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Nebraska Medical Marijuana Advocates Press Ahead After Campaign Notary Convicted For Misconduct

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3 weeks ago

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“Voters went ahead and voted, and it’s time to start moving forward and doing something about this issue instead of trying to obstruct it at every opportunity.”

Zach Wendling, Nebraska Examiner

Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana was behind the 2024 campaign to legalize and regulate medical cannabis, a day after a Hall County jury convicted one of the campaign’s volunteer notaries on 24 felony counts.

A six-person jury convicted Jacy C. Todd, 55, of York, on Wednesday of 23 counts of “official misconduct” stemming from 23 days of improper notarizations involving solicitation circulator Michael K. Egbert, 67, of Grand Island. Todd was also found guilty of lying at an appearance in October 2024 as part of a separate trial in which the campaign had enough valid petition signatures.

Lancaster County District Judge Susan Strong, after the 2024 election, issued a 57-page order in favor of the campaign in another case, saying the measures were improperly placed on the ballot.

Crista Eggers, executive director of Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana, told reporters Thursday that Strong’s verdict came after a four-day trial with many witnesses and experts.

“We, I stand by it, my organization is there and I think the voters are behind that they were absolutely legal to vote,” Eggers said. “Voters went ahead and voted, and it’s time to start moving forward and doing something about this issue instead of trying to obstruct it at every opportunity.”

In November 2024, Nebraskans voted to legalize and regulate medical cannabis. The laws entered into force on December 12, 2024.

86,499 valid signatures are required

The campaign needed at least 86,499 valid signatures for each measure. Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen secured 89,962 valid signatures for legalizing medical cannabis, and 89,856 for regulating it. The case did not address county-specific signature requirements.

Strong upheld the presumptive validity of the more than 4,000 signatures accepted by Todd on both measures, but said the more than 1,000 validated signatures collected by Egbert — except for a dozen notarized by Todd — lost the presumption of validity.

Egbert admitted to forging signatures using a phone book and pleaded guilty in November 2024 to a Class I felony count of “attempting” to falsify his circulator’s sworn applications.

Former state Sen. John Kuehn of Heartwell, a marijuana opponent who filed the Lancaster County civil suit, has appealed Strong’s decision to the Nebraska Supreme Court. Evnen and Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers (R), who made similar arguments to Kuehn’s against the campaign, also appealed.

The case went to the Supreme Court on December 3. They have not yet given a decision.

Hilgers, who coordinated with Hall County District Attorney Marty Klein on Todd’s criminal case, said Todd’s case provided “evidence of a systematic scheme in which the law was routinely broken.”

“As we’ve said up until now, the medical marijuana demand campaign was built on fraud and criminals and ultimately should never have been on the ballot,” Hilgers said Wednesday.

The campaign has denied that wrongdoing is widespread, but has admitted that some mistakes have been made. Strong corrected some of these errors in his judgment.

Appeal from the Supreme Court

Todd’s soon after conviction On Wednesday, Kuehn’s attorneys filed a motion with the Supreme Court asking the justices to consider Todd’s conviction and other trial materials.

In the filing, attorneys said the conviction is in “direct contrast” to Strong’s ruling on Todd.

Todd, in the Lancaster County case and again this week, has denied wrongdoing. Egbert also testified at two trials where he said he has a neurological disease that affects his memory. Egbert said he never signed his petitions in Todd’s presence, which is improper notarization.

During the civil trial, Strong said “Egbert’s credibility issues are more serious” than Todd’s and that Kuehn and Evnen had not shown a “preponderance of the evidence” that any other notarized petition by Todd should have lost the “presumption of validity.”

“Presumption of validity” means signatures verified by local county officials and legally collected by an affidavit of an approved circulator.

If a signature loses the presumption of validity, the campaign may have the opportunity to recover the signature in a second phase of the trial. Revoking both petitions would require almost 3,500 signatures to lose the presumption of validity.

Even if all of Todd’s notarized signatures lose the presumption of validity, the campaign would still meet the threshold for the ballot.

This week, a central Nebraska jury sided with the version of events described by Egbert and state and local prosecutors. Todd’s attorney said Todd would appeal after the 9 a.m. sentencing hearing on April 22.

Eggers did not say whether he was concerned that Todd’s conviction could affect the appeal, but said the campaigns are awaiting the Supreme Court’s decision.

“I believe the Supreme Court is the body that will make a reasonable ruling on this matter,” Eggers said. “They will consider the things they need and the appeal that has been presented to them, but I think they are still at a time to make a decision.”

This story was first published by the Nebraska Examiner.

Photo by Chris Wallis // Side Pocket Images.

