⚖️ The signatures stand in Nebraska

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A quick note before the news: I will be at the PBC Conference in Washington later this week. If you are going to be there, come find me.

It is Labor Day, the unofficial end of summer and the anniversary of a holiday the labor movement built for itself. Congress made it federal in June of 1894, while the Pullman strike was still running. The industry we cover employs 412,500 people by the latest Vangst and Whitney Economics count, and they are building careers inside a market their own government still calls illegal. Enjoy the cookout, and raise something for the people who work the floors. The news, meanwhile, did not take the day off. Nebraska's Supreme Court closed a two-year fight over the 2024 medical cannabis petitions on Friday. The same day, a federal judge in Ohio enjoined that state's hemp redefinition on the merits. And a ProPublica and Denver Gazette investigation into a Colorado sleep pill turned up a two-year gap between when the manufacturer started hearing complaints and when any regulator did.

🌽 The signatures stand
⚖️ Ohio's ban meets the Commerce Clause
🕰️ The sleep pill that was never a cannabis problem
🤠 Texas gets an October date

If you have been waiting to see whether the legal foundation under Nebraska's medical program would hold, it held. The state Supreme Court affirmed the judgment upholding the 2024 petitions on Friday, closing the challenge John Kuehn filed on September 12, 2024, weeks before anyone voted. The arithmetic in Kuehn v. Evnen, No. S-24-901, was never close. Each petition needed 86,499 valid signatures plus the constitutional spread across 38 counties. Sponsors Anna Wishart, Crista Eggers, and Adam Morfeld turned in 114,367 and 114,596, and Secretary of State Bob Evnen verified 89,962 and 89,856. Lancaster County District Judge Susan Strong found additional invalid signatures at trial, nowhere near enough to matter, and the high court turned away what was left on appeal, including the theories built on circulator and notary conduct and on witnesses who took the Fifth. Several outlets are calling this the attorney general's lawsuit. Attorney General Mike Hilgers's office litigated hard against these petitions, but the plaintiff was Kuehn, a former state senator. What Friday actually changes is who feels safe participating. The permanent rules route every patient through a practitioner directory, and that directory stayed thin because physicians did not want to be the test case for an attorney general who was still in court over the program's legitimacy. He is not in court anymore. I think that directory grows meaningfully before the end of the year, since the risk keeping doctors out was litigation risk and Friday retired it. If the list is not visibly longer by January, legal exposure was never the binding constraint, and the twelve-dispensary cap is the real problem, which is a harder fix and a legislative one. (Nebraska Judicial Branch; Nebraska Examiner; Lincoln Journal Star; KETV)

🗳️ The court settled the last cycle on Friday, and the governor spent Wednesday working on the next one. Gov. Jim Pillen, Evnen, and county election commissioners announced a push to rewrite Nebraska's initiative process after officials reviewed roughly 767,000 signatures across 17 petitions and some 85,000 pages. The headline proposal would ban paying circulators by the signature, a restriction Nebraska kept on the books until the Legislature dropped it in 2015. Nothing is drafted, and the officials asking for it are the ones who just lost. Whether the unicameral gives them thirty-three votes is a 2027 question. (Office of Governor Jim Pillen; 1011 NOW; Nebraska Examiner)

Judge Jeffrey Helmick granted a preliminary injunction Thursday in Delta Beverages v. Canepa and entered judgment the same day, barring Ohio from enforcing Senate Bill 56's narrowed hemp definition against fourteen companies, Rhinegeist and Great Lakes Brewing and Seventh Son and Fifty West and Hometown Hero among them, so long as their products remain hemp under federal law. He read SB 56 together with Ohio's existing licensing code and found the thing the statute never says out loud: once products above 0.3 percent total THC became marijuana, and marijuana licensees may not obtain or move product across state lines, Ohio had quietly reserved its intoxicating hemp market for companies that source, manufacture, and sell entirely in state. Granholm and National Pork Producers make that arrangement a constitutional problem, and the dormant Commerce Clause applies whether or not Congress has spoken. He also refused to sever the advertising and age-gating provisions from the licensing architecture, answering Ohio's warning about a hemp "wild west" with a question of his own: "why would it pass a bill that did not regulate those products?" This is his second injunction against SB 56 this summer, after Titan Logistics, which is already up at the Sixth Circuit. The ruling also lands squarely on one side of a real split, with the First and Second Circuits applying dormant Commerce Clause principles to state cannabis licensing, the Ninth holding they do not protect commerce in a federally illegal market, and the Supreme Court content to let that sit. Ohio will appeal rather than govern under an injunction, and I expect the Sixth Circuit to write the next consequential word on state hemp bans well before Congress does. Titan is already briefed there, and appellate panels move faster than conference committees. A December framework out of Congress that occupies this field would change that, and drain most of the stakes out of these cases before any panel rules. (Delta Beverage, Inc. v. Canepa, No. 3:26-cv-01793, N.D. Ohio, Sept. 4, 2026)

