⚖️ Schedule III holds, and the operators stay outside

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A three-judge panel in Washington told a drug testing association and a pharmaceutical company that Schedule III stays where it is while their case runs, and told two cannabis operators they can watch from the gallery. Pennsylvania's Auditor General asked the Department of Health for its inspection files and a third of them were not there. Massachusetts crossed ten billion dollars in gross adult-use sales on Saturday. And Virginia posted the draft rulebook that decides who opens a store in 2027.

⚖️ The stay fails, the operators wait
🗂️ A third of the files are gone
🏛️ Ten billion at the register
🌱 Virginia caps what one company can hold

Judges Robert Wilkins, Justin Walker, and Bradley Garcia denied the stay Wednesday, holding that "petitioners have not satisfied the stringent requirements for a stay pending court review." The June motion from the National Drug and Alcohol Screening Association and MMJ International Holdings would have sent state-licensed medical cannabis and FDA-approved cannabis drug products back to Schedule I while the consolidated challenges proceed. The same order denied MedPharm Iowa and Tri-Mountain Pure the right to intervene, found their interests adequately represented by the government, and admitted them as amici instead. That is the correct test, and the Justice Department has defended this order hard, so the ruling is unremarkable as law and peculiar as a caption. NDASA sells drug testing, MMJ has a cannabinoid drug program and no approved product, and the two companies left outside have filed DEA registrations and stopped paying 280E. The record here gets built entirely by the government and the objectors. I expect a decision on standing rather than on accepted medical use, an opinion reaching the two-part test would prove me wrong, and proposed briefing formats are due within thirty days. (Marijuana Moment; The Marijuana Herald; Law360)

⚖️ Judge Janet C. Hall dismissed the Connecticut hemp farmers' preemption suit Tuesday and refused leave to amend. Michael Goodenough, Darren Cugno, Ricardo Sotil, Norman Plude, and Wells Logging LLC argued the state's THC restrictions conflict with the 2018 Farm Bill, and Hall found the laws they attacked govern the sale of consumable products while these plaintiffs grow and process. She also found they sued the wrong officials, since the agriculture commissioner appears to hold enforcement authority over the state hemp program. The opinion leans on the coming federal definition change to say the dispute will evaporate, and cites a November date that now governs only part of the shelf. (The Marijuana Herald; Goodenough v. Lamont, No. 3:25-cv-1371, D. Conn.)

🧳 The State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs told Americans on Tuesday not to carry cannabis, THC, or CBD products across an international border, including prescribed medical cannabis, and including into countries where cannabis is legal. The useful part of the notice is the dull part, which is to pack from a completely empty bag and check every pocket. Brittney Griner and Marc Fogel both came home through prisoner swaps, and neither had a state-law argument that worked at a foreign customs desk. (Marijuana Moment; U.S. Department of State)

Auditor General Timothy DeFoor released the first performance audit of the state's medical cannabis program since it began in 2016, sampling nine of 34 grower/processors and 30 of 182 dispensaries across calendar 2024. Of 103 inspection checklists requested, 35 had not been retained and two were only partly retained. Twenty-six of the checklists that did surface carried deficiencies requiring a formal Notice of Deficiency. Fifteen of those notices were never issued, nine went out past the bureau's roughly two-and-a-half-month window, and one arrived on time. At a single dispensary, auditors counted fourteen deficiencies and no notice was ever written. The Bureau of Medical Marijuana pointed to staff shortages, a hiring freeze, turnover, medical leave, and no system able to carry the volume by hand, which is what anybody who has run one of these agencies would say, because the inspection file is the first thing that slips and nobody ever calls to complain about a checklist that was not filed. The Department of Health agreed with all nine recommendations, and its real fix is a licensing system that was due in August 2024 and now arrives in March 2027. (Pennsylvania Department of the Auditor General; The Marijuana Herald; ABC27)

🌿 Adria Berry pushed back this week on the charge that OMMA closes businesses over one or two missing tags, calling it "completely dishonest and not factual." She is right that her agency is one link in a longer chain, since the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs picks up after OMMA acts, and right that statute gives OMMA ninety days on a commercial application. Attorney Dana Kurtz wants more training, which is a fair ask and a cheap one to grant. Oklahoma licensed more businesses than its market could carry and is living through the correction now, and running the enforcement docket through that stretch is the least thanked job in the state.
(KJRH)

