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DEA told its own judge the GAO report can come into the rescheduling record, and that nothing else should come in with it. Oklahoma lawmakers heard that three in ten patients doubt the lab results on their medicine. Three economists priced what December 11th takes from hemp drink buyers, and Micah Hyde explained what it takes from him. Minnesota published the medical products a store has to stock, and Massachusetts funded a public awareness campaign for the first time in five years.

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⏳ Deadlines, Decoded is moving to its own email. Starting October 27, the tracker gets a monthly email of its own, sent on the last Tuesday of each month. Each issue covers what takes effect over the following 45 days: comment windows that are closing, hearings, licensing rounds and enacted effective dates, each linked to the document that set it. Anything that changed since the last issue sits at the top. It's free, and nothing about this briefing changes.

DEA told Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek Julius that it defers to him on admitting last month’s Government Accountability Office report into the rescheduling record and doesn’t object if he does. It opposes everything the opponents want to build on top of it, arguing the report “does not present any new evidence salient to the issue” and needs no further argument. The opponents asked for more on Tuesday anyway. NDASA, DUID Victim Voices and Dr. Kenneth Finn, who won the stay in September, moved to reopen the record for limited discovery and testimony on five subjects, including HHS’s 2023 evaluation. Smart Approaches to Marijuana and the states of Idaho, Indiana and Nebraska separately asked for supplemental briefing on whether HHS’s missing written procedures shaped its review. That’s the same coalition that joined DOJ last week in asking the D.C. Circuit to stretch briefing into February, and it would like more briefing here too. A party is entitled to ask what a federal audit means for its case. GAO answered most of that itself when it found DEA’s 84 final scheduling decisions in its sample matched HHS’s recommendations. In September I said Julius would lift the stay without reopening the record. With DEA’s consent the report probably comes in, so that call misses on the letter. On the part that mattered, the government is asking him to stop at the document, and admitting a report and reopening testimony are two different orders. He takes the report and denies the rest, and an order setting a discovery schedule would put his recommendation in 2027 and prove me wrong where it counts. Former Diversion Control deputy Matthew Strait said on a Harris Sliwoski webinar that DEA shouldn’t issue registrations while the D.C. Circuit case runs. MMJ International Holdings, a party to that case, circulated his view by press release. DEA opened Form 225 on October 5th regardless. (Marijuana Moment; U.S. Government Accountability Office; MMJ International Holdings release)

🌍 In July a Kenyan judge dismissed the Rastafari Society of Kenya’s 2021 petition for a religious exemption to grow, hold and use cannabis as a sacrament. The judge found no constitutional violation shown, while saying the country ought to debate the law. Hannah McCarthy of The Irish Times went to Kibera to meet the people that ruling leaves where they were. Gigi Spice served two years for 125 grams. Possession carries up to five years and cultivation up to twenty, with sentences that turn on the magistrate and on who can pay a fine. Kenyan courts recognized Rastafari as a protected religion in 2019, in a case about a schoolgirl’s dreadlocks. The judge’s call for a national debate is the one door the ruling left open, and it opens onto Parliament. (The Irish Times)

Rep. Jacob Rosecrants, D-Norman, held a House interim study Tuesday on cannabis lab testing. Researcher Marion McNabb told lawmakers that about 30 percent of patients surveyed distrust the accuracy of Oklahoma’s lab results, and business owners described requirements nobody had explained to them. The state relies on about a dozen independent labs. OMMA’s quality assurance lab, built to check their work, is running but still awaiting accreditation for some testing methods, according to chief administrative officer Barrett Brown. Gillian Schauer of the Cannabis Regulators Association walked through why Oklahoma’s stakes run high. It tests only finished product, so a failed result costs the operator the whole batch, and the lab is paid by the customer hoping it passes. “We need better methods,” she said. Rep. T.J. Marti, R-Broken Arrow, who chairs the House Alcohol, Tobacco and Controlled Substances Committee, wants a pause on new rules until six years of changes take hold. He also asked the industry to agree on its priorities, a fair request from a chairman who heard more than a dozen proposals in a single afternoon. We never fully solved the who-pays problem in Massachusetts either. A state reference lab gets closest, since it’s the one lab in the state no licensee pays. Rosecrants noted that broader pesticide panels can move through OMMA rulemaking without a bill, and that route arrives before session does. If the reference lab still lacks full accreditation when the Legislature convenes in February, Marti’s pause wins the argument by default. (Oklahoma Voice)

