Gov. Abigail Spanberger explained her cannabis veto: she didn’t want to rush like other states. The problem is that the states that rushed are doing fine, and her veto just froze a $50 million expansion and hundreds of jobs.
A day after vetoing the bill that would have launched Virginia’s adult-use cannabis market, Gov. Abigail Spanberger explained herself. Speaking at an unrelated event Wednesday, she said she still supports a retail market but wants “a durable one,” and that opening sales by January 2027 was simply too fast.
“The notion that, between July and January, we would be able to build out all of the rules of the road for a legal recreational marijuana market and have doors open to sales in January, is a rushed time frame.”
Gov. Abigail Spanberger
She also said the 350-store cap in the bill, with up to three stores per locality, was “far more” than she was comfortable with, and that her team had talked with other governors to learn from “the mistakes of other states that have either rushed, or even thinking that they got it right on a methodical path.” (We covered the veto itself and the new criminal penalties that killed it for her own party, here.)
Here’s the catch. She never named a single state or a single mistake.
The states that “rushed” are fine
The trouble with the too-fast argument is that the record points the other way. Ohio launched adult-use sales in August 2024, less than a year after voters legalized it in November 2023. Maryland opened in July 2023, eight months after its own ballot measure. Neither rollout drew much industry criticism.
The state most operators point to as a cautionary tale is New York, which moved slowly. Its first store didn’t open until December 2022, nearly two years after legalization, and the botched rollout was so bad that even Gov. Kathy Hochul called it exactly that. In other words, the disaster Spanberger says she wants to avoid is the one caused by going slow, which is the thing her veto just guaranteed.
$50 million and hundreds of jobs, on pause
While the governor talks timelines, the veto already has a price tag. Jushi Holdings, the Florida-based operator that runs Beyond Hello dispensaries in Virginia, said a $50 million plan to expand its existing business and hire “hundreds” of new workers is now frozen.
“All that is on pause.”
A Jushi Holdings executive, to the Washington Business Journal
Trent Woloveck, Jushi’s chief strategy director, has been blunt about the logic gap. Pushing the program back six months while invoking public health, he told local outlets, amounts to the governor “talking out of both sides of her mouth,” because the unregulated market she says she’s worried about keeps running in the meantime.
That’s the bind Virginia is now in. The governor would rather have no legal market than a flawed one, as she put it, she’d prefer no retail sales at all to a rushed launch. But “no legal market” isn’t a neutral holding pattern. It’s the status quo that has existed since 2021: possession is legal, sales are not, and the illicit market fills the gap, untaxed and untested. The next real shot at fixing that comes in the 2027 legislative session, which pushes a realistic launch to 2028 at the earliest.
