Virginia appears set to remain the only state in the country with recreational marijuana legalization but without legal sales.

That status quo would continue if, as widely expected, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin again vetoes adult-use sales legalization bills that state lawmakers recently sent to him.

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For the second straight year, Virginia’s Democratic-controlled General Assembly passed legislation that would finally set up adult-use sales in the state.

Youngkin’s Democratic predecessor, Ralph Northam, signed legalization into law in 2021, but that bill had a clause that required further action to create a market projected to be worth hundreds of millions.

The most recent legislation would give exclusive adult-use sales rights to the state’s existing medical marijuana businesses, which include major multistate operators such as:

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The Trump administration’s plan to cut federal research funding threatens 565 ongoing experiments involving cannabis, according to an MJBizDaily review and interviews with scientists and academics.

An accompanying freeze of new National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants is also stymieing future research at a key moment – and raising questions about the fate of marijuana rescheduling as well as suggesting profound consequences for the regulated MJ industry.

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The NIH announced Feb. 7 that it would drastically reduce to no more than 15% the amount of “indirect costs” – money used to cover administrative and facility-related bills – financed by federal research grants.

Without fully funded indirect costs, “I literally cannot do my research,” Angela Bryan, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the

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(This is the first installment in a series – a collaboration with the Marijuana Policy Project – highlighting demographic shifts within medical cannabis registries nationwide.)

The expansion of adult-use marijuana sales to 21 states has ushered in a new era of commercialism in the U.S. cannabis industry.

For some retailers, that means a concentration of certain well-performing products.

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For some medical marijuana patients, that means less access to full-spectrum cannabis stock-keeping units (SKUs).

Inventory rightsizing is a key element for retail success, particularly given the dramatic shifts in customer and product demand after a market’s conversion to recreational sales.

“In most adult-use legalization states, the number of registered patients has dropped significantly since legalization passed,” Karen O’Keefe, director of state policies for the

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