Attorney General Marty Jackley issued an opinion Tuesday, requested by lawmakers on the Medical Marijuana Oversight Committee. It concludes that federal rescheduling will have a negligible impact on the state’s medical program and that the program can keep operating as it has. State-licensed manufacturers, distributors and dispensaries come into federal compliance by registering with DEA, he wrote. That answers what South Dakota law asks of a licensee, and it leaves last session’s bill to end the program 90 days after rescheduling without its premise. Program administrator Whitney Brunner told the same committee in August that federal guidance had amounted to requests for information, and the opinion can’t fill that gap for DEA. (Marijuana Moment; KELOLAND; Cannabis Business Times)

Aaron Staples, Valerie Kilders and Vincenzina Caputo, researchers at the University of Illinois, Purdue and Michigan State, estimate in the Journal of Wine Economics that pulling hemp THC beverages from the market would cost consumers $112 million to $146 million a year. The number comes from 2,010 adults making ten simulated weekend purchases across alcohol and cannabis products, and it works out to $3.32 per person each time they buy. It measures the value buyers lose. The authors say it isn’t lost sales or tax revenue. It also leaves out producers and any public health effect in either direction, which is the ground groups like the National Consumers League stand on. Micah Hyde, the former NFL safety who started Hyde’s Hail Mary in August 2025, is one of the producers left out. His THC shandy sells in five states, two distribution deals fell apart this year over federal uncertainty, and he can’t stockpile ahead of December 11th because beverages expire. He wants a 21-and-over line, independent testing, clear labels, licensed sales and a cap that could sit at 10 milligrams per container. He sends readers to the Hemp Beverage Alliance’s action center. Kai Adams, co-founder of Sebago Brewing, which employs 225 people in Maine, launched a 5 milligram drink called Mystic Cove in February 2025. In Mainebiz he argued for regulating the drinks like beer. He argued against moving them into dispensaries, which would shut out the brewers who can make them. December 11th is also the day government funding runs out, and the economists have handed every member who wants these drinks regulated a figure to cite when that package comes together. (The Marijuana Herald; Journal of Wine Economics; Marijuana Moment; Mainebiz)

🍷 The Supreme Court declined Ohio Attorney General D. Andrew Wilson’s petition to review the Sixth Circuit’s May ruling in Block v. Canepa, which struck down Ohio’s ban on out-of-state retailers shipping wine to Ohioans. In May the Court passed on Arizona’s and Indiana’s retailer-shipping laws, which the Ninth and Seventh Circuits had upheld. That leaves the same question with two answers on the books, and the justices have declined to pick one. Jim Gay’s petition asking the Court to apply the dormant Commerce Clause to cannabis licensing has a response due Thursday. A Court that won’t referee a wine split, under an amendment written for alcohol, has given little reason to think it wants one about a plant federal law still lists. (Law360; Supreme Court Docket No. 25-1366; Libation Law Blog)

The Office of Cannabis Management posted Guidance Memo GM-2026-08 on October 12th, filling in the list chapter 123 left to the agency. Starting January 1st, retailers with medical endorsements have to carry four formulations: CBD-only, high-CBD at 1:15 THC to CBD or more, balanced 1:1, and at least one product with 20 milligrams or more of THC per serving, in pills, oral solutions, tinctures and dissolvables. A store that can’t produce a listed product within 24 hours of a patient’s request puts its endorsement at risk. OCM built the list partly from patient purchasing trends in Metrc, so the categories follow what patients in Minnesota have actually been buying. Manufacturers with medical endorsements now have eleven weeks to get each formulation through production and testing. (Minnesota Office of Cannabis Management; The Marijuana Herald)

