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Congress returns Monday with five weeks left before the federal hemp cap date, and Total Wine has added a lobbying firm. Democrats hold between 54 and 56 Senate seats, short of the 60 votes a filibuster demands, and Pennsylvania’s Senate leader says the state should wait for Washington. Wisconsin, Kansas, North Carolina and Iowa each face a different obstacle, Missouri voters made changes to their initiatives harder, and Georgia opens another dispensary application window. Illinois starts treating hemp drinks as cannabis on November 12th, Washington takes up cooperatives, and Massachusetts experts want a youth-use study.

🗓️ Five weeks left
🧮 Short of sixty
🗳️ Eighty percent to change it
🍺 Illinois goes first

Total Wine has been hunting for lobbyists as they gear up for a final push before December’s hemp deadline. A registration signed November 4th, effective October 26th, adds Impact Management Group of Little Rock, with lobbyists Robert Coon and Richard Bearden, on the issue “Regulation of Low Dose Hemp Derived Beverages.” It names no bill, but Total Wine backs Rep. Van Duyne’s Beverage Regulatory Parity Act, which would allow qualifying drinks up to 5 milligrams of THC per serving under Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau oversight, with age limits, testing and three tiers, per the Marijuana Herald.

Doubtful that a new lobbyist can cure the calendar, though. Lawmakers return Monday, November 9th, the continuing resolution expires December 11th, and advocates see that funding bill as a possible vehicle. Meanwhile the Hemp Beverage Alliance holds its Hill Climb on November 17th with about 20 participants, and Christopher Lackner told Hemp Beverage News, “We’re doing incremental regulation, which is fine, given where we’re at right now.”

There are two key dates looming over the hemp industry at this point. The 0.4 milligram per container cap was enacted nearly a year ago, and the recent CR delayed it to December 11th. Cannabinoids the plant can’t naturally produce are the exception, and they fall out of the hemp definition on November 12th, a week from today. Let’s say Congress is inclined to regulate these products instead of banning them, though. Still unresolved? Who actually owns it. TTB? FDA? Both? States are certainly watching. And the Congress that settles this date is the one coming back Monday, while the new one, with Democrats in command, takes its seats in January. January, of course, comes after December. A framework means deciding who oversees these drinks, how they are taxed and whether three tiers apply, which is a lot to settle in five weeks by a Congress with other spending to finish. A short extension in the December 11th funding bill still looks likelier to me than a framework, but politics is hardly a science. (Hemp Beverage News; The Marijuana Herald)

With two Senate races uncalled as of Wednesday morning, Marijuana Moment puts the Democratic majority at 54 to 56 seats. That sounds commanding until you count to 60, the number a bill needs to get past a filibuster, which previously has stalled even banking, and the House last passed legalization in 2022. The executive branch offers no shortcut either, since the administration has moved medical cannabis to Schedule III and is pursuing rescheduling rather than broad legalization. The incoming class does lean friendly, though. Texas’s James Talarico told Fox News, “I agree with the president on the need to legalize marijuana and reform this broken criminal justice system,” and the Marijuana Herald reports that Maine’s Troy Jackson, who defeated Susan Collins, voted for a 2020 resolution urging banking and insurance protections, which passed the Maine Senate 24 to 8. South Carolina’s Annie Andrews went further on a NORML questionnaire: “I support full legalization as a criminal justice issue.” A friendly answer on a questionnaire is one thing and a floor vote that needs 60 is another, and freshmen arrive in January with the least seniority in the chamber. Congress is going to find a way to do as little as possible, and banking has stalled anyway, so that is the vote I would watch first. (Marijuana Moment; The Marijuana Herald)

🗳️ The day after Massachusetts voted on Question 8, WBUR calls it a “resounding ‘no’ vote” - yeah, no shit - and notes that most of the repeal money came from Smart Approaches to Marijuana, Kevin Sabet’s national NIMBY crusade, which bankrolled the repeal from out of state. Experts who raised concerns about THC are skeptical repeal would have helped, and they want the state to study health effects and expand public education. WBUR reports that use has risen since 2018 while adolescent use has declined significantly. Study and education are what the experts are asking for, and both fit under the law as it stands. The AP projected that State Treasurer Deb Goldberg won a fourth term, soundly defeating her Republican challenger, Elizabeth Dionne, a former Belmont select board member. Dionne made the Cannabis Control Commission a central theme of her campaign, calling it chaos, cronyism, and corrupt. Voters saw it differently. (WBUR; The Boston Globe)

Sen. Joe Pittman, the Senate’s Republican majority leader, has already answered the election result, and his answer is to wait. Democrats appear to have flipped the Pennsylvania Senate and kept the House, with votes still being counted, and yet according to Marijuana Moment Pittman does not expect legalization this year and says the state should wait for further federal changes. He is sitting on an adult-use bill with state-run dispensary sales that the House passed last year and that stalled in his chamber, while Gov. Josh Shapiro’s budget request again included legalization. A ResponsiblePA spokesperson has already picked the year: “2027 is the year Pennsylvania gets this done.” Pittman has a fair point that Washington is still moving the ground under the states, and a lawmaker who would rather not build on a shifting foundation is not being unreasonable. But the House bill has already waited a year in his chamber, which makes waiting a policy of its own, and wait for what, exactly? The state’s Independent Fiscal Office projects nearly half a billion dollars a year by 2028 under Shapiro’s plan. (Marijuana Moment)

🔢 Missouri’s Amendment 6 passed with 59.97 percent, 1,251,555 votes to 835,585, according to the Marijuana Herald, and it raises the price of touching a citizen initiative afterward. Lawmakers now need at least 80 percent of both chambers, 131 of 163 in the House and 28 of 34 in the Senate, before they can send a change to voters, who must then approve it, and the amendment reaches back to initiatives from January 1, 2010, so both of the state’s cannabis amendments are covered. I’ve not been shy about hating ballot questions as a way to make law, and I can also say adult-use cannabis wouldn’t exist in Massachusetts without the mechanism. Idaho voters, for their part, kept theirs on Tuesday. (The Marijuana Herald)

A governor who wants legalization still needs a legislature willing to schedule the vote, and four states are about to show how differently that sentence can read. In Wisconsin, Democrats are poised to lead both chambers after years in the minority, and Assembly Democratic Leader Greta Neubauer told WKOW, “We do hope to raise some revenues from marijuana legalization,” though the report puts any legalization one to two years out and the governor would have to sign it. Remember Virginia…political alignment is not a policy guarantee.

