As the 2026 legislative session continues, Connecticut’s cannabis industry is facing the possibility of additional restrictions on the state’s licensed, legal market – even as silence regarding the illicit market continues. This situation involves misattribution, with state government blaming the risks of unregulated products on the most transparent and monitored part of the ecosystem: Connecticut’s legal, regulated cannabis market.
A recent report citing the Connecticut Poison Control Center flagged 668 calls regarding
children and cannabis since 2019. The is data is being used to justify new restrictions,
but 2019 is an inaccurate baseline because adult-use sales in Connecticut didn’t launch
until four years later in 2023.
This regulatory pattern began during the 2019 “vape crisis,” which was driven by vitamin E acetate found almost exclusively in illicit THC vape cartridges. Those cartridges did not originate from licensed cannabis programs, but from an unregulated market that expanded rapidly after the 2018 federal Farm Bill unintentionally created a loophole allowing intoxicating, high-THC hemp-derived products to be manufactured and sold outside of state cannabis regulatory frameworks.
Connecticut’s legal medical marijuana program did not record a single patient harmed during the 2019 vape crisis. Yet restrictive regulations were immediately imposed on licensed operators anyway — a case of punishing the legal market for a serious black-market failure that federal law helped enable.
Connecticut also prohibits the use of vape flavors that are common in our neighboring states — flavors such as Orange Creamsicle, Mango, or Strawberry — despite their widespread availability and consumer acceptance right over our borders. Instead,Connecticut operators are not permitted to produce these familiar flavor profiles which represent a significant market share.
The result is a structurally uncompetitive marketplace: consumers in neighboring states have access to a broad range of regulated, flavored vape products, while Connecticut’s legal market is artificially constrained by a limitation that neither improves safety nor reflects how cannabis products are formulated, regulated, or consumed across the rest of the country.
How can Connecticut be competitive when we are held to a wildly different standard?
The answer is we cannot and we are not.
The cannabis hyperemesis syndrome (CHS) – which can cause cycles of nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain after using cannabis — similarly claims that “legal weed causes CHS” but it confuses detection with causation. CHS is associated with chronic, heavy cannabis use regardless of source, and there are no controlled studies comparing CHS incidence in users of regulated versus illicit cannabis.
Reported increases in CHS following legalization are best explained by the fact that patients are more willing to report cannabis use, clinicians are more familiar with the diagnosis, and medical records are more likely to reflect it. Attributing CHS to “legal” or “higher potency” cannabis is speculative, unsupported by causal evidence, and mischaracterizes a condition driven by use patterns or possibly even genetic disposition, not market status.
Connecticut currently regulates licensed cannabis with a level of intensity that ignores relative risk. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), alcohol is associated with 140,000 deaths annually. By contrast, NIDA reports no documented cases of fatal overdoses from cannabis alone.
When we regulate a legal substance with no lethal dose more strictly than one with a high mortality rate, we aren't protecting public health—we are performing theater.
In Connecticut, our regulators are making a fundamental category error: they do not treat cannabis as a botanical or herbal medicine, but as a homogenized pharmaceutical formulation.
In true pharmaceutical manufacturing, in-house labs conduct compliance testing using validated, repeatable methods under strict cGMP standards. In Connecticut, all testing is outsourced to third-party labs following state-crafted mandates that often ignore these rigorous scientific controls. The DCP treats a raw, heterogeneous plant as if every sample will be 100 percent reflective of the entire batch.
This “bad math” means a single outlier sample—often a result of the testing process itself—can justify the destruction of an entire batch. Even worse, it triggers product recalls for minor deviations. While the FDA utilizes recalls sparingly, reserving them for high-risk instances or risk of death, Connecticut regulators deploy them frequently for bureaucratic inconsistencies.
The enforcement is unpredictable; a grower may be ordered to conduct a recall and pay fines for a situation that others face without penalty, even when no adverse health events are reported.
Most concerning is the assumption of lab infallibility. The state regs maintains a strict policy that any data point exceeding specification is the fault of the grower, ignoring the statistical reality that up to 80 percent of variation in such systems often stems from the measurement process itself—how a sample was collected and prepared, not the product. When a regulator refuses to acknowledge measurement error, they aren’t taking a pharmaceutical approach — they are ignoring the science of
measurement entirely.
This lack of scientific alignment leads to absurdities. For example, a legal cannabis gummy is currently held to residual ethanol specifications more stringent than the alcohol levels occurring naturally in a ripe banana. When a gummy is regulated more strictly than common fruit, we aren't following science — we are following a whim.
The most glaring failure is the obsession with “Total Microbial Counts”; Connecticut
regulators treat high counts as definitive danger. However, the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) is moving away from this approach because total counts are unreliable indicators of risk. By focusing on arbitrary numbers rather than specific pathogens, the state forces legal growers to treat safe flower, stripping it of quality.
The most recent example of “Mandated Self-Sabotage” is Public Act 25-166, which
requires legal dispensaries to post “Mold Warning” signs and warnings for “high-potency” products.
These signs warn of “negative health effects, including infections and toxicological effects” and risks associated with remediation. By forcing legal operators to disparage their own lab-cleared products, the state is unintentionally pushing consumers toward the illicit market, which operates in total silence and bears no warning labels.
If the Connecticut cannabis industry is a ship taking on water, it is largely due to the weight of its own regulations. But the “lifeboat” we need is not just for the operators, it is for the patients and consumers currently being pushed out of a safe market by cost and inconvenience.
The “Transparency Tax” is also responsible for the high cost of being a legal operator in Connecticut. The “Transparency Tax”; is the staggering cost of mandatory compliance testing. To sell a single gram of cannabis in the legal market, a licensed operator must pay for exhaustive, third-party lab testing. For a typical small operator in Connecticut, spending $500,000 on lab testing against $10,000,000 in top-line revenue is a crushing burden.
While we subject local businesses to these hurdles, the illicit market operates with zero
testing costs.
In 2025, DCP added to this burden by adopting a randomized final form sampling method unique to Connecticut. This “gotcha”; style of enforcement treats legal operators like suspects and adds an average of $175,000 in annual costs for micro-cultivators, costs that translate directly into higher prices for patients without adding a single layer of safety.
Perhaps the most damaging self-sabotage is Connecticut’s mandate on operating hours. The DCP requires dispensaries to close early, ostensibly to be aligned with liquor store hours. However, this logic fails on two fronts: bars remain open late, and Connecticut lacks cannabis consumption lounges. This mandate simply forces legal shops to close their doors while –again — the illicit market is “open for business” and vape shops and gas stations across the state stay open late, and sell unregulated, high-potency cannabis products with lackluster enforcement. By restricting legal hours, the state has effectively gifted a monopoly on late-night sales to the unregulated,
untaxed, and untested actors.
Inevitably, these costs are built into the retail price. Stacked on top of Connecticut’s unique potency-based tax, the average price in Connecticut at one point is nearly double that of Massachusetts but has dropped significantly in recent months. The result is that medical cannabis sales in Connecticut declined by $21 million in 2025. Patients on fixed incomes are being priced out of the safe market and driven back to the shadows. Connecticut needs regulations that reflect the economic and biological reality of 2026, not unfounded fears of the past.
Rino Ferrarese is president of Affinity Grow, based in Portland, Connecticut