The story below is from our May/June 2022 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
The road to marijuana legalization is a bumpy one, with plenty of challenges along the way.
Trees were just starting their spring blooms on a Friday in March as customers popped into Blue Ridge Hydroponics to gear up for the coming growing season.
It’s not unusual for Roanokers to contemplate soil treatments and how to start seedlings as they prepare their gardens. But the customers visiting the Marshall Avenue storefront were thinking less of kale and collards than another kind of green — marijuana, which Virginia lawmakers legalized in 2021.
“It recently went legal, to where you can grow four plants, and that’s helped us out a lot,” said Jeremy Poe, manager at Blue Ridge Hydroponics. “But online’s a big competition, and a couple of other stores have opened up. Pricing-wise, people try to talk me down on quite a bit of stuff. We answer questions, look at pictures, help decipher what’s going on with somebody’s grow. We’re a lot more personal, more helpful than buying online.”
So while marijuana legalization is already changing life in the Roanoke Valley, some things — like the struggle of brick-and-mortar business versus online markets — remain much the same.
Blue Ridge Hydroponics first opened in 2004, and Poe’s been managing the store for six years. Legalization has affected the business — but maybe not in the way you think.
“Before, a lot of people were nervous to talk about it,” Poe said. “They’d say ‘tomatoes.’ I’d say we had a lot [of customers growing marijuana] before, and a lot now. It’s just a lot easier to talk about it now. I still have some nervous people, but I think that’s because of the law, and what’s gray area.”
Virginia law now allows for adults 21 and older to grow, possess and recreationally use marijuana. But the law doesn’t allow any sales. Democrats delayed enacting laws outlining a commercial market in 2021, and then lost November elections for governor and the House of Delegates to Republicans. Democrats still control a narrow majority in the Senate, but split government meant the General Assembly couldn’t come to an agreement on a path forward this year.
That still leaves the door open for businesses like Blue Ridge Hydroponics that cater to people growing their own cannabis.
Say a person walks into the store looking to grow their own marijuana with no previous experience. Assuming they don’t have the outdoor space to privately grow, they’ll likely consider a starter kit: A grow tent that can be set up in a corner of a room, with LED lights, fabric pots, specialized soil and a ventilation system.
“There’s a lot of pieces, so I decipher what that person has room for, what that person’s goals are, and then we typically put together a kit for them,” Poe said.
What customers won’t find are starter seeds; state law still prohibits their sale. Yet that’s one of the more common questions that Blue Ridge Hydroponics fields, along with speculation about what the future may hold.
Uncertainty around marijuana sales isn’t just a conversational topic for people growing their own — it’s a question that will decide the viability of businesses throughout the state. Take Buffalo Hemp Company, which sells CBD and other hemp products at three retail locations in Floyd, Blacksburg and Roanoke’s Wasena neighborhood.
Real estate agent and entrepreneur Derek Wall co-founded the business with three partners in 2019, when the federal government legalized hemp — a version of marijuana with a low percentage of THC that yields other chemicals with medicinal properties, such as CBD. The business has seen ups and downs, developing a farm-to-retail niche and a broad network among hemp farmers and processors.
“There’s nobody making money in the hemp industry,” Wall said. “And if they shut down Delta-8” — a chemical variation of THC that could be outlawed by new legislation [see more regarding this on page 36] — “it’s for sure nobody will be making money in the hemp industry.”
Wall said marijuana wasn’t a factor when the hemp company began, but he took notice when state lawmakers began discussing legalization.
“I thought, ‘The bigger we can be and the more people that know of our brand, the better off we’ll be in that movement to getting into marijuana,’” Wall said.
But that movement largely ground to a halt in the 2022 General Assembly session. Senators continued to work along the same lines as before. During the session, the bill lurched wildly as senators shifted provisions that favored different sectors of the developing hemp and marijuana industries.
There are the companies that already hold licenses to dispense medical marijuana in Virginia. Farmers that previously dove into hemp and now are considering marijuana. Hemp processors that connected growers and retailers. And a spectrum of businesses that aim to open retail dispensaries.
Ultimately, the Senate passed a bill that was killed in the House of Delegates. With no legislation authorizing a commercial market, regulations can’t be drafted. Everything stalled.
“It’s just a really, really complex issue,” said Greg Habeeb, who heads Gentry Locke’s government and regulatory affairs team in Richmond. “The dynamics to get there had to be perfect, and they weren’t.”
Lawmakers seemed agree on the idea that Virginia agriculture deserves special status and protection, Habeeb said. Beyond that, everything’s up in the air.
Lawmakers’ failure to act doesn’t just affect business; it also has implications for law enforcement, criminal justice and consumer safety.
“Everyone is super focused on who gets to make a buck first or next, but let’s step back a bit from that,” said JM Pedini, executive director of Virginia NORML. “A few hundred people will have cannabis business licenses. There are tens of thousands of consumers in Virginia, and this last legislative session asked them to take a backseat while the state sorted out who could make money on them.”
Pedini said the first step for most states has been to authorize recreational sales by medical companies, who’ve already invested dozens of millions of dollars and been scrutinized by state regulators for years.
Others disagree with that approach, including Buffalo Hemp’s Wall as well as Chelsea Higgs Wise, co-founder and executive director of Marijuana Justice, a nonprofit advocacy group.
“What we’re finding out is that every state that has legalized with a limited exclusive market for medical operators — somehow the social equity piece has been held up,” Wise said. “And we’re finding a direct link from medical operators to litigation that’s holding us up.”
Instead, Marijuana Justice favors micro-businesses and coops that encourage more community buy-in — and therefore more restorative justice. Marijuana legalization was passed in part to relieve the effects of mass incarceration in heavily policed neighborhoods — which largely tend to have lower incomes and higher percentages of Black and Latino residents.
A state study found 88 localities in Virginia disproportionately arrested Black individuals for marijuana possession from 2015 to 2019. In Roanoke, Black individuals were 3.64 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana. That figure grows to 4.35 in Salem, 6.52 in Roanoke County and 9.36 in Botetourt County. State courts were even more likely to move forward with cases against Black than white individuals.
The 2021 legalization law was written with provisions to favor individuals and communities that have been severely affected by marijuana criminalization. Republicans view those social equity provisions less favorably than Democrats. The lack of legislative action this year leaves a lot of uncertainty across the board — but especially in those highly affected communities, which tend to have less privacy and space to grow, and still face more consequences than less policed areas.
There’s also the matter of adjusting the criminal justice system to reflect legalization. Unfortunately, that tends to fall by the wayside amid the new focus on business opportunities.
“Not one state in the entire nation has completed resentencing after legalization,” Wise said.
The ongoing uncertainty over Virginia’s legalization may be resolved in the 2023 General Assembly session. If not, expect the topic to become an issue that fall, when Virginia votes on all 140 seats in the General Assembly.
The story above is from our May/June 2022. For more stories, subscribe today or view our FREE digital edition. Thank you for supporting local journalism!