An email obtained by The Times shows that a committee leader, Rep. Sharon Wylie, an industry advocate, shared a draft of the bill with a cannabis lobbyist. “Thank you for being open to a compromise approach,” he wrote.
In an interview, Ms. Wylie said “the jury is still out” on the potential harms of cannabis, and that regulated businesses bring revenue to the state.
Ms. Davis is not resigning. He plans to introduce legislation in another committee this month that would ban all concentrates that exceed 35% THC, with exceptions for medical use.
“The industry needs boundaries,” he said.
Methodology
The New York Times looked at sales data from two cannabis industry data companies, BDSA and Headphones, for October 2023 through September 2024. Because the two companies’ rankings differed somewhat, the Times looked at all brands included in the list of the Top-20 business-24 total brands.
Reporters then located each brand page on WeedMaps, where available. Four were excluded because they did not have a presence on WeedMaps, their listings did not have specific product descriptions, or they had too few products.
In November 2024, the Times captured the entire WeedMaps product catalog for each of the remaining 20 brands: a dataset containing nearly 18,000 products. Times identified dozens of medical and health-related keywords that appeared in the descriptions. For each brand, reporters confirmed that keywords were used to suggest that the products could help treat specific health problems.
After reaching out to the brands for comment, the Times again reviewed WeedMaps descriptions of all the products in the original analysis to determine if any 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 Stiiizy’s website, focusing on its guides to individual strains of cannabis. Each guide included the strain’s flavors, supposed effects, and what conditions it “helps.” The Times programmatically identified 82 of those drivers in December and January, based on the site’s website, and extracted conditions mentioned in each.
Carson Keser contributed report and Julie Tait contributed research.
