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After months of hearings and study, the legislature’s Joint Commission on the Future of Cannabis Sales is poised to roll out a final proposal Tuesday that would launch a legal, regulated adult-use cannabis retail market in Virginia — potentially ending five years of economic and legal uncertainty since the commonwealth legalized possession and cultivation in 2021.

The latest version — sponsored by Commission Chair Paul Krizek, D-Fairfax, in the House of Delegates and Sens. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, and Aaron Rouse, D-Virginia Beach, in the Senate — scraps the controversial local-opt-out clause, increases local taxing authority and builds a licensing regime designed to privilege small, independent, Virginia-based businesses over large medical-marijuana operators.

An association of Massachusetts marijuana businesses is urging voters to tell local officials about any cases of misleading signature gathering tactics and “fraudulent messaging” by a campaign seeking to put an initiative on the ballot next year that would roll back the state’s adult-use legalization law.

The prohibitionist campaign, called the Coalition for a Healthy Massachusetts, said last week that it’s “confident” they turned in enough signatures to qualify for ballot placement. Supporters need 74,574 valid signatures to make the cut.

But the signature gathering hasn’t been without controversy, as there have been allegations piling up that petitioners working on behalf of the campaign have shared misleading information about what the measure would accomplish—with claims that paid petitioners have used fake cover letters for other ballot measures on issues like affordable housing and same-day voter registration. The state attorney general’s office has confirmed it’s received complaints to that end

A trade group representing large marijuana companies in New York filed a complaint in state Supreme Court on Wednesday over the continued illegal “inversion” of illicit market and out-of-state product into legal stores.

By failing to timely impose track-and-trace requirements, the state Office of Cannabis Management and Cannabis Control Board “have allowed a prolific supply of illicit and unregulated cannabis to enter the licensed New York cannabis market,” the New York Medical Cannabis Industry Association (NYMCIA) alleged.

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When Connecticut legalized recreational marijuana in 2021, the state’s lieutenant governor, Susan Bysiewicz, boasted that the new law was “crafted to repair the wounds left by the War on Drugs.” The move followed the same rationale that had motivated legalization in 18 other states: fewer resources exhausted on policing a drug that legalization advocates view as largely unharmful, fewer lives derailed by what they argue to be excessive lockups. In a sense, the plan worked: Possession arrests have fallen precipitously in the years since. But as Connecticut’s number of legal neighborhood weed shops has grown, so too has a problem that the state, like others that have eased marijuana laws, was seemingly ill-prepared to deal with: the rise of illegal marijuana shops.

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