Kansas is close to the opposite case: Cindy Holscher leads Ty Masterson for governor in a race the AP has not called. She told KCUR, “All of the states around us have done it,” but the Marijuana Herald says Republicans keep strong influence in the legislature, and what she has made so far are pledges, with no bill. North Carolina has Democrats who flipped the House for the first time since 2010, a Senate expected to stay Republican and Gov. Josh Stein backing a regulated adult-use market, and that Senate passed medical bills 36 to 10 in 2023 and 2024, with the advisory council’s final recommendations due by the end of December. In Iowa, Rob Sand estimates “probably” $50 million in the first year and more than $100 million later, which are his own numbers with no method given, and says, “I think we should treat it the way we treat alcohol.” Any bill there still needs the legislature.

Kansas and North Carolina share the same arrangement, a governor who is for it and a Republican chamber that decides what gets a vote. If I were working either state, I would learn the committee roster first and introduce myself to the members before the session opens, because a lawmaker who has met you will hear your case differently than one who first sees you at a hearing. (WKOW; The Marijuana Herald; Marijuana Moment)

That early groundwork is a big part of what we do for clients at THC Group. If you'd rather make your own case, How to Be Heard, our guide to making public comment that regulators actually read, is yours when five colleagues subscribe through your referral link.

🥃 Georgia’s cap math is simpler than it looks: each of the six existing producers starts with five dispensaries, gains one at 25,000 patients and one more for every additional 10,000, so the cap sits at nine apiece now and climbs to 10, or 60 statewide, at 65,000, which gives an applicant a number to plan around. The Marijuana Herald reports a second application window, November 16th through 20th, between the October 26th to 30th window and the next regular one in January, open only to those six. The registry had 56,650 active patients as of September 23rd, up from 36,703 at the end of June, and Executive Director Andrew Turnage said of reaching 65,000, “I think we will very soon.” (The Marijuana Herald)

Chicago’s Revolution Brewing halts brewery sales after Sunday, Block Club Chicago reports, with the Illinois cutoff a week away. Under state law, products described as intoxicating hemp at 0.4 milligrams of total THC or more can be sold only through licensed dispensaries starting November 12th, per the Peoria Journal Star. That is a state date, and it happens to land on the same day as the federal change for cannabinoids the plant can’t naturally produce, though the two are separate rules and both are separate from the federal December 11th cap.

The brewers are blunt about what they expect. Ed Marszewski of Marz Community Brewing says, “There’s no market for our beverages in the dispensaries,” and Jonathan Fritz of Hopewell Brewing says, “It will completely eliminate the THC beverage category.” They know their customers, and a taproom regular is not necessarily a dispensary shopper, so losing a channel they built is a real loss. Illinois chose to put intoxicating drinks at that strength into one licensed channel, but taprooms and package stores already answer to their own regulators, and a beverage is stored, served, poured and consumed differently than flower, edibles or concentrates. Both channels can coexist under their respective agencies, and I don't envy the brewers who built a business on the one Illinois is closing. (Block Club Chicago; Peoria Journal Star)

🍁 A required second employee would be a major cost, says Tom Doran of Winnipeg’s Jupiter Cannabis, who is preparing a Competition Act complaint over the provincial distribution model that he has not filed, MMJ Daily reports. Those allegations are his own, and the article carries no response from Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries. Until a regulation puts a number on it, that second employee is a cost Doran can only guess at. The law behind the staffing question is Manitoba’s Bill 56, which took effect October 29th, removes the window-cover requirement for retailers and lets regulations set staffing minimums, with no number or hours in the statute, and the regulator’s notice, as Doran describes it, says no staffing changes apply yet. (MMJ Daily)

Small producers in Washington who want to band together would get a legal way to do it, up to three of them at a time, under a cooperative rule the Liquor and Cannabis Board advanced as a CR-102 proposal implementing HB 1941, which was signed in March and took effect June 11th, the Marijuana Herald reports. Members could not mix cannabis owned by different licensees or use it as payment, and selling packaged product to retailers would still require a processor license. This is a different rule from the five-store ownership proposal that surfaced November 4th. The ownership lines look like a sensible way to test the idea at a modest size, because a cooperative that could pool product freely would raise hard questions about whose cannabis is whose. Members would also keep lab test records and transport manifests for product moved between facilities, and those records are what let anyone, regulators included, follow cooperative product from one member to the next. I would want the board to spell out who answers for a lot after three licensees have handled it. The hearing is December 17th, adoption is possible January 6th and the rule could take effect as early as February 6th. (The Marijuana Herald)

🗺️ Around the map: In Sri Lanka, Army Intelligence and the Department of Wildlife Conservation raided a plantation in the Somawathiya Reserve near Kantale on November 3rd and arrested one person, according to Newswire.lk. The three-acre site held more than 35,000 cannabis plants, and another two acres were being prepared. (Newswire.lk)

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Policy, Decoded is compiled and edited by Shawn Collins of THC Group. AI tools help with research and source checks; the judgments are his.
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