🧾 New Jersey's Cannabis Regulatory Commission has approved 2,568 of 3,267 applications submitted, with 122 awaiting a cure or resubmission and 96 sitting with Compliance and Investigations. The adult-use approvals sort into 1,700 conditional licenses, 504 conversions from conditional to annual, and 363 annual licenses. Approval and operation are different conditions. The conversion count is the one that describes how many of these actually opened their doors. (The Marijuana Herald)

Massachusetts adult-use retailers, delivery operators, and microbusinesses with delivery endorsements crossed ten billion dollars in cumulative gross sales on Saturday, $10,008,567,111 by the Commission's count, seven months after the ninth billion. I had a hand in standing that agency up and I am proud of it, and of the people who read applications at night and did the unsexy work to stand up bureaucracy. The sales belong to the licensees who made them, one transaction at a time, to adult consumers who chose a regulated store. Ten billion is only what rang through the register, and it leaves out rent paid across more than 300 cities and towns, wages reaching roughly 15,000 employees at 782 operating businesses, and the money moving out to electricians, packaging suppliers, security firms, insurance brokers, testing labs, and accountants who never appear in a sales report. Nobody has run that total for Massachusetts, and whatever it comes to, it is larger than the figure in the release. The state's own share is easier to see, at two billion dollars in state and local taxes since 2016 and approximately $336 million in fiscal 2026 alone by the Department of Revenue's count. In November, voters decide whether the licensed version of this survives, and the filings and schedule are at StoptheRepealMA.com; the Commission expects to open Supplemental License applications for social consumption by year's end, equity applicants first. (Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission; MassLive; New England Public Media)

🗽 The Cannabis Impact Prevention Coalition had a five-judge Third Department panel waiting in Albany on Wednesday to hear its appeal over state financing of turnkey dispensaries, and nobody appeared. The trial court had already dismissed the challenge to the Social Equity Cannabis Investment Fund and the Dormitory Authority's role in it, and the appeal was what remained. A missed argument is not a dismissal and the panel can decide on the papers. It is still a strange way to spend the last procedural chance you have. (Bloomberg Law; New York Law Journal; New York State Appellate Division, Third Department)

🏷️ Metrc is running two New York User Exchange sessions, in New York City on September 14th and Syracuse on September 16th, less than a year after the state's December go-live. New York is the harder kind of implementation, a large market with a long licensing backlog and many operators who built their businesses outside any track-and-trace regime, and putting people in rooms in two regions is the right way to close that distance. Berry pointed Oklahoma licensees toward the same company's training library this week. Compliance education has quietly relocated to the vendor. (Cannabis Business Times; Metrc)

The Cannabis Control Authority posted its draft adult-use regulations alongside Wednesday's board meeting, the first detailed look at the market that opens July 1, 2027. Cultivation runs in five canopy tiers, from 5,000 square feet at Tier I to 35,000 at Tier V, with outdoor growing allowed only in the first two. No person may hold an interest in more than five establishment licenses or more than one Tier V, testing laboratories stay independent of everyone, and a microbusiness can hold nothing else. Impact licensees, meaning businesses at least 51 percent owned and controlled by people who meet a geographic test tied to disproportionate enforcement plus one additional qualifying factor, run their own lottery first and roll into the general pool if they miss. Their preferences include fee reductions, grants and low-interest loans, and an exemption from proving funds or site control at the initial application stage, which reckons with what an eighteen-month buildout clock does to an applicant without capital. Every licensee must also enter and maintain a labor peace agreement, and losing one can cost the license. The Cannabis Public Health Advisory Council takes the draft up in October and finishes in December, and I think the five-license cap draws the heaviest comment in that window, unless the labor peace requirement generates more written objections than the caps do. (The Marijuana Herald; Virginia Cannabis Control Authority)

🏗️ Maryland's Cannabis Administration and Department of General Services are looking for an operator to run a state-managed incubator for social equity microbusiness licensees, roughly 30,000 square feet of shared processing space, equipment, storage, and training. Responses are due September 28th through eMMA. Conditional social equity licensees approaching their 24-month deadline can seek up to two six-month extensions. Shared infrastructure is the version of equity support that survives a budget cycle, since a building keeps working after the grant program ends. (The Outlaw Report)

🏙️ Washington's Alcoholic Beverage and Cannabis Administration will let conditional medical cannabis licensees convert to a location-bound license using a zoning certificate instead of a Certificate of Occupancy, an emergency change running through October 28th. Conditional licenses keep their original three-year expiration regardless. A Certificate of Occupancy arrives after a buildout the licensee cannot finance without the license. This measure breaks that circle for seven weeks. (The Outlaw Report)

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