🏛️ DEA asks its own judge to hurry Schedule III

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The federal government spent the start of this week arguing with itself about cannabis, and losing to itself on both ends. At DEA, the agency's closing brief asks the judge it gave to a roster of opponents to hurry up and recommend Schedule III. At the Department of Justice, a new rule hands gun rights back to the same cannabis consumers the department told the Supreme Court were too dangerous to have them. And in New Haven, Connecticut shows what the other end of the pipeline looks like when the warnings run out and the state starts asking who supplied the store.

🏛️ Justice argues with itself
🎯 Gun rights, restored
⛔ New Haven, closed for good

DEA's closing brief landed, and the agency asked its own judge to hurry. The filing argues that marijuana fails Schedule I's statutory test because it has an accepted medical use and an accepted safety profile under supervision, points to more than 30,000 practitioners treating over six million patients across 43 jurisdictions, and asks Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek Julius to "expeditiously recommend" the move to Schedule III. The brief goes further than defense. It argues opposition witnesses conceded the ground under cross, with pain physicians acknowledging therapeutic benefit even while disputing dosing and quality control, and it asks Julius to discard testimony from witnesses who read hearing transcripts in violation of his sequestration order. Set that against June, when Administrator Terrance Cole seated only rescheduling opponents as parties. The government built its own opposition, heard it out, and then filed the strongest pro-rescheduling argument in the record. On the other side, Smart Approaches to Marijuana and the states of Idaho, Indiana, and Nebraska answer that the government has denied this same petition nine times under a five-part test and invented a friendlier two-part standard to reach the result it wanted, while the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation presses a cleaner procedural point, that the proposed rule came from the attorney general rather than the administrator. I spent enough years inside administrative hearings to know that a closed record changes the job; the persuasion is over, and what remains is craft. Julius writes his recommendation next, the parties get 20 days to file exceptions, and the final call sits with the administrator, who faces no deadline at all. The agency asking its own judge for speed is the one actor in the room with the power to take its time. (Marijuana Moment)

🔓 The Rhode Island injunction is formally gone. Judge Melissa DuBose dissolved her April order Friday, writing that regulators are "free to implement the law as they see fit," now that the General Assembly has stripped the residency requirement that drew three constitutional challenges. The paperwork closes a fight that began with three lawsuits, and as of Monday afternoon the commission had received zero adult-use retail applications against 32 social equity interest forms, with the window open through November 23rd. With the court out of the way, the question is whether anyone shows up. (Rhode Island Current, via Marijuana Moment)

The Justice Department's new Federal Firearm Rights Restoration policy, announced Monday, lets people stripped of Second Amendment rights apply to get them back, and it carves out one clear exemption. Applications are presumptively denied for unlawful users of controlled substances, except that the rule's definition of controlled substance excludes marijuana entirely, for users and for people with an addiction alike. The department's own filing credits the Supreme Court's ruling in U.S. v. Hemani, which found the prosecution of a cannabis consumer for gun possession unconstitutional, along with a comment record that ran overwhelmingly toward cannabis and the practical impossibility of distinguishing a user from an addict on the paperwork an application produces. Attorney General Todd Blanche called the Second Amendment "not a second-class right," which lands differently coming from the department that argued to the justices, months ago, that cannabis consumers pose a greater danger than people who drink. The Second Amendment Foundation welcomed the change and expects ATF to follow with a revised Form 4473, the purchase form the bureau already redrafted in May to acknowledge medical cannabis's post-April federal status. The executive branch keeps losing cannabis arguments to courts and to its own rescheduling order, and the rulebooks keep quietly conforming to the losses. Restoration applications will now be decided under a definition that treats cannabis the way most states already do. (Marijuana Moment; U.S. Department of Justice)

🧭 The first public poll on Question 8 finds 79 percent of Massachusetts Democratic primary voters would keep the adult-use law and 16 percent would repeal it, with supermajorities holding across every age, race, gender, and region Suffolk University and The Boston Globe surveyed August 13th through 16th. A primary electorate is not November's electorate, so read it as a floor rather than a forecast. A floor is not enough, though. The Marijuana Policy Project has warned that even a narrow save would spook markets and invite copycat repeals in other states, so the goal in November is a margin wide enough to close the question. The campaign doing that work is at StoptheRepealMA.com, plugged here without apology. (Marijuana Moment, citing Suffolk University/Boston Globe polling)

