⚖️ Texas never defined "trace." A judge noticed.

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A Travis County judge spent Friday afternoon asking Texas what "trace amount" means and left the courthouse without an order on the docket. The House comes back to Washington today with the Senate's hemp delay on its suspension calendar and a White House statement behind it. In Missouri, the state told a federal judge its hemp ban is simple, and the plaintiffs answered that a law which needs its defender to explain it has conceded the point. In Sand Springs, Oklahoma, a licensed extraction lab that a fire marshal had ordered shut a week earlier exploded, killed two men, and put its owner on a murder warrant. And Minnesota published its licensing count, which shows 350 cannabis licenses issued and 16 of them retail.

⚖️ Trace, undefined
🏛️ Suspension week
🧯 The stop order that stopped nothing

Judge Maya Guerra Gamble, sitting as Travis County's emergency judge for the week, heard the hemp retailers' request for a temporary restraining order against the Department of State Health Services on Friday, and closed by saying she needed time. The argument narrowed to one word. The Texas Supreme Court's Sky Marketing opinion let DSHS treat manufactured delta-8 as a controlled substance while exempting naturally occurring trace amounts. Since the rules took effect at the start of August, DSHS has been detaining product and referring retailers under a standard that uses "trace" without ever saying what it is. David Sergi, for the plaintiffs, argued that a threshold an agency enforces is a rule, and a rule goes through rulemaking before anyone is detained under it. Jim Rich, for the Attorney General's office, argued there is no irreparable harm because a seller whose product is held can contest the hold and eventually get it back. Gamble's sharpest questions went to the plaintiffs. She said she would not sign an order that lets anyone sell delta-8 marketed as delta-8, told Sergi the draft in front of her did not make that clear, and sent him back to narrow it. My read is that any TRO she signs will cover less than the petition asked for, because a judge who says on the record which order she will not sign has already drawn the line. The temporary injunction hearing in September is where the trace question actually gets answered. The state's no-harm argument is weaker than it sounded in the room. Kingpin Kush pulled more than $300,000 in inventory to stay out of a referral, and an owner who wins the product back in six months has still lost the season he needed it for. I would revise the read if the signed order defines trace itself, since a judge willing to supply the number is a judge willing to run the agency's rulemaking for it. (KXAN; FOX 7 Austin; KSAT; Texas Supreme Court, Sky Marketing)

The House returns from recess today with the Senate's continuing resolution scheduled under suspension of the rules, which requires two-thirds and therefore Democrats, and with a Statement of Administration Policy in which the White House says the president "strongly opposes another futile government shutdown." The hemp provision in that bill moves the federal restrictions from November 12th to December 11th. Politico reported Friday that Trump personally called Sen. Ted Budd after Budd filed his amendment to strip the delay. Budd demanded the vote anyway and lost it 61 to 32. In a statement Thursday he called it "morally reprehensible to threaten a shutdown over a loophole Congress agreed to close." Riley Moore told reporters this month he expected the House to iron out the hemp language rather than pass the Senate bill clean. The suspension calendar says leadership disagrees. The administration also does not expect to finish hemp regulations by December 11th, so Jonathan Miller of the U.S. Hemp Roundtable is describing a "regulatory bridge" of interim rules, a 21-and-over floor, a ban on Chinese imports, manufacturing standards, a copycat-packaging crackdown, and labeling, that would ride on whatever funds the government after December 11th. Christopher Lackner of the Hemp Beverage Alliance put the posture plainly. "The hemp industry does not have an August recess." My read is that December 11th is the first extension rather than the last. The administration asked for this date to write rules and has now told the industry it cannot write them in time, and a second extension attached to the next funding vehicle costs the same votes this one does. A proposed rule in the Federal Register before Thanksgiving would change that read, and so would a House amendment this week, since either would mean someone chose the harder path. The Senate is out until September 14th. (Politico; Washington Times; Roll Call; Hemp Beverage Alliance)

The state's motion to dismiss the MoHemp Trade Association's federal challenge to House Bill 2641 tells Judge M. Douglas Harpool the statute is easy to read. A product that meets the definition of a hemp-derived cannabinoid product is marijuana, "it is that simple," and the suit is part of a nationwide industry playbook that has lost elsewhere. The plaintiffs' response, filed this week by Chuck Hatfield, argues that a law whose defender has to explain which of its overlapping definitions controls has conceded the vagueness claim in the act of denying it. Neither filing touches the clock. HB 2641 takes effect November 12th regardless of how Harpool rules, keeps its ban on everything except beverages even if Congress moves the federal date, and confines whatever survives to licensed dispensaries. My read is the vagueness count survives the motion, because Harpool has no reason to resolve a definitional fight on the pleadings when the effective date gives him ten weeks to hear it. (Missouri Independent; Marijuana Moment)

