⚖️ A jury said $31.8 million. The Sixth Circuit says no court can collect it

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A Michigan grower delivered its harvest, went unpaid, won $31.8 million from a jury, and watched a federal appeals court hold that no court can make the buyer pay. A dispensary owner in Mississippi has four days to decide whether to fire two employees or give up her place in line at the DEA. Nebraska's Supreme Court ended the state's federal preemption case without deciding anything about preemption. Illinois added 37 medical dispensaries in a single stroke. And Ricky Williams joined The Hybrid this morning to talk everything from being told he was throwing it all away for drugs, Ayurveda, and even Question 8 in Massachusetts.

⚖️ The verdict that cannot be collected
🪪 Four days, two employees, one rule
🌽 Nebraska ends it on the doorstep
🏈 Ricky Williams on The Hybrid

Hello Farms Licensing MI held a Michigan medical cultivation license in November 2020 when it agreed to sell its entire 2020 and 2021 output to GR Vending MI and CURA MI, two Curaleaf Holdings subsidiaries, against a $2.2 million deposit. The 2020 harvest came in around 16,300 pounds and passed every contractual test. Prices went into freefall that January, GR Vending stopped taking deliveries after roughly 2,000 pounds, Hello Farms dumped the rest on a third party at a loss, and a jury in Bay City awarded it $31.8 million. Judge John Nalbandian reversed on Thursday, joined by Judge Eugene Siler, with Judge Whitney Hermandorfer concurring in all but one section. The contract required the product to pass "local and state recreational cannabis testing requirements," and that one term put the deal outside the Rohrabacher-Farr rider, which has only ever covered medical. Strip the rider away and the agreement is a promise to distribute a Schedule I substance answered by a promise to pay for it, and Kaiser Steel forbids a federal court from enforcing the precise conduct Congress criminalized. April's rescheduling order supplies no cover. A contract illegal when made stays illegal through a later change in the law, the order carries no retroactive effect, and the same parties signing the same deal this morning would still need DEA registration. Judge Matthew Leitman called the illegality defense a close call twice before letting the case reach a jury. Growers, processors and retailers across Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee are holding supply agreements that a federal court will not enforce, and the party that walks away from one is now in a better position than the party that performed. I expect Hello Farms to petition for rehearing en banc inside the fourteen days Rule 40 allows, and if Plunkett Cooney and Stinar Lannen let September 24th pass without filing, I had this wrong. (Hello Farms Licensing MI, LLC v. GR Vending MI, LLC, No. 25-1759, 6th Cir.; Bloomberg Law; MLive)

🧾 The federal illegality problem cut the other way in Fort Yates, North Dakota, where Joshua Luger and Warrior Wash & Emporium sued the government for the return of products Bureau of Indian Affairs officers seized in December 2023, 1,280 pre-rolls, two disposables and six containers of gummies. A tribal prosecutor dropped the criminal case in May 2024 on a KCA Laboratories certificate, a tribal court ordered the goods returned, and federal officials kept them anyway. Judge Elaine Kaplan took jurisdiction over the Fifth Amendment takings claim on September 2nd and then dismissed it with prejudice, because the lab report the plaintiffs filed themselves showed total delta-9 THC at 23.0103 percent. They had been reading a delta-9 number that ignored what THCA becomes when heated. Contraband cannot be taken, in the constitutional sense, because it was never property the government had to pay for. (Luger v. United States, No. 26-30, U.S. Court of Federal Claims; The Marijuana Herald)

🏥 Illinois granted medical dispensing authority to 37 existing adult-use dispensaries, the largest single expansion of the state's medical retail footprint since 2016. The door opened on September 10th under SB 3222, which Gov. JB Pritzker signed on June 12th, and it is a rolling application rather than a round. Registered patients can now fill their allotments at the medical tax rate in 37 more places than they could last Wednesday, and that does more for patient access in four days than a new license round would do in two years. (Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation; Marijuana Moment; MJBizDaily)

Nicole Huff runs Wildflower Medical Dispensary in Aberdeen, Mississippi, and applied for the DEA registration that carries the federal protections attached to April's Schedule III order. Ashlie Way, a diversion investigator in DEA's Jackson District Office, emailed her about two employees with controlled-substance felony convictions and gave her until the close of business on Labor Day to pick one of three bad paths. She could surrender the expedited application and request an employment waiver, withdraw the application entirely, or let the file travel to headquarters as an Order to Show Cause and argue it before an administrative law judge in Washington. The rule is 21 C.F.R. 1301.76(a), which bars a registrant from employing anyone with a controlled-substance felony in any position with access to controlled substances, and 1307.03 is the relief valve, available only where there are valid reasons to believe diversion is unlikely. Huff says the two have worked for her over a year without a disciplinary action, and she is going to the judge to ask for a grandfather provision covering nonviolent convictions and clean employment records. This is suitability colliding with a federal standard. Missouri's constitution makes a nonviolent marijuana arrest an eligibility criterion for a microbusiness license. Illinois, New York and Massachusetts all wrote justice involvement into their scoring. Those programs recruited exactly the people 1301.76(a) excludes, and every operator among them who wants Schedule III protection will be running payroll against a DEA rule written for pharmacies in 1971. This is Huff's account of her own correspondence, and the agency did not answer Marijuana Moment's question about how many other applications are stuck on the same rule. (Marijuana Moment; 21 C.F.R. §§ 1301.76(a), 1307.03; DEA Pharmacist's Manual)

