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 $265,000 to $662,000 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.
Alaska's constitutional privacy precedent does not transfer to Connecticut.
Ravin v. State, 537 P.2d 494 (Alaska 1975), rested on an express privacy clause in the Alaska Constitution adopted in 1972. Connecticut's constitution contains no such clause — the Office of Legislative Research has stated that the word “privacy” does not appear in it. Alaska is the only state whose courts have gone this far, and Hawaii and Montana declined to follow. We cite Ravin for its reasoning about the home, not as controlling law.
Ravin protected possession, not cultivation.
The opinion held that possession and ingestion in the home were protected. Several popular accounts describe it as protecting cultivation. It does not say that.
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 are still verifying where the indoor-only rule lives.
The Department adopted final cannabis regulations in January 2025. We have asked the Office of Legislative Research whether the indoor-only requirement now sits in a formally adopted regulation — which would have cleared the Attorney General and the Legislative Regulation Review Committee — or remains in agency policies and procedures. We will publish that answer here either way.
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.