🧾 Florida's $10 million against Amendment 3 came from sick kids

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A Florida grand jury has now said in writing what everyone in the Amendment 3 fight suspected in 2024. Ten million dollars that Centene owed the state for overbilling a children's health program moved through the Hope Florida Foundation in 25 days and came out the other side as campaign money against legalization, and nobody in Tallahassee can remember who decided that. In Washington, the D.C. Circuit put a calendar on Smart Approaches to Marijuana's attempt to sue a Medicare hemp benefit out of existence. Virginia's hemp businesses asked the General Assembly for a hearing on the two-milligram line that took effect two weeks ago. And in Alaska, the legislature watched a quarter of its growers leave and kept the tax that helped push them.

🧾 Ten million, twenty-five days, no memory
⚖️ SAM gets a briefing schedule
🐟 Alaska taxes by the pound

A Leon County grand jury found that the DeSantis administration misappropriated $10 million in taxpayer money when it steered part of a Medicaid settlement into the Hope Florida Foundation, and found no one to charge, because no witness could say who made the decision. The report, sealed since January 28th and obtained by CBS News Miami, lays out the route. Centene had overbilled the Florida Healthy Kids program and owed the state about $67 million. The settlement sat untouched for three years, then in September 2024, 45 days before the election, it was rewritten twice in two days to send $10 million to the foundation tied to Casey DeSantis's Hope Florida initiative. Centene wired it October 4th. Within days, two $5 million grants went to Secure Florida's Future and Save Our Society From Drugs on applications that promised no political use, and $8.5 million of that landed in Keep Florida Clean, the committee chaired by then chief of staff and now Attorney General James Uthmeier, which sent $7 million to the Republican Party of Florida. Amendment 3 fell short of 60 percent that November. The grand jury rejected the explanation that the $10 million was a "bonus" from Centene, called the settlement rushed, and noted there was no press release and no notice to the legislature, which under Florida law decides how the state's money is spent. I remember getting raked over the coals because the agency I ran had been slow to collect fees at the height of COVID, from businesses that in many cases were forced to close and struggled to reopen, then stay open. That was over a few hundred thousand dollars of leniency. Here, ten million dollars owed to a children's health program was moved to persuade people not to vote for legal weed, and the standard is that nobody remembers. The campaign this money funded told Floridians that legalization would put children at risk. The money came from a program built to insure them. Governor DeSantis called the report a hoax Wednesday. Uthmeier and Senator Ashley Moody, who as attorney general authorized her deputy to sign, are both on the ballot in November, and the grand jury's only remedy is a recommendation that the legislature require every dollar the state recovers to go into the General Fund. That is a modest ask, and it is the right one. (CBS News Miami; Tallahassee Democrat; Miami Herald; First Coast News)

The D.C. Circuit set the briefing schedule Wednesday for Smart Approaches to Marijuana's appeal of the dismissal of its suit against the CMS hemp benefit, the Medicare demonstration that lets participating providers furnish up to $500 a year in hemp products, at their own expense, to eligible beneficiaries. Opening brief October 5th, government response November 4th, final briefs December 16th, oral argument possible. Judge Trevor McFadden threw the case out in May without reaching the merits, writing that each plaintiff claimed "an injury too abstract or too remote to open the courtroom doors." SAM said it had diverted resources. MMJ International Holdings, the co-plaintiff with a DEA-licensed drug program and no product, said it was a competitor. A retired lawyer said his doctor might someday recommend hemp. None of that is Article III injury, and the appeal has to clear that wall before anyone argues about whether CMS followed the Administrative Procedure Act. SAM is simultaneously suing to stop rescheduling and funding the campaign to repeal Massachusetts' adult-use law, which is a lot of litigation for an organization whose theory of harm is that other people are getting something it dislikes. Final briefs land five weeks after November 12th, when the federal hemp restrictions would make most of the products in this benefit illegal anyway, unless Congress moves the date. SAM may win by default against a program the calendar has already outrun, and I would not expect it to say so. (Marijuana Moment; D.C. Circuit order; MMJ International Holdings press release)

The Cannabis Small Business Association asked Senator Lashrecse Aird and Delegate Paul Krizek, who chair the legislature's joint commission on the cannabis retail transition, to hold a hearing on the two-milligram total THC cap per package that took effect August 15th under the budget, House Bill 30. Seven hemp businesses already lost their bid for an injunction in Roanoke, and the commission has not said whether it will take the request. The businesses' case is the same one they made in court, that a 2.1-milligram beverage is now contraband in a state that will license far stronger products at dispensaries starting July 1, 2027. The court said the legislature was within its rights. The legislature now gets to say whether it meant it. (Marijuana Moment)

