🍁 Vermont's lieutenant governor pays $2,500 and calls it steep

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Vermont's lieutenant governor paid the Cannabis Control Board $2,500 over plants in a greenhouse nobody registered, then told a reporter the price was steep. Michigan's 24 percent wholesale tax now has a candidate for governor running on repeal and an industry fundraiser behind him. The Census Bureau published five years of cannabis tax data showing eleven new taxing states and almost no new money. And somebody sent me (and many others) a fake email from Oklahoma's regulator.

🍁 Half the fine, all of the complaint
💸 A tax finds a candidate
📊 Eleven states, 15.7 percent
🎣 The fake notice in my inbox

Lieutenant Governor John Rodgers agreed to pay the Cannabis Control Board $2,500 over roughly 100 seedlings his cultivation business kept in a greenhouse on a parcel the board had not approved. Rodgers holds two licensed sites, his son and business partner filed to add the third, and nobody confirmed the filing went through. A routine inspection turned it up. The board's August 13th notice carried $5,000, the settlement cut that in half, and Rodgers still described it as "a very expensive fine for a very minor infraction" that a more collegial process could have resolved. He also said the failure to follow up was his own. I spent enough years on the issuing side of notices like this one to know the amount comes off a schedule that shouldn’t care who the respondent is, which is the entire value of having a schedule. Compliance adds up exactly this way, one unconfirmed form at a time, and the cultivators who did file for their second site paid for the same inspector who drove out to Glover. A sitting statewide officeholder answering to that inspector on the record does more for the board's credibility than any policy statement it could issue. Rodgers is a Republican and faces former Lieutenant Governor Molly Gray in November, and the settlement is now a public document in that race. (Vermont Public; VTDigger)

🎣 The Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority warned licensees this week about emails impersonating the agency, and the mail is traveling well past the licensee list. One of the fraudulent messages reached me, and many others I know, and none of us hold an Oklahoma license, which puts the sender's list somewhere other than OMMA's registry. Earlier versions carried fake license-suspension notices with malicious attachments, and a suspension notice is the one email a licensee opens before finishing the sentence. Adria Berry's agency has documented this pattern before. The check that works is the licensee portal, which will either say the same thing or say nothing. (KFOR; KOCO)

John James, the Republican nominee for governor, wants to repeal or sharply reduce the 24 percent wholesale tax Michigan layered on top of its existing 10 percent excise and 6 percent sales tax in January. He said so publicly in mid-August, weeks after making the same case at a July fundraiser that executives of JARS Cannabis organized for him, which state disclosures put at nearly $90,000 from about 100 attendees. That is a slice of the roughly $1.2 million his campaign has raised since late July, and it is the first time this tax has organized a room on its own behalf. The arithmetic helps him. The levy brought in $73.4 million through six months against a $315 million consensus for the fiscal year and an original legislative projection near $420 million. Jocelyn Benson has taken no position. James argues that repeal respects the law voters passed in 2018, a law he has said he would have voted against, which is a defensible place to land and an awkward one to campaign from. The road agencies that organized in August to defend money already programmed into projects have not gone anywhere, and a tax with constituencies on both sides is harder to kill than one with enemies only. I expect Benson to commit to a position before the first debate; her staying silent through October would prove me wrong. (Bridge Michigan; Marijuana Moment; Michigan Department of Treasury)

⚖️ Judge Jill Otake dismissed the preemption challenge to Hawaii's hemp restrictions on September 4th and denied the injunction Lance Alyas and Kyler Falces-Cachola sought, holding that the 2018 Farm Bill's protection for interstate transport does not reach a state's control of in-state sale and distribution, including Hawaii's treatment of THCA inside total THC. Alyas filed in January, after enforcement under Act 269 began in July. Congress protected the truck, and Hawaii regulates the shelf. (The Marijuana Herald; Alyas v. Lopez, No. 1:26-cv-00035, D. Haw.)

🧾 TerrAscend has until September 18th to answer the government's suit seeking return of roughly $8.36 million it received after amending its 2020 return to claim about $64.6 million in deductions. The United States filed in May and had demanded roughly $9.53 million with interest in April. These are allegations and nothing has been adjudicated. The refund years are the piece of Section 280E that April's rescheduling order left entirely open, and TerrAscend is the company that has to answer for them first. (The Marijuana Herald; United States v. TerrAscend USA, Inc., No. 2:26-cv-05640, D.N.J.)