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Demand for medical cannabis continues to grow

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5 hours ago

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March 22, 2026

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West Virginians’ demand for medical cannabis continues to grow

Meanwhile, the national conversation reveals an ongoing debate about the value of cannabis, with a new presidential executive order and a New York Times editorial pointing in opposite directions. A WVU Medicine addiction specialist shared some resources on the issues behind that conversation.

In Morgantown, a new medical cannabis dispensary recently opened at Earl Core and Hartman Run roads: Country Grown Cannabis. That brought the dispensary count in Morgantown to eight, with three in Westover, Kingwood, Fairmont and one in White Hall.

And for West Virginia, most data provided by the state’s Office of Medical Cannabis have admitted 35,202 patients in December 2025: a slight decrease from October 2025, when the number was 35,598; but higher than the 34,003 in our previous report in September 2024.

Sales revenue varies from month to month, according to the Transparency Project – a national data source used by the OMC. As of August 2024, revenue was $8.39 billion. Most recently, in October 2025, it was $8.09 million; and in December, 7.97 million dollars.

Read more at Dominion Position










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Missouri Court Orders Officials To Award Marijuana Business Licenses Amid Application Scoring Flaws

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6 hours ago

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March 22, 2026

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“The department’s scoring criteria and scorers’ decisions were based on the subjective ratings of the scorers. This fundamental flaw tainted the entire scoring process.”

By Rebecca Rivas, Missouri Independent

A Missouri appeals court has issued a sweeping rebuke of the state’s marijuana licensing process, ordering regulators to issue Hippos LLC licenses to 13 facilities after 2019 scoring was inconsistent and, in one case, after a grader had never established the ratings.

A unanimous verdict is issued after a few weeks A rigorous state audit found the same errors-irregular scoring, poor documentation and a process so opaque that the integrity of the results was in doubt.

Last week’s decision by the Missouri Southern District Court of Appeals does more than revive Hippos’ longstanding challenge over denied cultivation, manufacturing and dispensary licenses. It also undercuts the methodology Missouri’s Administrative Hearing Board has used to resolve cannabis licensing disputes and raises new questions about hundreds of potential rulings in nearly 850 appeals filed by unsuccessful applicants.

Lisa Cox, spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, which oversees the cannabis program, told The Independent that the agency is “evaluating all options” in terms of appealing the decision.

Hippos officials could not be reached for comment.

As the Missouri Department of Health and Aging Services worked to build the state’s multibillion-dollar industry framework in 2019, it hired Nevada-based Wise Health Solutions to source nearly 2,000 applications.

“In each of Hippo’s applications, the same answers to the same question received consistent scores in many cases,” Judge Jeffrey Bates wrote in the ruling. “This should never have happened if Wise’s scorers had followed the instructions given. Neither the department nor Wise did anything to correct this situation.”

The Hippos lawsuit challenged requests for denials of two cultivation, six manufacturing and five dispensary licenses.

The first stop to appeal the denied applications was with the Administrative Hearing Board, which tried to recover Hippos’ applications by choosing the most common score for the questions the company challenged.

The three appeals judges found the commission’s approach to reinstatement “completely flawed”.

“The raw scores do not provide evidence of the intent of the scorers, as there is no note explaining why the scores were given,” the ruling said. “The conflict of these unexplained scores cannot be reconciled by assuming that the most common score for a given answer is correct.”

The justices agreed with Hippos that the commission’s decisions affirming the state’s denial of the company’s requests were “arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable” and that those decisions were not supported by competent and substantial evidence at all.

The case was remanded to the circuit court, with the lower court ordering the department to “grant Hippos the requested cultivation, manufacturing and dispensary facility licenses.”

No rejection

A major blow to the state’s defense, the judges said, was that Hippos provided two credible witnesses who testified that the petition should have received higher scores, and the judges believed the state did not back down.

The experts were cannabis consultants who collectively prepared 83 applications in Missouri, the ruling says, and more than half of their clients’ applications successfully received licenses.

“The Department offered no rebuttal to Hippos’ expert testimony and presented no other testimony as to why Hippos should not have been given the higher score that the experts testified to,” the ruling states.

In its response to State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick’s report released last month by the department, it argued that the board had conducted a “thorough review” of the scoring evidence and heard from many experts on hundreds of appeals.

Cox said the Hippos case was one of the first the commission heard in the process of reviewing the department’s licensing decisions.

“The information the Southern District is seeking – expert testimony supporting the department’s position – has been provided in all of the following cases and supports the Administrative Hearing Board’s decision in the Hippos case,” he said in an email to The Independent.

The department’s audit response listed several cases in which the commission ruled in favor of the department, and in at least one other case, the commission used the same methodology that an appeals court last week called “flawed.”

No notes, no evidence

Hippos challenged the scores given to various questions in the application.

The judge had a hard time justifying the scores without seeing the grader’s notes on why they made them.

