute analysis of 837 Instagram posts from nine intoxicating hemp brands found youth-oriented imagery in nearly half, with health or age warnings on 2.5 percent, across products including delta-8, HHC, and THC-P. The researchers are openly using the findings to argue for restrictions as Congress rewrites the hemp statute, so read the framing as advocacy. Read the underlying numbers, though, as ammunition already in the chamber. If the industry wants regulation instead of prohibition, marketing rules are part of the purchase price, and studies like this set the opening bid. (Public Health Institute; Addiction)

🤠 The Houston Chronicle editorial board argues Texas has built an incoherent THC regime, banning converted and synthetic hemp intoxicants while leaving other federally compliant delta-9 products on shelves, and calls for legalizing and regulating cannabis outright. Another major Texas daily editorializing against the state's own crackdown, days after AG Ken Paxton admitted he does not know the details of the law his office is defending. The prohibition side of the Texas fight keeps losing its home-state press. (Houston Chronicle, editorial)

💍 And in Brattleboro, a Vermont couple worked a tribute to their favorite dispensary into their wedding ceremony. The industry has spent years asking to be treated as a normal part of life. Normal, it turns out, includes the vows. (Brattleboro Reformer)

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