Twice, the Democratic-controlled General Assembly passed bills to legalize retail sales of cannabis. Twice, a Republican governor vetoed them.
When Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the governorship, Democratic legislators assumed retail sales were a done deal. After all, she had said on the campaign trail that she supported legalization. And yet, once again, she has vetoed their bill.
Why?
In a recent interview with Cardinal News, Spanberger gave her most extensive comments to date on the veto. The short version is the same as with some other bills she vetoed: While she supported the policy, she had concerns about the details — and if her administration is going to be the one in charge of implementing the legalization rollout, she wants to be more confident about those details.
In a statement following her veto, the bill’s sponsors — Sen. Lashrecse Aird, D-Henrico County, and Del. Paul Krizek, D-Fairfax County — noted that there’s a robust black market for cannabis that’s now going unregulated and untaxed and that legalization would work to diminish it. “The General Assembly provided Virginia with an opportunity to lead on this issue, but instead this veto prolongs uncertainty and provides comfort to those profiting from the illicit market. This veto and its consequences belong to the Governor and Governor alone,” they said.
Spanberger said that’s exactly the point with legalization, too — the consequences would be on her. “If I’m going to be responsible for a monumental consequential change to how we do one type of business in Virginia, then do it right,” she said. “The devil’s in the details.”
Here are some of the highlights about what Spanberger had to say about cannabis.
Spanberger: “I don’t see [a delay] as something that is a negative”
Legislators initially envisioned legalizing sales as early as November, then pushed that back to Jan. 1. Spanberger thinks even that is too soon, given the details involved. That’s one point of conflict.
“The fact that we’re going to be talking a little bit longer about how do you set up a retail cannabis market correctly — I don’t see that as something that is a negative,” Spanberger said. “Do people want me to sign a bill or do people want me to get it right, and as the person doing the implementing, what’s most important to me is get it right.”
So far, 21 states have legal retail markets for cannabis. Spanberger would like to know about their experiences. “Not all experiences are created equal. There are states who did things that they wish they hadn’t, and we should be endeavoring to learn from whether it’s called their mistakes or the best practices that they’ve sort of led us to. That’s what we as Virginians would want to do.”
Legislators feel they have studied other states; there was a legislative commission that spent the past year working on a cannabis bill. “They did put in a tremendous amount of work. And I respect that,” Spanberger said. “And their role is to put forth a bill.” But her role as governor is to review that bill, she said. “In the process we have in Virginia, the governor has the option of signing, vetoing or amending. And if I wasn’t supposed to take that option of amending seriously, it wouldn’t be an option in our process.” Since that option is there, Spanberger said, “I should utilize it because it’s a responsibility that I use it.” So she has.
Spanberger: The bill she vetoed ‘did not give the state enough time to set up for success’
For some reason, Southwest Virginia has become an epicenter for cannabis stores that operate openly, if illicitly. Over the past few years, Cardinal has made purchases at many of them and had the product tested — each time, it came back as definitely marijuana, often high-potency strains (and often contaminated with mold and other things you wouldn’t want to ingest). One of those stores is just south of Abingdon. When I visited there two years ago, I was given a “membership” card as soon as I entered. Advocates of legalizing retail sales point to these stores as evidence that legalization won’t widen the spread of cannabis — it’s already here — but will help put these rogue operators out of business. Since our interview took place in Abingdon, I jokingly suggested to the governor that she go visit the store.
She declined the invitation (as has every other politician to whom I’ve made the same offer).
“I hear you,” she said. “And inherent in that statement, I think, is a critique, but I didn’t write the law that had the holes that you can drive a truck through. I would say where we are right now is a foreseeable outcome of legislation that was passed a number of years ago. That is why we need to establish a legal retail market — because there are giant gaping holes in prior legislation. But the answer to not necessarily getting it 100% right the first time is not to rush to double down on the next step.
“People might argue with my assertion of rushing, but again, as the governor who will both sign it and then implement it,” Spanberger said, it does feel like rushing to her to “set up in six months the entire regulatory framework for an entirely new type of commerce that historically has been illegal and continues to be in some of our neighboring states. That is not the sort of thing you put a six-month time frame on. That was, frankly, one of my issues — a principle challenge with the bill is it didn’t give the state time to be set up for success.”
Spanberger: “When you’re doing something so consequential that has major public safety implications, you’ve got to do it right.”
The original legislation envisioned 400 licenses for retail cannabis stores across the state; that’s about the same number of Alcohol Beverage Commission stores in Virginia. During the session, that number was cut to 350. The original bill also envisioned a start date of Nov. 1, but that was pushed back to Jan. 1, 2027, partly at the request of cannabis advocates who said small entrepreneurs would need time to grow a legal crop — otherwise the market would be dominated by medical marijuana companies that already have product. That’s what passed and went to the governor: 350 licenses starting on Jan. 1.
Spanberger sent the bill back with an amendment that cut the number of licenses to 200 (along with a lot of other changes) and delayed implementation until July 1, 2027. When the General Assembly reconvened to take up her amendments, both House and Senate voted to “pass by for the day” the governor’s changes — meaning they never came up for a vote. The bill went back to the governor on a “take it or leave it” basis. She chose the latter and vetoed it.