♟️ Boris Jordan guessed right about the data room. Organigram has held talks with Aurora in recent weeks, MJBizDaily reports, citing the newsletter Cultivated, and nobody has disclosed terms. British American Tobacco owns a large stake in Organigram, and analyst Pablo Zuanic told Moby that Organigram would need fresh cash to compete with Curaleaf’s $5 offer, which runs to December 4th. All three want the same thing, Aurora’s EU-GMP plants and the German medical market they supply. Curaleaf has room to add cash before any Organigram terms surface, and it likely does, unless BAT commits money first. (MJBizDaily; Yahoo Finance)

Western University’s Jamie Seabrook and colleagues linked COMPASS survey answers from 419,887 secondary students in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec to the licensed cannabis stores near their schools from 2018 through 2023. Writing in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, they found that associations between store access and teen use were small, inconsistent and mostly not significant. The null held across 264 model specifications. Among students who already used, more stores nearby went with more frequent use in 2018, and that link faded as retail spread. Past-year use among the students sampled fell from 22.2 percent to 10 percent, though the authors caution that the survey added younger grades in later years. Kids who said cannabis was easy to get were far more likely to use it. The authors point to friends and households over storefronts as the likelier supply, since stores card at the door. (Drug and Alcohol Dependence; NORML)

Licensees have until November 1st to relabel under the rule changes JCAR approved April 14th. Labels have to show Total THC, calculated as THC plus THCA times 0.877 and matching the lab’s certificate of analysis. They also have to list any other cannabinoid detected above 0.3 percent by weight or 0.4 milligrams, and disclose when a product contains hemp. A changed ingredient list means an updated product registration with the Department of Agriculture, whose fee just dropped from $100 to $25. The date is on our Deadlines, Decoded tracker. The 0.877 conversion is the same arithmetic behind the federal total-THC standard for hemp, so an Illinois dispensary label and a federal hemp test will now report THC the same way. (Illinois Department of Agriculture; The Marijuana Herald)

Sen. Cindy Holscher, the Democratic nominee for governor, told 12 News that “it’s already here,” pointing to Kansas plates in the lots of dispensaries along the Oklahoma line. She also cited $255 million in Missouri cannabis revenue. She said the medical bill the House passed in 2021 died because Senate President Ty Masterson, her Republican opponent, stopped it. Masterson said in 2023 he was open to a limited medical program and ruled one out in 2024. Gov. Laura Kelly called for medical legalization last year and got nowhere either. Kansas senators were elected in 2024 to four-year terms, so the chamber that has blocked medical cannabis since 2021 isn’t on this ballot. (Marijuana Moment)

Attorney General Mike Hilgers told the Nebraska Examiner that cannabis “has hardly come up at all” with voters, and that the few who raise it thank him for policing the 2024 petition drive. His office accused that drive of fraud and lost 7-0 at the state Supreme Court, and Nebraska is one of the states challenging April’s rescheduling order. Democrat Jocelyn Brasher, a former deputy Dodge County attorney, says it may be the biggest issue she hears about. She says Hilgers tried to overturn an election he disagreed with. She would write medical cannabis regulations aligned with what voters approved, likely including guidance for law enforcement. Seventy-one percent of Nebraskans voted for the program in 2024, and the attorney general reviews every rule the Medical Cannabis Commission sends up. (Nebraska Examiner)

📋 Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division is authorized for about 158 positions and employs about 84, senior director Dominique Mendiola told High Times. Its budget runs on application and licensing fees that shrink when sales do. Raising fees to close the gap would land on businesses already in a declining market, she said. That’s the bind every fee-funded regulator lives in, where a soft market cuts the inspection staff just as margins tempt operators to cut corners. She’d like to coordinate with federal inspectors so DEA registrants aren’t inspected twice, and at 84 people she could use the help. (High Times)

🏈 The NFL rescinded two fines against Lions receiver Jameson Williams, $14,926 and $11,941, for celebrations in Detroit’s Week 2 loss to the Bills. Appeals officer Derrick Brooks heard an argument, reported by NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport, that if one gesture was meant as a puff, marijuana is legal in a lot of states. Brooks rescinded the fines and told him to celebrate with teammates “in the best professional manner possible.” The league didn’t change its celebration rules, so the next receiver who mimes a joint in the end zone gets to find out whether Brooks was ruling on the law or on the receiver. (WILX; Bleacher Report; The Athletic)

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