The Census Bureau updated its cannabis excise series Thursday. Total state cannabis tax revenue rose from $3.06 billion in fiscal 2022 to $3.55 billion in fiscal 2026, an increase of 15.7 percent, with cumulative collections since the third quarter of 2021 passing $15.8 billion. Over those same five years the number of jurisdictions collecting the tax went from 19 states and the District of Columbia to 30 and the District, Alabama arriving most recently in May on medical sales alone. Eleven new taxing states bought the country a 15.7 percent increase, so the average state's share has been shrinking the whole time the headline number climbed. The quarter itself reads healthy at $987.5 million, up about 11 percent from the same quarter of 2025. California reported $161 million and Washington $153.1 million, under $8 million apart, between a state of 39 million people and a state of eight million, and Washington's rate structure does most of that work. Michigan came in at $110.6 million, New York at $76.8 million and Illinois at $71.8 million, and those five states hold 58 percent of everything Census counted. The series lags a quarter behind the sales it measures, leaves out medical revenue and licensing fees, and gets revised, with the first quarter of 2026 reported at $825.1 million in June and reading $851.6 million now. Anyone building a 2027 budget off one quarter of this data is building off a draft. (U.S. Census Bureau, Quarterly Summary of State and Local Government Tax Revenue; Marijuana Moment; The Marijuana Herald)

🎟️ The Missouri Lottery drew the state's third and final microbusiness round on September 9th from 888 applications, for roughly 77 licenses starting in December, about 20 of which exist because earlier ones were revoked or surrendered. The Division of Cannabis Regulation ran the drawing blind, assigning each application a number and emailing applicants their identifier beforehand, so nothing in the room connected a file to a person. Names follow in the coming weeks, once DCR cross-references the draw and runs eligibility. The constitution asks for 144 microbusiness licenses; as of August 18th, 21 were operating. (Missouri Division of Cannabis Regulation; MMJDaily)

🧪 A review led by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine researchers in Current Neuropharmacology gathered 22 controlled human studies of delta-9 THC combined with other cannabis compounds and found the broad entourage claim unproven, describing a translation gap where animal models show synergy that human laboratories fail to reproduce. Clinical data on minor cannabinoids and terpenes remain, in the authors' description, "exceptionally limited." The authors stop short of calling the effect a myth. The same institution produced the 2024 d-limonene trial that is still the strongest evidence for any specific interaction, which makes this harder to wave off as skepticism from outside the field. (StratCann; Current Neuropharmacology)

🎒 Faith English and coauthors at UMass Amherst and Johns Hopkins interviewed 18 Massachusetts residents under 21 who had been disciplined at school over cannabis, publishing the results in the International Journal of Drug Policy. The four themes they found were surveillance, inconsistency in how discipline landed, a sense that the response did more damage than the conduct, and support for transparent harm-reduction approaches over exclusion. Eighteen interviews generalize to eighteen people. They still describe the part of legalization nobody licenses, where a state with a ten-billion-dollar regulated market hands teenagers consequences under rules written district by district. (MG Magazine; International Journal of Drug Policy)

🏀 Boston Celtics legend Robert Parish is putting his name on a five-product line with Canna Provisions, built around a strain called Full Court Chronic and reaching shelves in Holyoke, Lee and Pittsfield on September 21st. Parish says he has shopped there since 2020, and the company made the announcement, so read the enthusiasm accordingly. Allen Iverson's beverage brand issued its own growth release the same week. An industry that spent a decade marketing to people in their twenties is now signing the players those customers' parents watched, and a nine-time All-Star with three Boston championships and his number in the rafters since 1998 is the least youth-appealing endorsement a Massachusetts brand could have found, which may be the entire point. (Canna Provisions via WWLP)

🩺 A 2026 review in the International Medical Journal by Iga Rusin and colleagues at Wrocław's 4th Military Clinical Hospital collects the existing CBD and athletics evidence and finds no support for a performance benefit, alongside limited and uneven indications of help with post-exercise recovery. The randomized feasibility trial it leans on ran 29 participants on 67 milligrams daily for 15 days and reported a difference 48 hours after induced muscle injury, which is the kind of finding that asks for a larger study rather than a label claim. Ricky Williams, who won the Heisman in 1998 and spent a career arguing this question in public, is our next guest on The Hybrid. (Marijuana Moment; International Medical Journal)

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