💊 Britain's medical cannabis market is now mostly a high-THC flower market. Prescription data that Business of Cannabis pulled from the NHS Business Services Authority through two freedom-of-information requests count 1,774,669 items dispensed in 2025, up 165 percent in a year. Among the flower records the outlet could classify, 53.6 percent were labeled at 25 percent THC or higher in 2025, and roughly two-thirds in the 2026 months available so far. Products above 22 percent went from about three-quarters of flower to 85 percent. The outlet flags that the 2026 data are partial and that some prescriber codes are clinics rather than doctors, which is honest and does not move the trend. A private prescription market that began as a CBD-oil story eight years ago has sorted itself toward the strongest product a clinic can lawfully write, and the prescribing rules put no potency ceiling in its way. (Business of Cannabis; NHS Business Services Authority)

Two men died when Solos Extract Co. in Sand Springs, Oklahoma exploded around 1:00AM Thursday during a butane extraction run, one at the scene and one at the hospital, and the blast damaged at least 25 businesses in the Morrow-Gill complex and was felt up to 30 miles away. The Sand Springs fire marshal had failed the facility on inspection the week before and ordered it to stop operating until the discrepancies were fixed, and according to Deputy Chief Todd Enzbrenner it had not fixed them. One of the dead was reportedly living inside the building. Tulsa County District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler charged the owner, Ryan Bassham, on Friday with two counts of first-degree murder in the commission of a crime, and police say he may have left the state. The Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority confirmed that licensed businesses operate in the complex and said it is working with investigators; the hazardous-processor license that butane extraction requires under OMMA's rules is the document everyone will be asking for. A fire marshal in a city of 20,000 found the hazard a week early, wrote it up, and issued the only order he had, which was a piece of paper. My expectation is that this ends in a rule about what happens to a cannabis license the day a local fire official issues a stop order. The state has now watched the gap between those two authorities cost two lives, and Oklahoma's legislature has never needed much prompting to write cannabis rules. The charges against Bassham are allegations. Whether the fire marshal's finding reached OMMA before Thursday is the question the file will answer. (KJRH; NewsOn6; KTUL; FOX23; Law&Crime, citing Tulsa World)

The Office of Cannabis Management's August 24th data put issued cannabis business licenses at 350, with 1,255 more preliminarily approved: 254 microbusinesses, 22 mezzobusinesses, 20 cultivators, 16 retailers, 12 transporters, 10 wholesalers, six delivery services, five testing labs, three manufacturers, and two medical combination businesses. Of the 150 retail licenses the statute allows, 854 applied, 132 withdrew, 494 lost the lottery, 80 hold preliminary approval, and 16 are open. A supply chain that finally started delivering flower this summer has 16 licensed front doors beyond the tribal stores and the microbusinesses selling their own product. Preliminary approval starts an 18-month clock for local sign-off, final plans, and inspection, so the 80 will arrive one city council at a time. The lower-potency hemp side is tracked separately, at 2,001 licenses. (Minnesota Office of Cannabis Management; The Marijuana Herald)

🌲 Oregon's Liquor and Cannabis Commission closed applications Friday for a Rules Advisory Committee on permanent rules to lift the moratorium on new wholesale licenses, the first move to reopen a frozen license class since the legislature imposed the freeze in 2022 and extended it in 2024 through House Bill 4121. Wholesale is the right place to start and the least consequential. A wholesaler moves product between licensees and adds no canopy, so lifting that freeze does nothing to the six-million-pound harvest the state's own economists just priced into nine years of lower revenue. The advisory committee is where the agency finds out whether anyone wants to argue the producer side next. (Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission; The Marijuana Herald)

The Maryland Cannabis Administration put Evermore Cannabis Company on two years of conditional probation and fined it $50,000, payable in ten $5,000 installments, over 24 instances in which the Baltimore cultivator handed loose, untested, unpackaged flower to employees as "samples" in amounts well past what any individual may lawfully hold, according to a consent order reviewed by the Outlaw Report. The inventory manager logged six transactions dispensing 45 to 150 grams to herself. The case began with an unannounced inspection on October 17, 2025, and the order tightens how Evermore records and audits employee product from here. The case was made in the ledger. Product that leaves a facility without a Metrc tag leaves a hole in it, and an inspector reconciling the ledger against the vault is how a hole becomes a finding. A pre-charge consent order under the Evermore name has sat on the agency's sanctions list since 2022, which is one way to read the conditions attached to this probation. (Outlaw Report; Maryland Cannabis Administration)

