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Nebraska’s first licensed medical cannabis crop is weeks from harvest, and the commission holds a hearing today on the fees it says it needs before it can license anyone to take that crop. DEA owes its administrative law judge an answer by Wednesday on reopening the rescheduling record. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu came out against Question 8 as Massachusetts heads into early voting. Chris Lindsey of ATACH picked a public fight with his old employer over hemp THC, and Vermont regulators vote next week on cannabis sales at community events.
🌽 The plants didn’t wait
🏛️ Three clocks, one moving
🗳️ Nine questions, one remote
🥤 Hemp on the letterhead
Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.
⏳ 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.
It turns out plants can’t read calendars. Garrett Elting of MahāMotā Cultivation told the Nebraska Medical Cannabis Commission in September that his crop was four to six weeks out and might have to sit in storage for months. He put the cost plainly: “We have degradation of the biomass.” Nobody is licensed to take it. No processor, transporter, lab or dispensary exists yet, and the commission won’t license one until it can charge fees, which is what this afternoon’s hearing in Lincoln is about. The draft runs $5,000 to apply, $10,000 to $28,500 a year depending on the license, and $13,000 to plug into seed-to-sale tracking, with written comments open until midnight. Give the commission its due. A fee-funded agency that licenses before it can bill is spending money it doesn’t have. Its new executive director, Brett Long, didn’t write the statute that left the agency without fee revenue or the power to license a testing lab. The gap in labs is the one that I’d be worried about. Anyone who has sequenced one of these rollouts has sat through the meeting where a licensee asks what to do with product the rules won’t let them move. There is no good answer in that room, only a faster or slower one. The program is being built in the order its opponents would have picked, cultivation first and everything else later. Every rule routes through Gov. Jim Pillen and Attorney General Mike Hilgers, who both opposed it and are both on the ballot next month. A barn full of degrading flower is the best exhibit anyone could bring to a Legislature looking for reasons to rewrite what 71 percent of voters approved. The patients who voted for this reach the second anniversary next month with nothing to buy. I’d put the first licensed sale after next summer. A lab fix needs a bill, and a bill from the January session takes effect three months after adjournment. The emergency clause that would speed it up takes 33 of 49 senators. If the commission can get an existing state laboratory to take on testing by agreement before session, I’ll happily be wrong, and Monday’s commission meeting is the first place that could show up. (Nebraska Examiner; MJBizDaily; Marijuana Moment)
🤠 James Talarico, the Democratic state representative running for U.S. Senate in Texas, told a Texas Tribune questionnaire he’d work to legalize cannabis federally and send the tax revenue to public safety and health. Ken Paxton, the attorney general on the other side of that race, left the question blank. That fits an office that has sued cities over local decriminalization. Down the ballot, Rep. Vikki Goodwin, who is running for lieutenant governor, rallied for adult-use legalization at High Horse Ice House in San Antonio. She laid the stall at the feet of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who spent 2025 trying to ban the hemp THC Texans already buy at the corner store until Gov. Greg Abbott vetoed it. Texas is the rare state where the legalization argument starts from a THC market that already exists. (Marijuana Moment; San Antonio Current)
Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek Julius gave DEA until October 21st to answer the opponents’ bid to reopen the rescheduling record for discovery and testimony on September’s GAO report. The case stays frozen while he waits. DEA has already told him the report can come in and nothing should come in behind it. The opponents are entitled to ask for more process. Every month of process is also a month the broad rule doesn’t move, and the D.C. Circuit schedule DOJ and the petitioners proposed already runs to February 19th. The only federal track doing anything is the narrow one. DEA has been taking Form 225 applications from state medical licensees since October 5th, which makes a quiet registration portal the most consequential thing in federal cannabis policy this fall. I expect Julius to take the report and deny the rest. A DEA answer that softens on discovery would be the first sign the government has stopped minding the delay. (Marijuana Moment; Cannabis Business Times; Federal Register)
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu came out against Question 8 on Wednesday, recalling that she backed legalization a decade ago when few elected officials would. The Lee Select Board got there unanimously on October 6th. All four Haverhill retailers walk the city this weekend with former NFL players Ricky Williams and Kyle Turley, campaigning against 8 and for a local social consumption question. Ricky sat down with us on The Hybrid, and we’re looking forward to seeing him again this weekend. Early voting opens Saturday on a ballot with nine statewide questions, a Senate race and a governor’s race that aren’t close. Maine and New Hampshire have races that are, and they’re buying up Boston television. Long ballots get skipped from the bottom, and the state constitution helps whoever is defending current law. An initiative needs a majority of those voting on it plus yes votes equal to 30 percent of every ballot cast, so a voter who never reaches 8 counts, in effect, toward no. I’d still put No above 60 percent. The official fiscal statement is the number to expect in the closing two weeks: about $280 million a year to the state and $50 million to cities and towns. The case for voting no is at StoptheRepealMA.com. (Cannabis Business Times; News10; WHAV; Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth)
📊 Headset counts September sales up year over year in 13 of the 15 adult-use markets it tracks, nearly $1.9 billion across all of them. California led at $330 million. The two markets going backward were Michigan, down 3.6 percent on $242 million, and Nevada, down 9.1 percent. Ohio grew 33 percent in its second year of adult-use sales, New York added 10 percent and Illinois nearly 11. Massachusetts came in at $142 million, ahead of Illinois with five million fewer residents. That is one month of the market Question 8 asks voters to close. (Shanken News Daily)