“After concluding that it was necessary to re-score Hippos’ applications due to the inconsistencies noted by the commission, the commission stated that it was looking for ‘evidence’ that reflected the subjective evaluation of the scorers,” the ruling stated. “Obviously, any notes on a scorer’s reasons for giving a particular score would be helpful to demonstrate consistency.”

Without notice, the ruling said the board’s decision to use the old sheet music was “inventive.”

The lack of notice comes from an instruction in Wise’s training manual, the ruling said, pointing to the lines: “Don’t write anything you don’t want everyone to read. Past versions (something deleted) can be found(.) Adhere to this axiom: Say and forget; write and regret.”

The handbook reminded them that e-mails, memos, or other written materials could be discovered if any scores were challenged in court.

During the audit, Fitzpatrick also said those sentences and the lack of note-taking were problematic. In response to the audit, the department said reading the sentences on its own “does not consider that language in the context of the rest of the training manual,” and raters were encouraged to take notes.

In the lawsuit, Hippos also successfully challenged the scorer’s credentials, something they had tried and failed to do before the commission in other cases.

The ruling stated that Wise was required to ensure that each scorer had the experience and background to perform their assigned role. In the case of the woman who got the grades Hippos challenged, “there is nothing in the record to show that that requirement was met.” The woman did not list or describe any experience or background in the cannabis industry or business evaluation or analysis, the ruling said.

However, the department has argued that he is a university professor with good research skills in the entire case. In a 2024 brief, the department noted that it also graded three other questions about Hippos applications.

“However, Hippos does not criticize the scoring of these questions,” he said short the states “Because they gave each of them a score of 10.”

The appeals court was not convinced.

Unanimous court the verdictAlong with Fitzpatrick’s audit is a sweeping assessment of how Missouri has issued licenses that launched its legal marijuana market. It also raises broader questions about other cases in which the Administrative Hearing Board has relied on similar methods to review disputed application scores.

“The board correctly concluded that the department’s scoring criteria and scorers’ decisions were based on the subjective assessments of the scorers,” the ruling states. “This fundamental error tainted the entire scoring process.”

This story was first published by the Missouri Independent.

Photo elements courtesy of the user rawpixel and Philip Steffan.

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Sulfur’s key role in plant nutrition

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1 day ago

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March 21, 2026

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Sulfur plays a crucial role in plant nutrition from a biochemical point of view, especially in the synthesis of amino acids and proteins. “In fact, it is a key element in the synthesis of basic compounds such as methionine, cysteine ​​and glutathione,” Afepasa explained.

“Methionine serves as a precursor to several molecules that are essential in plant growth and stress regulation. Cysteine ​​provides structural support for proteins and contributes to the antioxidant defense of plants. Glutathione, one of the most powerful antioxidants, participates in detoxification and protects cells from oxidative damage, in favor of general metabolic stability.”

© Afepasa

In terms of availability, different forms of sulfur behave differently in the soil. “Elemental sulfur acts as a medium and long-term reserve, as it must first be converted into sulfates by microbial activity before being absorbed by plants. This conversion process makes the supply slower and more permanent. On the other hand, sulfates can be used immediately by plants, they offer a quick response but are more prone to leaching losses, especially in light soil or intensive irrigation.” Afepasa’s technological innovation helps to overcome these traditional limitations.

Technologies such as Sultech improve sulfur efficiency through orthorhombic crystallography and smaller particle size, increasing reactivity and rapid soil transformation. This ensures a faster availability of nutrients with immediate and lasting effects.

© Afepasa

Sulfur as a biostimulant
In addition to its nutritional role, sulfur functions as a biostimulant. “Its presence improves the microbiological activity of the soil, especially the microorganisms that convert nutrients into a form available to plants. At the same time, by contributing to the synthesis of compounds such as glutathione, it helps strengthen plant defenses and increases tolerance to abiotic stresses, such as drought, salinity or extreme temperatures.”

“The effect of sulfur also affects how other nutrients behave in the soil. Its interaction with nitrogen improves nitrogen uptake, especially in high-demand crops, thereby maximizing the efficiency of nitrogen fertilization. Sulfur also helps dissolve phosphorus and micronutrients that may be locked in the soil, making them more accessible to plant roots.”

© Afepasa

Improvement of the physico-chemical properties of the soil
Finally, regarding the improvement of the soil, Afepasa emphasized that formulations based on sulfur are essential to solve physical-chemical imbalances. “Products developed with our advanced Sultech technology can displace salts in saline-sodic soils, reducing electrical conductivity and creating a more suitable environment for root growth. They are also effective in correcting the alkaline pH of the wet bulb, helping to restore optimal conditions for nutrient absorption.”

© AfepasaFor more information:
Afepasa
Ignasi Casajuana Reyes
Area Manager Latam and responsible for digital marketing
Email: (email protected)
https://afepasa.com/

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