🔬 High Times ran the Colorado numbers on potency labels. Ripple bought 15 Denver flower and shake products in 2024 and sent them to a state-licensed lab. Two met every requirement tested, twelve fell outside Colorado's 15 percent tolerance, flower labels averaged 34 percent above the measured THC, and shake labels averaged 59 percent above. A separate University of Colorado Boulder audit of 277 products from 52 dispensaries topped out at 33 percent measured against labels that reached 39. Rubén Valenzuela of Valenveras, which sells portable analyzers and says so, argues that somewhere around 34 percent is the ceiling a plant can produce and everything above it is a marketing decision. That last claim is an expert's inference rather than a settled number. What the piece establishes without the inference is the shape of the error, which runs one direction at a size no lab variance explains, and Massachusetts pulled 13 of 63 flower products off its shelves this month for the same reason. (High Times; Ripple; University of Colorado Boulder)

Assembly Bill 2250 cleared the Senate 38 to 0 on August 25th and the Assembly concurred 78 to 0 the next day, and Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, who wrote last year's AB 8, calls it a technical clean-up of her own work. Most of it is. Beginning January 1st, 2028, CBN isolate above 99 percent purity joins CBD isolate outside the definition of cannabis concentrate, so a sleep gummy made from hemp CBN no longer sits one prosecutor away from a controlled-substance charge. AB 8 barred tobacco retailers from possessing or selling cannabis without funding anyone to go find it. AB 2250 lets the state spend compliance-fund money to seize and destroy what inspectors turn up at the smoke-shop counter, which is the difference between a prohibition and an enforcement program. Newsom has until the end of September, and my guess is it gets signed without a message. (California Legislative Information; The Marijuana Herald; Law Office of Shay Aaron Gilmore)

🌱 Maine's Office of Cannabis Policy told outdoor-only medical caregivers Thursday that they may keep seedlings and immature plants alive through January and February 2027, then said in the same guidance that the statute does not allow it. P.L. 2025, ch. 514 created the outdoor-only registration on July 29th with a March-through-December growing season and applied the season to every plant, including the ones that have to be started under lights in February to be in the ground by March. The agency read the Legislature's intent, granted a one-winter grace period, and put a date on its own forbearance. If lawmakers do not fix the text next session, outdoor caregivers stop all cultivation each January and February beginning in 2028. That is the correct way for an agency to handle a drafting error, in writing, with a sunset, and with the fix assigned to the branch that made the mistake. (Maine Office of Cannabis Policy; The Marijuana Herald)

🗳️ Kim Ahern's two years chairing Rhode Island's Cannabis Control Commission have become an issue in the Democratic primary for attorney general, nine days out, because no new adult-use retail license issued on her watch after she said in 2023 she hoped stores could open in 2024. The Boston Globe walked the record and quoted the legalization sponsors, who do not put the delay on her. The chronology does not either. The commission ran the process the General Assembly wrote, the residency requirement in that statute drew three federal suits, Judge Melissa DuBose froze licensing in April, and the legislature rewrote the law in June, months after Ahern had left to run. A chair cannot license around a statute, and the applicants who paid $7,500 to enter a round the state later voided know which building the delay came from. Primary day is September 9th. (The Boston Globe; Rhode Island Current)

Frank Perullo, co-founder and president of Ascend Wellness, spent Friday afternoon on direct examination in the federal extortion trial of former Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins, under an immunity agreement the government disclosed in openings. He told the jury Tompkins asked in the summer of 2020 to invest ahead of the IPO and that he brushed it off. The sheriff kept coming back, he said, with the reminder that Ascend "would not be this big company" without him and the reentry hiring partnership that anchored the company's Boston license application. Perullo said he relented because a pulled partnership meant delays the company could not afford before going public. Martin Weinberg has not cross-examined him yet, and the defense's case is that Perullo owned the shares, controlled the decision, and campaigned for Tompkins's reelection afterward. Andrea Cabral, Ascend's Massachusetts chief executive and Tompkins's predecessor as sheriff, testifies for the defense. Judge Myong Joun has the trial through the first week of September, and the verdict turns on whether a jury believes the license was ever in danger. (WBUR; The Boston Globe; GBH)

🎾 Katie Boulter, Britain's top-ranked woman, told reporters before the US Open that the cannabis smell drifting onto the practice courts and some outer courts from Corona Park is a distraction she does not want in the middle of a match, and Fran Jones and Harriet Dart said the same. The USTA said it stays vigilant and cannot control what happens outside its gates, and it is right about both. New York lets adults smoke cannabis anywhere the state lets them smoke tobacco, the park is public, and Flushing Meadows is open-air. Nick Kyrgios raised it in 2022, Maria Sakkari asked the chair umpire about it in 2023, and Casper Ruud brought it up last year, so the complaint is now as much a fixture of the first week as rain. Five years into legalization, the most-watched consequence in the country's largest city is a smell that a tennis federation has politely conceded it cannot regulate. (ESPN; BBC Sport; The Times)

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