The American Trade Association for Cannabis and Hemp has spent the fall lobbying for the federal rule that would make most of the hemp consumer market illegal. That’s a fine line to walk with hemp on the letterhead. It fought the September extension that kept hemp drinks on shelves. Now its policy chief, Chris Lindsey, has turned on the Marijuana Policy Project, where he spent close to a decade. In a Marijuana Moment op-ed, he scolds his old shop for asking Congress to keep intoxicating hemp legal. The argument leans on equity. Hemp-derived THC pays nothing into the equity funds and agency budgets licensed operators carry, and he counts one hemp-only bill since 2019 that addressed equity at all. Fair enough, if the coalition making the argument looked anything like the people it invokes. ATACH’s board runs from Verano, a multistate operator, to Medicine Man in Denver, with a packaging manufacturer, a humidity-pack maker and a payments company filling out the seats. None of the eight belongs to a social equity licensee. The first sentence of its “About” page says ATACH was founded “to support and protect regulated cannabis businesses,” and hemp doesn’t make that sentence. Then there’s Keef Brands, whose executive chairman sits on ATACH’s board. Keef sells cannabis drinks through dispensaries, and the rule ATACH is defending would clear hemp drinks off grocery and liquor store shelves. Lindsey wants December 11th to treat THCa flower as marijuana and synthetics as designer drugs. Sounds good. He calls the cost of a state license “the price of admission,” and the members who paid it are first in line for the customers when the gas station cooler empties. “THC should be treated as THC” is an easy slogan when your board sells the licensed version. Everyone else in the fight holds a distinct position. The National Consumers League wants no extension without rules. MPP wants the products kept legal while Congress writes them. The Hemp Beverage Alliance backs rules built for drinks, including Reps. Andy Barr and Angie Craig’s Lawful Hemp Protection Act. That bill sets a 21-and-over line, FDA cannabinoid limits, a three-tier system and a five-cent-per-milligram tax. The alcohol wholesalers who would run that three-tier system can afford to wait while hemp and cannabis fight it out. A short extension in the December 11th funding bill still looks likelier to me than a framework. An extension is one line, and a framework needs a markup nobody has scheduled. A Barr-Craig markup before Thanksgiving would change my mind. With the infighting spilling into op-eds, though, it is no surprise Congress lacks an actual path forward. (Marijuana Moment; Office of Rep. Andy Barr; GovInfo)
Vermont sells itself on the farmer standing behind the table at the county fair. The pilot permit James Pepper’s Cannabis Control Board votes on October 23rd would put a cannabis retailer there instead. Licensed retailers could sell inside a sanctioned area at qualifying events, and nobody could consume on site. The roughly 300 small cultivators growing on 1,000 square feet or less would reach the fairgoer through someone else’s register. Starting with retailers makes regulatory sense, since they already carry the ID checks, the inventory tracking and the compliance staff. I’d bet the board passes it with that limit intact. Cultivator access then becomes the second-season fight, argued over a summer of data on whether any of it reached someone under 21. (WCAX)
💨 Good Times in Santa Cruz went looking for the origin of puff-puff-pass, enlisting Brian Kelly of Indiana University, Caleb Chen of the Cal Poly Humboldt Cannabis Studies Lab and Rob Chlala of Cal State Long Beach to help. The earliest recorded reference one of them could find is a 1996 Young Lay track. The custom is surely older than anyone’s willingness to write it down. The rules about who rolls, who lights and who gets skipped have never needed a regulator to enforce them. Vermont’s event permits settle the matter for the fairgrounds by keeping the joint off them altogether. (Good Times)
The Cannabis Control Commission voted October 8th to let its executive director grant license extensions to businesses still waiting on a compliant host community agreement or waiver under the 2022 reform law. In practice, that means businesses waiting on a city or town. Each extension runs up to 365 days and covers HCA compliance only. It requires good standing with the Department of Revenue, a prorated fee and a MassCIP request at least 14 days before expiration. The earlier extension votes come off the books December 8th, and new HCA extensions stop entirely after November 9th, 2027. Both dates are on our Deadlines, Decoded tracker. The second falls less than eight weeks before Question 8 would take effect, and since a regulator can only plan against the statute in force, the commission has written a schedule that assumes the market it oversees is still there. (Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission; Vicente LLP)
New Mexico’s Department of Health is working through roughly 80 comments on its medical psilocybin rules ahead of a December launch. Lawmakers including Rep. Nathan Small are pushing back on the prescriber requirement, landlord consent and staffing ratios. The state has issued its first producer permit to Sacred Alto Spores and has set aside $630,000 for treatment equity and $300,000 for UNM research. In Oregon, where no prescriber is required, Leopoldo Cabassa and colleagues posed as prospective clients with depression and reached 15 of 22 licensed service centers. None offered to skip the screening or let a client dose unsupervised, they report in Health Affairs Scholar. Fifteen phone calls won’t settle a policy argument. They do hand New Mexico’s critics their best evidence yet that a trained, licensed facilitator can hold the line the prescriber requirement was written to hold. The department has about seven weeks to decide how much that’s worth. (Marijuana Moment; Ganjapreneur)
The Supreme Court this week turned away Maurice T. Jones, who challenged the federal felon-in-possession ban as applied to his nonviolent cannabis felony, Law360 reports. The Tenth Circuit had rejected him under its own precedent upholding 18 U.S.C. §922(g)(1). Under April’s rule, a patient buying from a state licensee now deals in a Schedule III substance. Set that beside Jones, and the federal government holds two ideas about the same plant at once. Rescheduling moves the drug and leaves the person where the conviction put him. The provision for current users, §922(g)(3), is the one the Court took up last term in United States v. Hemani, and it’s a separate question. The response to Jim Gay’s dormant Commerce Clause petition is due today, the next cannabis case asking for the same nine justices’ attention. (Law360; U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit)
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