An email obtained by The Times shows that one of the committee leaders, Rep. Sharon Wylie, an industry supporter, shared a draft of the bill with a cannabis lobbyist. “Thank you for your openness to the compromise approach,” she wrote.
In an interview, Ms. Willey said the “jury is still out” on the potential harms of cannabis, and that regulated businesses bring in revenue for the state.
Ms. Davis doesn’t give up. It plans to introduce legislation to another committee this month that would ban all concentrates exceeding 35 percent THC, with exceptions for medical use.
“The industry needs boundaries,” she said.
methodology
The New York Times examined sales data from two cannabis industry data companies, BDSA and Headset, for the period from October 2023 to September 2024. Because the two companies’ rankings differed somewhat, the newspaper looked at all of the brands included in the top 20 list — 24 brands in total. .
Reporters then located each brand’s page on Weedmaps, where available. Four of them were excluded, because they had no presence on Weedmaps, their listings lacked product descriptions or they had too few products listed.
In November 2024, The Times downloaded the entire Weedmaps product catalog for each of the remaining 20 brands: a dataset containing nearly 18,000 products. The Times identified dozens of medical and health-related keywords that appeared in the descriptions. For each brand, reporters confirmed that keywords were used to indicate that the products could help treat specific health issues.
After contacting the brands for comment, The Times again examined the Weedmaps descriptions for all products in the initial analysis, to determine whether any of the health-related language had been removed.
Weedmaps listings do not necessarily include all products sold under a particular brand and may reflect some items that are no longer widely sold.
The Times conducted a separate analysis of the health claims on the Stiiizy website, focusing on its guides for individual cannabis strains. Each guide included the flavors of the strain and the effects and conditions it allegedly “helps with.” The Times programmatically identified 82 such pieces of evidence in December and January, based on… Site mapand the extracted conditions mentioned in each of them.
Carson Kessler Contributed to the preparation of reports, and Julie Tate Contributed to research.