Here’s what Spanberger said about the bill she rejected: “Not only did it not give the state enough time to set up for success, but also establishes so many licenses that you can’t sort of tiptoe into, OK, let’s start with X number of licenses and then you’re going to rush the regulatory framework. Where’s the time to hire any of the law enforcement? We’re going to create an entire new law enforcement agency. When do we get them ready? When do they learn the laws that they’re enforcing when the regulators haven’t even built out their framework? When do you apply for your license? If you are able to open your doors as a store come January, when do you get your license? You walk back from that.”
She and legislators agree on one thing: They don’t want medical marijuana companies, who already are growing cannabis for medicinal purposes, to dominate the new retail market. They want to create space for small entrepreneurs, a generation of small businesses. However, Spanberger thinks it will take longer than legislators estimate to have retailers and a supply chain — other than those medical marijuana companies — ready to go.
“There are still a lot of regulatory pieces of how do you make sure we’re expanding the market so it isn’t only the people who are already part of the medical legal market, so they don’t automatically dominate the entirety of the market,” Spanberger said.
“These are also businesses: You don’t want to have failed businesses. If you’re flooding the market without any real understanding of what retail interest might be — opening up a full number of licenses at maximum capacity without a full understanding — you’re basically putting people in a place where if they one day say, I might want to have a retail cannabis shop, like move now or you might miss that chance. So now they’re starting to open a business they know potentially nothing about, without any regulatory framework to dig into, potentially bringing all of their personal capital to bear to try and fund this.
“And then you deal with the issues that, from a lending perspective at the federal level, there’s still real challenges with getting your money in the banking system. All of these things need to be figured out, and the biggest problem in all of this is there’s no time to get it right. And when you’re doing something so consequential that has major public safety implications, you’ve got to do it right.”
Of course, legislators think they have done it right and see Spanberger as showing up late to the conversation with changes they don’t think are necessary or outright disagree with. However, Spanberger says, “I’m responsible for getting it right. And if I were to sign a bill that I don’t think sets us up to get it right, then a year and a half from now, it’s headline after headline about, whether it’s like, somebody who lost their shirt because they started this business and they were set up for failure or a public health issue or confusion within the law enforcement community and that is all on me.”
Spanberger: ‘There is a bill I would have signed’
So what next? Cannabis now seems stuck in a power struggle between the governor and the General Assembly, some of which I wrote about in Wednesday’s column. We’ve seen conflicts between a Democratic governor and a Democratic General Assembly before, although you have to go back to the 1980s and early ’90s — a time when some legislators today weren’t even born.
State Sen. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, who has emerged as Spanberger’s chief critic, has pointed out that the General Assembly has a special session open to deal with the budget (although the legislature isn’t meeting), so the governor “can send us bills at anytime to correct vetoes and restore the money to the budget.” (Cannabis sales would produce an estimated $9.2 million in tax revenue for fiscal year 2027 and $22.1 million in fiscal year 2028.)
I asked the governor about this. Her response: “I wrote amendments. They are welcome to take up my amendments. The thing about it is like, there was a bill I would have signed, and they passed by all my amendments. That is fully their prerogative. But it is incorrect to say, ‘My goodness, she said she supported this. Now she won’t sign a bill.’ No, I won’t sign that bill, and you won’t even consider my amendments. That creates a space where now we have to potentially go back to the discussion table — which is fine, right, and that’s the reality of it. There is a bill I would have signed. They didn’t want that, but I’m not going to sign just any bill because they don’t want to have a conversation about amendments, and I think that is the tension. And it is wholly the legislature’s prerogative to reject, to accept or even to pass by my amendments. But it was also wholly the prerogative of the governor to say these amendments are so consequential and important to me … Maybe it’s a different story if they had taken up the amendments,” and they had gotten up and down votes. “People agree with me, they don’t disagree with me. That’s a different discussion, right?”
One sticking point with legislators in Spanberger’s amendment was an increase in some criminal penalties, specifically for transporting large quantities of cannabis. Spanberger’s proposed amendment would have made transporting 50 pounds or more of weed a Class 2 felony, punishable by a minimum of 20 years in prison. For many cannabis advocates who have been pushing to reduce or eliminate criminal penalties for such offenses, that was a non-starter. We did not get to that in our interview, but I asked the governor’s office later about that provision and was told that her intent with that provision was to further discourage the black market: “Governor Spanberger proposed amendments to strenghten public safety, protect Virginians’ health and well-begin and take steps to curb untested cannabis products distributed through the illicit market, including by targeting large-scale, illegal drug trafficking networks.”
All we know on the surface is that some legislators were so unhappy about increasing penalties for illegal possession of an otherwise legal product that they were willing to risk not taking up the governor’s amendments.
Now, here’s what we don’t know: We don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes on cannabis. On the surface, the governor saying to legislators, “they are welcome to take up my amendments,” seems rather passive. Typically, if a governor wants a particular piece of legislation passed, they find a senior legislator to sponsor it and actively manage the process. Is that happening here? We don’t know yet. All we know is that legislators — both Democrats and Republicans — have complained that the governor’s office isn’t communicating well with them. That’s a common complaint with new governors, so it’s not necessarily unique to Spanberger. We’ll have to see how that plays out.
Spanberger on her approach to bills: A ‘technical fix’ or ‘make or break’?
The governor said her general approach to bills that came back to her, after the legislature rejected her amendments, was to determine how serious her concerns were. “I had to decide, was this sort of a technical fix” that she had proposed only to have rejected or was this a “make or break” detail? “And in just about all of those cases it was OK, it’s not break.” However, “for something as consequential as cannabis, I’m responsible for getting it right.”
So now we wait to see if she and the legislature can come to terms on what she will find right.
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