📊 Massachusetts voters reject repeal 55 to 33, and Kevin Sabet rejects the poll

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The first general-electorate poll on Question 8 landed the same day the man funding the repeal went on public radio to make the case against legalization, and the two readings don't agree on what Massachusetts voters think. Cory Booker and Donald Trump are both moving federal cannabis policy, from opposite ends of the building. Texas hemp retailers opened a third courtroom against the state's rules. And Tennessee learned what happens when you tax a market the month before you shut it.

📊 Massachusetts counts the undecided
🛤️ Two federal tracks, one drug
🧑‍⚖️ Texas tries the state courthouse again

The UMass Amherst/WCVB survey of 800 registered voters, taken August 5th through 12th, finds 55 percent opposed to Question 8 and 33 percent in favor, with 10 percent undecided and no demographic group, by party, age, race, education, or income, at majority support. Trump voters at 48 percent and Republicans at 45 are as close as repeal gets. Asked separately whether legalization has been good for the state, 55 percent say yes and 24 percent say no. Tatishe Nteta, who runs the poll, calls reversing course a "formidable challenge" with the campaign still young, and repeal drew less support than any of the eight other questions on the ballot. The same day, Kevin Sabet of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, whose SAM Action has put more than $1.5 million into the Coalition for a Healthy Massachusetts, told GBH's Arun Rath the case for repeal: potency that has climbed from single digits to 90 percent in concentrates, one in three users meeting the clinical definition of addiction, stores and corporations where voters expected a plant. He also dismissed the industry's "bogus polling numbers," which is a harder line to hold the week a university poll lands at 55 to 33. Both readings hold. The Massachusetts electorate is not in a repealing mood, and the argument Sabet is making is the one the other side has the least practice answering, because it concedes the possession question and fights entirely on commercial terms. George Will's Washington Post column this week made the same move in print, and when a Pulitzer columnist and a campaign funder land on the same framing in the same week, you know where the next ten weeks get spent. A ten-point undecided bloc is the ground, and the currency will be potency and addiction data. The campaign working that ground is at StoptheRepealMA.com, our standing plug. The poll says it starts the fight ahead. (Marijuana Moment, citing UMass Amherst/WCVB; GBH News)

Tennessee's new hemp tax has produced about 3 percent of what the state projected, a hole of more than $54 million, according to WPLN. In February alone the state expected nearly $8.8 million and collected $61,000. The General Assembly passed the tax and the THCA ban in the same session, the tax took effect January 1st, and the ban, delayed to July 1st, spent the intervening six months emptying the shelves the tax was written to reach. Farmers like Lee Crabtree in Readyville had already moved on to seasonal crops before the deadline arrived. The shortfall has been covered by franchise, excise, and general sales tax surpluses, so the budget is fine. The forecast was the problem, and no shit: you cannot book revenue from products you've scheduled for removal. Any state pairing a cannabinoid tax with a cannabinoid ban in the same bill is running the same arithmetic, and the Tennessee numbers are what the answer looks like. (WPLN News)

Two federal tracks are running at once, and they start from different premises about what cannabis is. President Trump's December order and the Acting Attorney General's April action move state-licensed medical cannabis to Schedule III, and Trump said at the signing that the order does not legalize marijuana and does not sanction adult use. That is the medical lane, and it carries 280E relief, research access, and not much else. Sens. Cory Booker, Chuck Schumer, and Ron Wyden refiled the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act in July to remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act entirely, with automatic expungement of nonviolent federal convictions, resentencing for people still inside, an end to routine federal drug testing, and employment protections for industry workers. Booker welcomed the April action as a financial benefit to New Jersey operators and then said what it leaves untouched: possession remains a federal crime, people will still be prosecuted and deported for it, and records will follow them. Twenty-two Republican senators, led by North Carolina's Ted Budd, wrote the President in December asking him to leave marijuana in Schedule I, and the April action went ahead over them. Read the two tracks through the people they reach. A dispensary CFO in Newark gets a tax bill that looks like any other retailer's. A veteran with a 2009 federal possession charge gets nothing from Schedule III and everything from CAOA. Medical progress and social progress are different goods, and the two men with the most leverage over federal cannabis policy have each picked one. The Republican president owns the only federal action that has happened. The Democrat who may run for president again has staked out the position that rescheduling is the floor. Which of those the 2028 field runs on will decide the next decade. (Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act; Sen. Booker's April statement; Sen. Budd's December letter to the President; Patch)

