What We Are Not Claiming
What we are not claiming
We would rather tell you the limits of this work than have you find them later.
This does not reverse the enrollment decline.
At a realistic uptake of roughly 855 licensed caregivers serving five patients each, the bill reaches about 18% of the patients Connecticut has lost since 2021. It slows the loss and serves the people least able to help themselves. It does not undo it.
It is not a significant revenue measure.
Fee revenue in the realistic range is $130,000 to $660,000 a year against zero today. Because medical cannabis is exempt from the sales, excise and municipal taxes under § 12-412(120), some patients returning to the medical program will reduce other state tax receipts. We have modeled that offset ourselves rather than wait to be asked about it.
We do not claim a constitutional right to grow at home.
Connecticut’s constitution contains no privacy clause — the Office of Legislative Research has stated that the word “privacy” does not appear in it. No Connecticut court is going to read one in. That is precisely why this is a request to the General Assembly and not a lawsuit. The privacy and precedent brief in the document library sets out the Alaska case law, including the reasons it does not control here.
Federal Schedule III does not make Connecticut's program federally compliant.
The April 2026 order covers state-licensed medical cannabis. Adult-use remains Schedule I. Petitions challenging the order are pending in the D.C. Circuit, and a separate rescheduling proceeding has not been decided.
We do not claim the Department acted unlawfully.
The indoor-only requirement is not in statute. It appears in Department guidance, which points to policies and procedures issued under § 21a-421j — a section that lets the Department issue rules with the force of law on fifteen days’ notice while bypassing Regulation Review. The Department used the authority the legislature gave it. Our argument is that the delegation is too broad, not that anyone broke the rules.
Maine and Connecticut do not count patients the same way.
Maine's Office of Cannabis Policy reports patient certifications; Connecticut reports registered patients. The two units are close but not identical, so the per-capita comparison on The Data page should be read as an order-of-magnitude difference rather than a precise ratio. We flag it here rather than let a reader find it.