💸 The Tape

Ken Paxton doesn't know the details of Texas's THC ban. That's what he told a voter on camera this month before walking away from the question. It's an odd gap in knowledge for the attorney general who defended the ban in court, sued five Texas cities to overturn voter-approved decriminalization, and is now the Republican nominee for a U.S. Senate seat with those positions on his record. Marijuana Moment's Tom Angell went looking for an explanation in campaign finance filings and found at least $509,806 from the alcohol industry flowing to Paxton's campaigns since 2014.

The roster reads like a directory of the Texas three-tier system. The Beer Alliance of Texas PAC: $98,500. Wholesale Beer Distributors of Texas PAC: $52,500. The Texas Package Stores Association's beverage alliance, the National Beer Wholesalers Association, Republic National Distributing, Southern Glazer's. Individually, Barry Andrews of Andrews Distributing has given $129,500; John Nau of Silver Eagle Distributors, $76,568. The Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America cut a $5,000 check to Paxton's Senate campaign in June.

The timing is what elevates this from a donor list to a story. A $10,000 check from the beer distributors' PAC landed in December 2021, less than two weeks after Paxton's office appealed a court injunction against state hemp restrictions to the Texas Supreme Court. In June 2019, $20,000 arrived from the same PAC and from Andrews; weeks later Paxton signed a letter urging prosecutors to keep pursuing marijuana cases despite the confusion created by hemp legalization. And the Wholesale Beer Distributors of Texas reportedly funded the Safer Texas Alliance, the campaign that ran ads about a "predatory synthetic THC industry" targeting children while lawmakers debated the ban.

Nobody can prove a quid pro quo, and Angell is careful to say so. But Paxton's opponent James Talarico doesn't need to prove one. "It doesn't make any sense until you follow the money" is a campaign line that writes itself when the money is this easy to follow. Vikki Goodwin is running the same play against Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who took roughly $275,000 from beer distributors and alcohol PACs while championing the hemp recriminalization bill that Governor Abbott vetoed and then largely reinstated by executive order.

The Kentucky version: McConnell closes his own door

If Texas is the retail version of alcohol's influence on cannabis policy, Kentucky is the wholesale version, and it runs through the man who legalized hemp in the first place.

Mitch McConnell wrote the 2018 Farm Bill provision that took hemp out of the Controlled Substances Act and urged Kentucky's tobacco farmers to plant it. Seven years later, on his way out of the Senate, he pushed to reverse it. His provision redefining hemp by total THC and capping consumable products at 0.4 milligrams per container was folded into the November 2025 bill that ended the government shutdown, over the objection of his own junior senator. Rand Paul called it "the most thoughtless, ignorant proposal to an industry that I've seen in a long, long time" and forced a vote to strip it. The Senate tabled his amendment 76-24.

Who was in the room? The week before the vote, the American Distilled Spirits Alliance, the Beer Institute, the Distilled Spirits Council, Wine America and the Wine Institute sent a joint letter to congressional leaders backing the ban, aligning themselves with 39 state attorneys general. Sludge reported the hemp language was added to the funding bill after a lobbying push by trade groups representing large alcohol companies and brewers. McConnell framed it as protecting children and preserving the crop for farmers. Cornbread Hemp's Jim Higdon, running the largest hemp company in McConnell's own state, said it would "roll back 10 years of progress and destroy the hemp industry as we know it." The state's Republican agriculture commissioner and Rep. James Comer later wrote McConnell begging for a delay because farmers were making planting decisions against a law that would wipe out their market.

The alcohol industry isn't monolithic, and that matters. The Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of Kentucky lobbied hard for the state's 2025 hemp beverage law, which routes THC drinks through the ABC — and then opposed the federal ban, because a regulated hemp beverage market is one distributors can sell into. More than 50 distributors signed a letter against the federal ban, noting that as alcohol demand has "shifted downward," THC products were helping sustain their businesses. The split is between distributors who profit from carrying THC drinks and producers — brewers, distillers, wine — who see a competitor taking shelf space and Gen Z share. The producers won in November. The distributors are why Congress delayed the effective date to December 11 and why a regulatory alternative is still alive.

This is not new

Alcohol money has been on the other side of cannabis ballot measures since the beginning. The California Beer & Beverage Distributors gave to the campaign against Proposition 19 in 2010. The Arizona Wine and Spirits Wholesale Association funded opposition to legalization in 2016, the same year Beer Distributors of Massachusetts wrote a check to the campaign against Question 4. Those contributions were small and mostly symbolic. What's changed is scale: the Texas filings show a sustained, decade-long relationship between distributors and the state officials who decide what competes with beer, and the federal hemp fight shows national trade groups shaping statutory language in must-pass legislation.

The irony is that the most sophisticated alcohol players have already moved on. Constellation owns a piece of Canopy. Tilray bought craft breweries. Molson Coors experimented with THC beverages in Canada. Distributors in Minnesota, Kentucky and North Carolina built real revenue on hemp seltzers. The industry knows cannabis is a category, not a threat, and its smartest operators want to own the distribution.