Anesthesia Smoke and Convenience in New Haven is finished, and the settlement Attorney General William Tong announced Tuesday shows enforcement escalating on schedule. The state first sued the shop and owner Fadhl Shaif in 2024 after investigators found thousands of unlicensed high-THC products, and settled for a $50,000 stipulated judgment with half suspended for good behavior. The store then skipped its required compliance report, inspectors found hundreds of cannabis products on two return visits, and the state moved for contempt in March. The new terms are permanent closure, a permanent bar on Shaif owning or operating any business in Connecticut, $100,000 due with another $125,000 suspended to guarantee compliance, and a duty to cooperate with investigators identifying the store's suppliers and investors. Tong's office said plainly of unlicensed sellers, "we will find you and we will hold you accountable," and the cooperation requirement converts one closed storefront into a map of whoever stocked and financed it. Plenty of states write graduated enforcement into their statutes. Connecticut just demonstrated what it looks like when each step actually arrives. (Connecticut Office of the Attorney General)

🔔 Trulieve rang Tuesday's closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange to mark its June 10th listing, the first for a U.S. cannabis company. The company also noted that all 207 of its medical dispensaries now hold DEA registrations under the April order, with federal inspections completed in Florida, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. That detail outlasts the confetti. A federally registered cannabis operator on the exchange floor was unthinkable two years ago and unremarkable on Tuesday. (Trulieve)

Dawson Hobbs, who runs government affairs for Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America, used a Marijuana Moment op-ed to ask the cannabis industry to back the Beverage Regulatory Parity Act, the Reps. Van Duyne and Landsman bill that would treat hemp beverages capped at 5 milligrams per serving as adult beverages under alcohol-style rules. His argument to skeptical operators is that opposing a workable framework because it falls short of full reform repeats "the very piecemeal approach the cannabis sector has spent years criticizing." The wholesalers backed federal adult-use legalization in 2023, so the courtship is consistent, and it arrives while the December 11th extension still needs the House. When the three-tier system starts recruiting cannabis allies by name, the hemp beverage fight has stopped being a hemp fight. (Marijuana Moment)

Palm Springs is moving to let cannabis consumption lounges of any size prepare and sell non-cannabis food and nonalcoholic drinks, host live entertainment, and hold up to 24 ticketed events a year, under authority a 2024 state law created and the City Council advanced 5 to 0 on first reading last month. An earlier draft rationed ticketed events by lounge size; the council cut that, and it resolved the hardest design question, outdoor events at lounges beside liquor stores and smoke shops, by routing those through a land-use permit rather than a flat prohibition. Councilmember Ron deHarte asked, "So why don't we work hard to figure out how to do it?" City cannabis tax revenue has fallen from about $4.23 million in fiscal 2021-22 to a forecast $1.13 million in 2024-25, a slide the council itself deepened when it cut the retail rate from 10 to 5 percent in 2024 to keep local shops competitive, and the city counts four lounges operating, two temporarily closed, and three more in the pipeline. A lounge that can sell you a seat but not a sandwich was never going to be a business, and San Francisco's supervisors reached the same conclusion in July under the same state law. The ordinance reads as consumption policy and functions as economic development. Second reading comes next, and the three lounges in the pipeline have the most riding on it. (The Palm Springs Post)

💵 Massachusetts cannabis regulators told state budget writers in April that implementing the overhaul the Legislature passed and Governor Healey signed will take more than $7.9 million beyond this year's allocation, most of it for technology, consultants, new regulatory systems, and staff, after the fiscal 2027 budget funded the agency at roughly $20.9 million against a $32.9 million request. The first social consumption application window, for the supplemental license letting existing operators host on-site consumption, opens in December. An agency handed new mandates and asking for the tools to execute them is ordinary arithmetic, and effective regulation costs money the industry it oversees returns to the state many times over. The cheap version of oversight is the expensive one. (State House News Service)

Atlanta City Council Members Wayne Martin and Antonio Lewis have proposed letting state-licensed medical cannabis dispensaries seek special permits to operate inside the distance buffers around schools, early-care programs, and houses of worship, and the Zoning Review Board recommended approval Thursday, sending the measure to the council's Zoning Committee. The city has held this relaxation authority since 2021 and never used it; what changed is demand, with Georgia's program expansion driving a surge onto the patient registry while Atlanta hosts exactly three dispensaries. The ordinance erases nothing. A location would still need zoning that permits retail, hospitals, and clinics as principal uses, then a neighborhood planning unit recommendation, a staff review, the Zoning Review Board, and a final council vote, which means relief arrives at the speed of four public hearings. Every maturing medical program eventually meets this problem, access authorized statewide and rationed locally by the map. Atlanta is at least the rare city proposing to redraw its own. (Axios Atlanta)

📺 Curaleaf CEO Boris Jordan took the Aurora Cannabis case to CNBC on Tuesday, discussing the unsolicited $4.00-per-share offer his company put directly to Aurora shareholders last week after two board rejections. Hostile bids are argued in public because the audience that matters is the shareholder register, and a televised case for the deal is a campaign step no filing lists. (CNBC)

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