🍺 Rhinegeist told the Cincinnati Business Courier its Fuzzy Bones THC seltzer returns to Ohio shelves this weekend under Judge Jeffrey Helmick's order in Delta Beverage v. Canepa, the second group of plaintiffs to get relief from Senate Bill 56 this summer. The drink is already sold in 18 other states. Ohio's largest craft brewer has spent most of 2026 selling a legal product everywhere except home, and a federal judge is now the only reason that changed. (Cincinnati Business Courier)

🥤 The Economist filed from Austin this week on the THC beverage market, and its opening observation is the whole story. Possession of any amount of cannabis can send a Texan to jail, and the same Texan can buy a THC seltzer where he buys beer. The magazine puts the category above $4.4 billion by 2030 on Brightfield's projection and finds Total Wine selling the drinks in 22 states, while Congress runs a November prohibition and an August bill to regulate them like alcohol on parallel tracks. When the Economist calls the federal posture two-faced, it has read the statute correctly. The category grew inside a definition written for rope and birdseed, and it will live or die on whether Congress prefers the hypocrisy it has or the one it would have to legislate. (The Economist; Hemp Beverage Alliance; Brightfield Group)

🪪 Kentucky's medical cannabis program passed 25,000 patient cards and 41 open businesses this week, with Blue Sage in Lebanon opening today as the 23rd dispensary. Governor Andy Beshear calls it halfway. House Majority Whip Jason Nemes calls the governor's June executive order expanding qualifying conditions unlawful and has asked Attorney General Russell Coleman not to defend it. The patients are arriving faster than the agreement over who decides which patients count. (Marijuana Moment)

🚛 A truck driver pulled into a Butts County, Georgia truck stop, found his load had shifted, opened the trailer, saw packages of cannabis, and called 911 on himself. The sheriff's office says about 1,800 pounds, tendered in Sacramento and bound for Orlando. Nobody has said the driver knew, and the shipper has not been named. Two days, two Georgia trailers, and the same question for the deputy standing behind each one. (CDL Life)

Alaska charges cultivators $50 an ounce on mature flower, $25 on immature, and $15 on trim, a rate written into the 2014 initiative when an ounce sold for several times what it sells for now. A weight tax does not fall when the price does, so the state's share of every sale has climbed while the sale itself shrank. Licensed growers declined by nearly a quarter from 2023 through 2025, and tax revenue slid from $29.6 million in 2022 to $25.3 million last year. Representative Ashley Carrick's House Bill 91 would have cut the rate to $12.50 an ounce and moved toward a sales tax, and the Department of Revenue priced it at $8.1 million in lost revenue for fiscal 2027, which is where it died. Carrick says she will bring it back. Alaska's legislature has now watched the same numbers for three sessions and chosen the certain $25 million over the uncertain path to keeping the people who pay it. (Alaska Public Media)

🛋️ Haverhill will be the first Massachusetts municipality to put social consumption directly to voters, on November 3rd, after Adam and Caroline Pineau of Stem Haverhill gathered more than 5,200 signatures and the city certified 3,532, well past the 3,160 required. The Cannabis Control Commission finalized its social consumption rules in December, municipalities have been able to opt in since January 2nd, and none has. The Pineaus did not wait for City Hall, and the state's first lounge may open because two retailers decided to hustle a petition through a summer of farmers markets. Haverhill shares that ballot with Question 8, which would repeal adult-use sales statewide and make the local vote moot. Learn more at StoptheRepealMA.com. (The Weed Blog; The Boston Globe)

🐢 The University of Maryland sent a cease-and-desist letter in July to Terps USA, a Colorado terpene company, over the word "Terps" and a red, white, and black color scheme it says trades on the university's marks. Maryland's registration issued this January on an application from 2014; the company says it was already switching to green and gold. A dozen years of turtle mascots against a word every extractor in the country uses for the compounds that make cannabis smell like cannabis. The company's lawyer is unimpressed, and no suit has been filed. (Ganjapreneur)

📊 A University of Georgia study of more than 20 million workers in federal labor data from 1990 through March 2025 found medical cannabis laws associated with roughly 6.9 percent fewer health-related absences from work, and adult-use laws associated with no significant change. The design cannot say who used what. It can say that the medical program is the one that showed up in the payroll data, which is the same split the federal government drew when it rescheduled only the medical side. (FOX 5 Atlanta; Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health)

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