💊 PleoPharma announced a $6.5 million, three-year grant from NIDA to advance the Phase 3 CAN-004 trial of PP-01, an oral treatment for cannabis withdrawal symptoms in adults with cannabis use disorder. The company dosed its first Phase 3 patient in June and holds FDA Fast Track designation; there is no approved pharmacotherapy for withdrawal or the disorder itself. The announcement is the company's, but the grant is federal, and it comes the same week NIDA's own researchers published the divergence between falling alcohol use disorder and rising cannabis use disorder. The government is funding both the diagnosis and the treatment. (PleoPharma announcement, via Psychiatric Times)

A group of Texas hemp shops filed in Travis County district court Thursday asking for a temporary restraining order against the Department of State Health Services rules that redefine hemp by total THC rather than the 0.3 percent delta-9 standard the Legislature wrote into House Bill 1325 in 2019. San Marcos attorney David Sergi's argument is that an agency cannot rewrite a statute because it disagrees with the Legislature's policy, and the Legislature's policy, after a veto and two special sessions, was no new law at all. The rules, which took effect at the start of August after a court-ordered delay, also raised manufacturer licensing from $258 to $10,000 per facility and retail registration from $155 to $5,000. This is the third courtroom the industry has tried. The Texas Supreme Court sided with the state on the spring injunction, and a federal judge in Galveston denied emergency relief on the preemption theory on August 10th. A new state petition on agency authority is the remaining door, and the question it puts to a Travis County judge is a clean one: when elected lawmakers cannot agree on a policy, how much of one can an agency write under an executive order. That question outlives hemp. (CBS News Texas; The Texas Tribune)

FDA has posted a request for quotes for a contractor to monitor TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit for cannabis, CBD, and hemp conversations, filtered by age, sex, and persona with AI modeling and click-through to the original posts, and to run a dispensary shopper survey covering symptoms, conditions, dosing, and purchase paths. The agency specified Brightfield Group "or equal," the contract runs September 30th through September 29, 2027, and quotes are due Monday. The stated purpose is to fill knowledge gaps for policy, education, and compliance work. The timing is the thing. FDA is building a market-surveillance instrument for a hemp product category that Congress is scheduled to remove from general retail on November 12th, or December 11th if the House accepts the Senate's month. Either the agency expects a market to watch after the deadline, or it wants a record of the one that existed. Both are worth having. (Marijuana Moment; SAM.gov)

The Illinois Department of Agriculture published a proposal August 14th to redefine "licensed premises" so that cultivation centers and craft growers can grow outdoors inside an eight-foot chain-link fence topped with security wire, behind a gate, and screened from ordinary public view. Illinois has read "enclosed, locked facility" to require a roof since 2020, which is why Curaleaf, Green Thumb, and Nature's Grace each went to court over hoop houses and screened houses, and why the outdoor allowance has so far reached only the operators who sued. Scott Redman of the Illinois Independent Craft Growers Association told the Chicago Tribune that 31 of 85 craft permits have been awarded and that outdoor growing would save the tier "millions" in lighting and HVAC, on top of the canopy increase from 5,000 to 14,000 square feet the General Assembly passed this year. Illinois has spent five years trying to make craft cultivation pencil out with fee waivers, canopy bumps, and application rounds. A fence and a field may do more than all of it, because the cost that kills a 14,000-square-foot grow is the electric bill, and the sun does not send one. (Chicago Tribune; Illinois News Joint; MJBizDaily)