🏛️ The state-licensed industry spent the same week making the opposite argument in person. Bloomberg Government reported Friday that the U.S. Cannabis Roundtable, led by Saphira Galoob, worked Capitol Hill urging members not to reopen a federal pathway for intoxicating hemp as Congress heads toward December 11th. That is the structural grievance in institutional form: operators who built to a rulebook, asking Congress not to bless the competitors who skipped it. (Bloomberg Government)

ProPublica and The Denver Gazette published an investigation Friday into how long Colorado takes to warn consumers about products under review, built around 1906 Midnight Drops, the sleep pill made by Sima Sciences. The timeline is genuinely bad. State health officials began receiving reports of liver injury in March 2022, the Marijuana Enforcement Division posted an informational notification about four months later, and the stronger notice describing continuing reports of acute liver injury did not come until June 2023. By May 2024 the health department had 52 reports of harm, at least 20 requiring medical care, and 25 of them landed before that second notice. Across the cases the reporters reviewed, Colorado averaged more than seven months from complaint to public warning. What the reporting moves past is the ingredient. Midnight Drops contained corydalis rhizome extract, whose active compound is tetrahydropalmatine, and after the March 2022 reformulation it contained Stephania extract, which is primarily L-THP, the same compound by another name. That is a botanical supplement ingredient, sold today in vitamin shops and online in every state in the country, with no cannabis regulator anywhere near it. The cannabinoids in the product were the least interesting thing in the bottle. The company's own file is the other thing. The attorney general's office found that Sima started receiving complaints shortly after launch in 2020, two years before any health official heard a word, and the company spent August 2022 quietly changing the ingredient named on its website while keeping the same marketing copy and the same picture of the plant. That is the conduct the $400,000 settlement addressed, with another $600,000 riding on violations, and it is the reason the product line is gone. Give the division its due here, because it earned some. MED and CDPHE named corydalis and the hepatotoxicity concern in the very first notification in July 2022, when the science on the compound was thin and the manufacturer was still telling them the reformulated product was clean. The division also concluded it lacked authority to pull the product off shelves in this situation, which is a statutory problem rather than a nerve problem. And those notices did work as something nobody designed them to be. I know that firsthand: Massachusetts learned about this product because Colorado published, not because a single Massachusetts consumer complaint ever reached us. There is no national adverse-event system for state-licensed cannabis, so a PDF on a Colorado website is the interstate early-warning infrastructure, such as it is. Legislatures will reach for a warning clock, because a deadline is easy to write and costs an agency nothing but discretion. I do not think a clock alone would have saved anyone here. What would have is a duty on the licensee to report the complaints it receives, and someone with authority over the non-cannabis botanicals operators are dropping into cannabis products. The Chattings' suit continues, and Colorado's General Assembly convenes in January with this series on the record. (ProPublica; The Denver Gazette; Colorado Marijuana Enforcement Division notifications, July 22, 2022 and June 1, 2023)

🧪 Arizona is working through a version of the same question, with the authority Colorado said it lacked. The Arizona Republic reported that Kaycha Labs' Tempe facility kept its certification through repeated state findings after an $88,500 penalty in 2025, including a June inspection that identified a dilution practice capable of moving THC potency results. The health department's March certified-laboratory list still carries Kaycha at full scope. Testing integrity is the floor everything else in this market stands on, and a lab that stays certified through years of findings turns honesty into a competitive disadvantage for every lab that plays it straight. ADHS has not said what a third year of findings would change. (The Arizona Republic; MJBizDaily; Arizona Department of Health Services)

A Travis County judge denied the temporary restraining order hemp businesses sought against the Department of State Health Services' July 31st scheduling action, and set the temporary-injunction hearing for October 30th at 9 a.m. before Judge Maria Cantú Hexsel. The plaintiffs, including SS Distro USA, KingPin Kush, and My City Hemp, represented by David Sergi, argue that DSHS moved manufactured delta-8 and related isomers into Penalty Group 2 without the formal rulemaking Texas law requires, built enforcement on a "trace amount" exemption it has never defined, and added $10,000 manufacturer and $5,000 retailer fees on top. Their submitted economic analysis puts state consumable-hemp revenue at $5.1 billion a year across some 48,900 jobs, which are litigation figures rather than findings. When this fight reached an Austin courtroom in late August, the whole argument narrowed to that one undefined word, and it is undefined still. If you operate in Texas, you are running against a standard nobody can quote for at least eight more weeks, with no order protecting you in the meantime. High Times' review of the aggregate-weight sentencing rules found that a single package of converted-cannabinoid edibles can compute to felony weight on paper, though it turned up no individual prosecution on those terms since the change took effect. Eight more weeks of enforcement under a word the state has still not defined. (The Marijuana Herald; High Times; MJBizDaily guest commentary)

