[[“value”:”Cannabis buds for purchase on display at the now-closed Ceres Collaborative dispensary in Burlington on the first day of legal retail cannabis sales October 1, 2022. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
Since Vermont’s first recreational cannabis dispensaries opened their doors in 2022, the state’s medical marijuana program has hit the skids.
As of November 2024, just over 2,700 patients were enrolled in the program, down from a high of almost 5,500 medical-card holders in 2017, according to data from Vermont’s Cannabis Control Board. And as patients have opted to simply buy cannabis products at the now-ubiquitous recreational retailers, all but two of the state’s standalone medical dispensaries have shuttered their doors.
“The business model just doesn’t work anymore,” James Pepper, chair of Vermont’s Cannabis Control Board, told members of the House Committee on Human Services Wednesday.
To bolster the declining program, Vermont lawmakers have moved to integrate medical and recreational cannabis sales. Last year, the legislature passed Act 166, a law that, among other measures, introduced a new medical-use endorsement for cannabis retailers. The Cannabis Control Board could begin issuing it to select dispensaries as soon as this July.
Cannabis retailers with the endorsement will be able to essentially operate as medical dispensaries. That means they can sell medical-grade weed products to select patients enrolled in the state’s medical program tax-free, provide curbside pickup and increase quantity limits for sales to patients, among other things.
But regulators are still ironing out the details on how to roll out the new endorsement.
A large and lingering question is how to properly train and educate budtenders — the cannabis salespeople at dispensaries — to make sure that patients who often suffer from severe health conditions are finding products that are right for them.
To that end, regulators are considering introducing an app called Cannify to mediate interactions between medical patients and budtenders. Using a comprehensive questionnaire, the program would help steer patients toward proper treatment options.
“We feel like this might be a useful tool in the tool box to make sure that our budtenders, who are economically motivated, are not kind of making recommendations about products to people who have very serious health conditions,” Pepper told lawmakers Wednesday.
Regulators are also recommending that lawmakers move to modify the process for evaluating and approving medical conditions that would qualify patients for medical marijuana usage to help expand access to the program.
Currently, the legislature has sole authority to dictate what diagnoses would qualify patients, a process the Cannabis Control Board has recommended shifting to an independent regulatory authority of some kind.
“At what point are we going to turn that over to a regulatory process?” Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, said Wednesday. “Are we at that point with cannabis for medical relief? I think it’s a question that we should be talking about.”
— Habib Sabet
A federal judge in Burlington on Wednesday released Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian Vermonter detained earlier this month by federal immigration authorities.
Mahdawi, a student organizer at Columbia University and a lawful U.S. resident for a decade, was arrested by federal agents in Colchester during an interview as part of his U.S. citizenship naturalization process. Mahdawi’s is one of several high-profile cases involving the detention of noncitizen university students ostensibly for their campus activism in support of Palestinian human rights.
At Wednesday’s hearing, U.S. District Judge Geoffrey W. Crawford ruled from the bench, allowing Mahdawi to walk free on his own recognizance after more than two weeks in a Vermont prison while his deportation case continues in immigration court.
Read more about the court ruling here.
— Ethan Weinstein
Last week, AmeriCorps began terminating nearly $400 million in grants across the country that funded thousands of jobs, including about $2.4 million in funding for service positions in Vermont.
An April 25 grant termination letter said the state’s grant “no longer effectuates agency priorities” and demanded that recipients “immediately cease all award activities.” Several days after that notice arrived, Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark joined a multi-state lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s termination of AmeriCorps grants and positions.
The terminations impact about 200 positions, said Philip Kolling, the executive director of SerVermont which oversees the bulk of the state’s AmeriCorps members. About 70 are currently filled, with many slated to begin this spring and summer, he said. Some are government positions and many others are at nonprofits.
The funding cuts constitute about 40% of the roughly $6 million Vermont receives annually for AmeriCorps programs, Kolling said. Positions that focus on anti-poverty initiatives and programming for seniors are not impacted by the terminations, he added.
A separate AmeriCorps program, focused on affordable housing and disaster recovery, dismissed its members earlier this month, ending their service terms early and sending them home. The corps members under the SerVermont umbrella have not been officially let go.
Read more about the impacts of the cuts on the AmeriCorps programs here.
— Carly Berlin
U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., brought up the recent detention of eight workers on a large dairy farm in Franklin County by federal immigration authorities during the Wednesday confirmation hearing for Rodney Scott, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Welch’s office created a video clip showing the roughly five-minute exchange.
“We’ve got to milk our cows. We’ve got to have access to labor. None of these folks have any criminal record, and, really, this is a question about priorities,” Welch said. Scott answered, in part, that he doesn’t support “asking law enforcement officers not to enforce the law that’s in front of them.”
Welch also got to ask about the changes required at the Haskell Free Library in Derby Line, which straddles an international border and serves both Canadian and U.S. patrons: “I get that you’ve got to ‘enforce the law,’ but is it a real issue about Canadians coming into the Canadian side of a Vermont library to get a book?”
Since the U.S. border agency began requiring visitors from Canada to show ID at the door — with further restrictions on entry to come this fall — the library has opened up a back door into the building directly from Stanstead, Quebec.
Scott said he would commit to talking through any concerns about the arrangement and “we’re not going to make decisions in a vacuum.”
— Kristen Fountain
“]] Starting as soon as July, cannabis retailers with a new medical-use endorsement will be able to sell medical-grade pot products to select patients enrolled in the state’s medical program. Read More
