Throughout her bid for governor, Gov. Abigail Spanberger said she would support a bill to set up a legal, adult-use cannabis market — which is why her veto on May 19 caught many rooting for such a market by surprise.
“I thought it was a joke, honestly,” said Julian Redcross, a Hampton-based hemp grower. “When I saw it going around on fire on social media, I was like, ‘Oh, this is not real. This is AI.’”
Spanberger said her decision was based on the need for stronger tools to enforce the law and regulate a legal cannabis market.
“Virginians deserve a system that replaces the illicit cannabis market with one that prioritizes our children's health and safety, public safety, product integrity, and accountability," she wrote in her veto statement.
The veto left Virginia cannabis businesses facing another year in limbo after many spent years preparing for a legal market following the 2021 legalization of personal possession. Now, some hemp growers are having to make tough calls about the future of their businesses.
It also left the state’s safety questions unresolved: Regulators say they cannot finalize licensing, monitoring or inspection rules without a law in place, while health experts warn consumers are likely to keep buying products that are hard to test, label and trace.
The bill Virginia lawmakers sent to the governor’s desk this year would have allowed adults 21 and older to buy marijuana starting in January 2027. The legislation proposed capping the number of licenses to a few hundred to limit the number of retail cannabis stores. It included policies for labeling and testing, said Jason Blanchette, president of the Virginia Cannabis Association and a hemp grower in Hampton Roads.
Spanberger sent back changes that pushed the starting sale date to July 2027, capped the number of stores at 200, reduced the personal possession limit to two ounces and recommended new criminal penalties, VPM reported.
The new penalties, especially, gave lawmakers and lobbyists pause.
“The way that she wrote those back in, we are now recriminalizing a product that we have already made legal in the state of Virginia, so to a lot of those groups it appears that we are moving backwards when it comes to justice,” Blanchette said.
A sliver of hope remains that a compromise could still be reached when lawmakers meet later this month to talk about the state budget, Blanchette said, but it’s a long-shot.
“We’ll be lucky to be up and running by 2028,” he said.
That will be too late for some businesses.
‘Up in smoke’
Brad Wynne started growing hemp in Virginia Beach in 2023 for his company Veg Out Organics, which sells topical CBD products.
He stopped growing hemp in 2024, biding his time for the state to get the ball rolling on a retail cannabis market. But he said he can’t afford to wait any longer.
“I’m shutting down end of June,” Wynne said.
He said his operation was as small as they come, but he spent years building it.
“If you were to start from scratch with no land, no building, no nothing, each business, whether it's retail, growing or dispensing, is about $500,000 to $1 million,” he said.
The high startup cost makes sure the business can stay afloat while the plant is growing, which takes roughly six months.
“This is a living plant, so this is not something you just buy from out of state, throw onto a shelf of a dispensary overnight, and you're open the next morning,” Blanchette said.
Wynne said he wished Spanberger sent her changes as line items lawmakers could have addressed individually, rather than as a substitute that had to be accepted or rejected as a whole.
Blanchette said he disagreed with Spanberger’s assessment that the legislation was rushed.
“I've been personally working on this for five years, so I know that we've put plenty of time and effort into this, and it has not been rushed,” he said.
Julian Redcross said he was angry at Spanberger’s decision at first. But the anger soon gave way to acceptance and hope that a better bill will be proposed in the future.
He and his twin brother Jonathan Redcross co-own Yoagie Enterprises and started growing hemp in 2019, while keeping their day jobs. They stopped growing operations this year when new hemp regulations strained their business. Julian said they plan to keep waiting.
“We just have an empty space right now that's costing money, but we didn't jump over the edge just yet,” he said.
Julian and Jonathan said they hope when the state eventually sets up a retail market, it gives small businesses like theirs a fighting chance. As for Spanberger, Julian said doesn’t take this year’s veto as her backtracking on her support of the legal market — yet.
“She said she would pass it,” he said. “She didn't say when.”
A regulatory dilemma
One of Spanberberger’s reasons for vetoing the bill was the need for stronger regulations.
“That includes clear enforcement authority and sufficient resources for compliance, testing, and inspections, and robust tools to crack down on bad actors who continue to profit from the illicit market,” she wrote in her veto statement.
But the illicit market will continue to reign supreme with no competition from a legal market, said Wynne, the Virginia Beach grower.
Some businesses and public health experts say the commonwealth needs stronger safety rules before opening a retail cannabis market, but in practice, regulators are limited in how much they can prepare before lawmakers pass a final bill.
Barbara Biddle, a hemp business owner from Northern Virginia and the founder of the Cannabis Small Business Association, said she supports legalization, but did not think the vetoed bill was the right vehicle to create the market.
“It was a necessary action that needed to happen,” Biddle said. “But we don't think that this was the right vehicle for it.”
Biddle said Virginia needs clearer rules for testing, labeling and industry compliance, as well as more training for police and first responders before retail sales begin.
Jamie Patten, chief administrative officer at the Virginia Cannabis Control Authority, has previously told WHRO that the authority is ready to implement additional regulation and resources if lawmakers approve a retail market.
Those measures will include specific rules for licensing, monitoring and data collection in an adult-use retail market.
But without finalized legislation, she said, the agency can’t settle the details of how that market would be monitored.
In the interim, Patten said the authority has been focused on public education, including warnings about impaired driving, after a survey found nearly a third of Virginia drivers believe cannabis makes them safer behind the wheel.
Michelle Peace, a forensic science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who specializes in cannabis testing, said without a regulated retail market, consumers have fewer ways to know whether cannabis products are accurately labeled, properly tested or made under consistent safety standards.
She’s repeatedly found products with THC levels that did not match their labels.
“My laboratory has demonstrated over and over again that products are either more concentrated than what's on the label or significantly less concentrated than what's on the label,” Peace said.
The risk will also be hard to track because consumers may not know where to report adverse reactions from unregulated products, Peace said.