🧃 Springfield Township, New Jersey, is weighing a 2 percent local excise on intoxicating hemp beverage sales, according to TAPinto's reporting on the proposed ordinance. A town that taxes the category is a town assuming the category survives December, which makes even a small municipal excise a quiet wager on the federal outcome. No hearing date has been published. (TAPinto Springfield)

Florida's Department of Health proposed Rule 64-4.227, "MMTC Advertising and Marketing," on August 24th, converting emergency rules into the permanent regulation governing how the country's largest medical program markets itself, under the statute the Legislature rewrote in 2025. Comments close September 14th, one week from today. MJBizDaily and Politico report the proposal would tighten restrictions on celebrity-branded products, the lane where the Mike Tyson and Wiz Khalifa licensing deals live, along with social media marketing and certain roadside marquee advertising. Read the notice itself before you draft anything, because the rule text controls and the coverage does not. An emergency rule is a placeholder everyone treats as temporary. A permanent rule is the operating system a 940,000-patient market runs on for years, and the difference gets decided in comment files exactly like this one, usually by whoever bothered to write. Any operator holding a celebrity contract has seven days to get that on the record. (Florida Administrative Register, Notice 31289210; MJBizDaily; Politico)

🌲 In New Hampshire, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cinde Warmington told a town hall the state should legalize adult-use cannabis rather than keep exporting its residents' spending to Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine. Gov. Kelly Ayotte opposes legalization. The geography argues for whoever holds the podium, since every neighboring state already runs the experiment New Hampshire keeps declining to join. (Marijuana Moment)

The FDA published a request for information Thursday on botanical drug development, Docket FDA-2026-N-9550, asking developers and researchers where the pathway breaks down and what would fix it. The agency notes that four botanical products have ever won approval, three through new drug applications and one through a biologics license. Comments close November 3rd. The notice never mentions cannabis. Cannabis-derived medicines fit the botanical framework, drug-development interest is running higher than at any point in a decade with rescheduling live, and a docket like this is where a category either writes itself into the record or watches other plants do it instead. The relevance is the industry's to establish, comment by comment, because the agency did not establish it for anyone. If you are planning a cannabinoid IND, November 3rd is your deadline, and nobody else is going to file that comment for you. (Federal Register, 91 Fed. Reg. 56887; The Marijuana Herald)

Marijuana Moment reports that President Trump commuted the sentences of Jerry Haymon IV, who received a 10-year mandatory minimum in a cannabis distribution conspiracy and had roughly a year left on home confinement, and Kevin Harden, thirty years into a marijuana conspiracy sentence and a co-defendant of James Romans, who got clemency from Trump earlier. Advocates including Weldon Angelos's Mission Green pressed both cases through pardon czar Alice Johnson's office. Relief is moving person by person while the categorical version waits on a scheduling docket with no deadline, and there are far more files than warrants. (Marijuana Moment)

🎰 Nevada's Cannabis Advisory Commission taxation subcommittee met Friday to continue the study the Legislature ordered under AB 76, weighing whether to scrap the 15 percent wholesale excise on the first sale, raise the 10 percent adult-use retail excise to make up the difference, and extend an excise to consumable hemp, all while keeping the State Education Fund whole. Wholesale taxes are the ones operators carry when prices fall, which is precisely why the industry asked for this study. Recommendations go to the 2027 session. (Nevada Cannabis Compliance Board; The Marijuana Herald)

🏙️ New York's Cannabis Control Board met Thursday in Buffalo, and Cannabis Wire's account includes a proximity fight worth your attention if you hold New York paper: CAURD licensee Sons of Cannabis wants a waiver for a location just over 250 feet from an existing dispensary near Herald Square, with cultivation supply and ownership questions also before the board. Density policy in that state is being written one waiver at a time, storefront by storefront. (Cannabis Wire)

🌱 In Peekskill, Grand Street Cannabis Co. has held its special permit since December and still cannot put a plant in the ground, because the building's certificate of occupancy reflects the single-tenant use on file since 2018. The city flagged it last October and ordered landlord to fix it, the Planning Commission approved the corrected site plan in June, and the matter is now in city court. Principal Dwayne Reith did everything his license asked of him. The gap between a license issuing and revenue existing runs through paperwork the licensee does not control. The next hearing is September 25th, over a building. (Peekskill Herald)

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