Why it matters now

The DEA's rescheduling decision, the December hemp deadline, and Senate races in Texas and Iowa are all landing in the same quarter. In each one, the question of who funds prohibition is now a live campaign issue rather than a footnote. Talarico is running on it. Goodwin is running on it. Joe Rogan, who is not a Democrat, told his audience Texas Republicans will "turn the whole thing blue" over the THC ban.

For the cannabis industry, the lesson is uncomfortable but useful. Public support for reform has been above 60% for a decade. The reason policy lags is that the other side shows up with checks, consistently, in the races that decide who writes the rules. Paxton's $509,806 is the price of one attorney general's attention. The industry that wants to replace beer in the cooler has never come close to matching it.

Source: Marijuana Moment

📈 Dog Walkers

$CRLBF ( ▼ 3.59% ) Primes The Uplisting Pump

Cresco Labs (CSE: CL) (OTCQX: CRLBF) filed its circular for an October 30 annual and special meeting, and the three special resolutions on the ballot are a step-by-step blueprint for a senior U.S. exchange listing. This is the Trulieve template, executed in public.

Resolution one creates TopCo, a new parent that swaps one-for-one with existing Cresco securities across every share class, with board discretion to do a reverse split if exchange minimums require it. Resolution two redomiciles TopCo from British Columbia to Delaware — the same domestication move that made Trulieve eligible for S&P's U.S. indices this month — and adopts a U.S.-style equity incentive plan, with the board free to pull the trigger any time before the end of 2027. CEO Charles Bachtell called it streamlining the capital structure "in advance of accessing U.S. capital markets," which is about as direct as a CEO can be without naming an exchange.

Resolution three is the one that deserves a closer read. Cresco's multiple voting shares currently sunset one year after a U.S. listing. The board wants that extended to three years, framed as "continuity of strategy" through the transition. Translation: Bachtell and the founding group keep control through the first three years on the NYSE or Nasdaq rather than one. Proxy advisors tend to dislike sunset extensions on principle, but with the founders' economic stake aligned and the listing itself as the prize, this likely passes.

The surrounding moves confirm the direction. Cresco added former Cboe CEO Edward Tilly to the board and audit committee last week — a listed-exchange executive is not a coincidental hire — and it closed nine Pennsylvania dispensaries for $50 million on the first of the month. The interim CFO is signing the circular, so a permanent finance chief is presumably on the way.

Shareholders of record as of September 15 vote by October 28. If everything passes, Cresco walks into 2027 Delaware-domiciled, structurally clean and waiting on the DEA.

$MRMD ( ▲ 0.68% ) Down For The Cause

MariMed (CSE: MRMD) (OTCQB: MRMD) is bringing back its Betty's Eddies partnership with the Keep A Breast Foundation for a fourth consecutive October, and this year the campaign reaches past the packaging and into the register.

The familiar piece is the limited-edition pink Ache Away Eddies — the CBD, CBC and THC fruit chew formulated with turmeric, piperine and vitamin E for inflammation and recovery — available across Massachusetts, Maine, Maryland, Illinois and Delaware. Each package points consumers to the Keep A Breast app, a free self-check and risk-reduction tool that connects users directly to medical professionals.

New this year is a retail round-up at all 12 Thrive dispensaries in participating states. Customers can round their purchase up to the nearest dollar, with every cent going to KAB's awareness and education work; participants get a co-branded bracelet while supplies last. It's a small mechanic that scales, and it turns a marketing tie-in into a measurable donation stream.

Betty's Eddies has always positioned itself at the wellness end of the edibles shelf, and the brand says the partnership grew out of years of hearing from patients using the chews to manage treatment-related symptoms. That's a legitimate consumer base, and a cause partnership that speaks to it honestly beats a generic pink ribbon.

Cannabis brands don't have many ways to build mainstream goodwill. Four years of showing up for the same cause, with a dispensary-level giving program attached, is one of the better ones.

📺 Trade To Black

The Medical Cannabis Model U.S. Operators Need | Trade to Black

• Beyond flower and pre-rolls: Avicanna CEO Aras Azadian lays out a decade of building standardized, non-combustible, controlled-release formulations backed by clinical data — from RHO Phyto's 40-SKU formulary to the new QUICKS nano-emulsion line with 10-to-15-minute onset.

• MyMedi is real revenue: The patient-support platform originally built with Shoppers Drug Mart now generates north of $20 million with roughly 80% of sales covered by insurance, and it's pushing directly into hospitals and pain clinics.

• Where global regulators are heading: Brazil, France and Germany are all favoring non-combustible medical products, and physicians' limited time remains the biggest barrier to broader adoption.

• The U.S. angle: What ten years of Canadian infrastructure, formulations and clinical evidence could mean for American operators once federal rescheduling takes effect.