🍪 Oregon Sen. Lisa Reynolds, a Portland pediatrician, said she will bring back her bill to cap individual edibles at 10 milligrams of THC in 2027, this time with a lobbyist, after the Senate passed it this year and the House let it die under industry pressure. Multnomah County epidemiologist Julia Dilley told the same meeting that Oregon youth use runs higher than Washington's, where edibles are individually wrapped at 10 milligrams and retail outlets are capped. Oregon allows a 100-milligram cookie meant to be split. A pediatrician with a lobbyist is a different opponent than a pediatrician without one. (Oregon Capital Chronicle, via Philomath News)

Sara Farnsworth founded Full Circle Farms in Underhill in 2021 with her own money, works other jobs to keep it, and told the Vermont Daily Chronicle that the industry is "crushing my soul." Vermont law lets only retailers sell to consumers, and Cannabis Control Board member Kyle Harris estimates nearly half of the state's 110 retailers now grow their own, so the shelf a small cultivator needs is increasingly owned by a competitor. The Board paused new retail licenses last year to address saturation, recommended $1 million to offset independent growers' costs, and asked the Legislature for direct-to-consumer authority. The Legislature said no to both. Chair James Pepper has floated tiered retail, including convenience-store sales, which drew a predictable objection from Kevin Sabet about candy aisles. Farnsworth says at least ten growers are weighing whether to renew at all. Every regulator who has run a licensing program knows this failure from the inside: you can issue a cultivation license in an afternoon and spend years discovering that the license was only ever worth what the retail tier would pay for it. Vermont's board saw that and asked for the fix. The fix sits with the General Assembly, and the growers are deciding before January whether to wait for it. (Vermont Daily Chronicle, via MMJDaily)

New Mexico's cumulative cannabis sales passed $2.35 billion, with $284.9 million in the first half of 2026 and $49.8 million in July, according to Regulation and Licensing Department data. Albuquerque leads at roughly $14 million a month, and second is Sunland Park, the El Paso suburb of 17,000 that clears $5.3 to $5.8 million a month almost entirely from Texans crossing the state line. Chaparral and Santa Teresa, also on the border, grew quarter over quarter. Average tickets have fallen from about $50 in 2022 to $38 while volume held, which is what a mature market with a $2,500 license fee and 47 outlets per 100,000 residents looks like. Texas lawmakers already persuaded Sunland Park to reject two new retail permits in May over traffic back into El Paso. The Texas hemp rules now clearing THC products off the shelves in Austin and Dallas will send more of that demand down Interstate 10, and the El Paso Times has the receipts. (El Paso Times; MJBizDaily; New Mexico Regulation and Licensing Department)

The Missouri Lottery draws September 9th from nearly 900 applications for the final 77 microbusiness licenses, at least 29 wholesale and 34 dispensary, to reach the 144 the 2022 constitutional amendment requires. The first two rounds produced dozens of revocations after regulators found outside investors holding control behind eligible front owners, and the rules adopted in May respond directly: the Division of Cannabis Regulation will review ownership arrangements before issuing a license rather than after, will communicate only with majority owners and not their consultants, and requires a compliance course before application and again after award. Chief equity officer Lesley Turek says top-drawn applicants that fail review are skipped for the next name. As of August 18th, 21 microbusinesses are operating, five of them dispensaries, and 46 licenses from the first two rounds are active but not yet open. Jimi Poe, who opened the state's first microbusiness dispensary in Platte City two years after winning in 2023, did fourteen months in federal prison for a marijuana sale at twenty; that record is what made him eligible. Moving the control test to the front of the line is the right design and it is also the slow one. DHSS spokeswoman Lisa Cox says round three licenses will issue by year's end, and the number that will judge the program is how many of the 144 are open in 2028. (Missouri Independent)

🧃 Cannabis beverage research firm MoreBetter reports that 65 percent of 4,516 participants drank less alcohol during a three-week study of 1-to-10 milligram THC beverages, with improved sleep and mood also self-reported. The sample is large, the funding is industry, and the measure is what people said they did, so read it as a consumer pattern with a clinical question attached. It arrives as Congress decides whether the product category survives past December 11th. (Marijuana Moment)

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