🗳️ It is well established that Question 8 is on the Massachusetts ballot on November 3rd under the Secretary of the Commonwealth's title, "Prohibit Retail Sale of Adult Recreational Use Marijuana," and now the arguments have started arriving through opinion pages, with Boston Globe letters on Friday and a Forbes piece framing repeal as a test of cannabis banking. The structural questions are the ones nobody has answered on paper. Ending licensed adult-use retail while preserving possession and the medical program leaves open what becomes of existing licenses, inventory on hand, host community agreements with years left to run, and debt underwritten against revenue the measure would eliminate. An op-ed from an executive at Insa carries cumulative sales and employment figures that are the industry's own. StoptheRepealMA.com has the filings and the schedule. (Marijuana Moment; The Boston Globe; Forbes; Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth)

Chief Justice Jeffrey Funke wrote for a unanimous court on Friday, twenty-nine pages, affirming Judge Susan Strong's dismissal of John Kuehn's challenge to Nebraska's voter-approved medical cannabis laws without prejudice. Kuehn filed in December 2024, amended last in June 2025, conceded he had suffered no direct injury, and asked the court to admit him through taxpayer standing or the great-public-concern exception. Funke closed both, finding the first inconsistent with Nebraska's own jurisprudence and the second reserved for circumstances this case does not present. Any headline describing this as a preemption ruling is describing a question the court declined to answer. Deputy Solicitor General Zachary Pohlman had listed five parties better positioned to bring it, among them the federal government, Attorney General Mike Hilgers, a property owner, a prospective patient, and a criminal defendant raising the state laws as a defense. Hilgers has already joined the federal suit challenging April's rescheduling order, which puts the state's chief legal officer on the attack in federal court and on defense in his own. The Legislature has appropriated more money to the Nebraska Medical Cannabis Commission since June 2025, and an expenditure-centered complaint is the shape a second attempt would take. Kuehn has lost the petition challenge and the preemption challenge in eight days, and a dismissal without prejudice is not the same thing as an ending. The commission meets this morning. (Kuehn v. Pillen, No. S-25-503, Nebraska Supreme Court; Nebraska Examiner; Nebraska Judicial Branch)

🌴 Florida's Department of Health published proposed Rule 64-4.214 on Friday, replacing the 2022 emergency rule with a permanent process for medical marijuana treatment center licensing cycles, built on a $146,000 application fee and a five-day window to file in any given batching cycle. The 22 applicants from the April 2023 cycle are still waiting on final orders. Writing the permanent architecture before resolving the cycle that exposed why it was needed is a sequencing choice the department will have to explain to whoever files next. (Florida Administrative Register; Fla. Stat. § 381.986(8)(a)2.b.; The Marijuana Herald)

☕ San Francisco's Office of Cannabis released proposed rules for cannabis cafés on Friday and set comments to close September 25th. The ordinance Mayor Daniel Lurie signed on July 23rd took effect August 23rd and lets qualifying businesses pair on-site consumption with food, nonalcoholic beverages and live entertainment. The draft covers employee training, security, medical access and the controls that keep product from leaving with the customer, and that last one is where Denver, West Hollywood and Las Vegas all went back and rewrote. (San Francisco Office of Cannabis; The Marijuana Herald)

🥤 Chelsea Davis, deputy secretary for gaming, cannabis and alcohol, told the New York Post that intoxicating drinks moving through bodegas cannot continue under the state's regulatory structure. Three different things are being discussed as though they were one. There are unlicensed intoxicating sales, the low-dose hemp beverages the state already permits, and S.9220/A.10191 from Sen. Jeremy Cooney and Assemblymember John Zaccaro, which would open a regulated lower-potency channel through specified alcohol retailers and has not passed. No statewide ban has been announced and no enforcement order has issued. What exists is an administration deciding which of those three it means before the federal hemp definition changes in December. (New York Post; Hoodline; New York State Senate)

🌮 Mexico's Supreme Court held 7-2 on September 10th that a personal-use cannabis authorization extends to preparing cannabis or THC in food for the permit holder's own consumption. Commercial edible sales, distribution and gifting stay outside it, and the restrictions governing medicines, herbal remedies, supplements, cosmetics and vaping products were left standing. COFEPRIS now has to administer a right the legislature still has not written into a statute. Eight years of Mexican cannabis policy has arrived this way, one court order at a time. (High Times; Latin American Post; Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación)

🚲 The first follow-up on the Netherlands' controlled supply experiment covers April 2025 through the first quarter of 2026 across ten participating municipalities and their comparison areas. Regulated product variety widened, prices fell, and researchers found no measurable difference yet in problematic cannabis use or health outcomes. The trial runs through the end of 2029, so this is one year of a five-year read. Prices falling and use not moving is the result every legalization skeptic predicts cannot happen, and one year is not long enough to tell them they were wrong. (StratCann; Dutch Controlled Cannabis Supply Chain Experiment)

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