Connecticut House Passes Bill Removing THC Limits on Cannabis

Connecticut’s House of Representatives passed a bill Monday night that would remove or raise THC limits on certain cannabis products, touching off a debate that exposed deep disagreements about how far the state should go to help its legal marijuana market compete with neighbors.

The legislation would eliminate caps on THC content in cannabis flower, plant material, and concentrates, raise limits on infused beverages, open the market to out-of-state consumers, and create new product categories. It now heads to the Senate.

Rep. Roland Lemar, D-New Haven, carried the bill on the floor and framed it as a market correction. “What this does is, it modernizes our cannabis and hemp laws to reflect today’s market realities,” Lemar said. He pointed to a specific regional imbalance: Connecticut businesses are competing against operators in New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island under rules those states don’t impose on their own licensees.

Connecticut legalized recreational cannabis in 2021 by a narrow vote in the General Assembly. Since then, lawmakers have returned to the law repeatedly, banning promotional discounts, regulating THC-infused beverages, and tightening rules around hemp products. Each round of changes has generated its own fight.

This one is no different.

The economic argument from supporters is straightforward. Lemar told colleagues the legal market has generated hundreds of jobs and tens of millions of dollars in state revenue. Federal regulations put in place last year complicated that picture, he said, by restricting how cannabis businesses operate and move product. “This is a burgeoning marketplace here in Connecticut, creating a lot of jobs and a lot of investment,” Lemar said. “We’re creating a strong pathway here for an infused beverage marketplace.”

For Connecticut’s Gold Coast and commuter-belt communities, that revenue argument has practical weight. Cannabis tax receipts flow into municipal aid formulas that affect everything from school budgets to road maintenance. Towns in Fairfield County that didn’t anticipate becoming stakeholders in cannabis policy now find their finances tied to how well the state’s licensed dispensaries perform against unregulated competitors just across the border in Port Chester or Yonkers.

“Make no mistake about it. A Connecticut business in this space is at a severe disadvantage to those that exist in New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island,” Lemar said. “They cannot compete on an even playing field because we have stacked the deck against them.”

The opposition wasn’t minor.

Rep. David Rutigliano, R-Trumbull, warned at a press conference that the cannabis industry had entered what he called a “capitalist market” driven by large corporations, and that public health would pay the price. His sharpest objection targeted the elimination of THC concentration caps on flower and concentrates. He said public health professionals who testified at a committee hearing on the bill were unambiguous. “Whatever you do, don’t raise the limits on THC. That’s what’s getting the kids sick, that’s causing psychosis … that’s causing all the problems that we have right now, is that the stuff is just too strong,” Rutigliano said, quoting from that testimony.

The CT Mirror reported that Rutigliano specifically argued higher THC concentrations would make addiction easier to develop, a concern echoed by the medical witnesses he cited.

The THC potency debate isn’t new to Connecticut or to the broader national conversation about cannabis regulation. States that moved early on legalization have wrestled with the same question: how much latitude to give a commercial market before public health costs outweigh tax benefits. Connecticut’s answer, at least from the House majority, is that the current caps have put the state’s licensed businesses at a structural disadvantage that benefits neither consumers nor the public health goals those limits were meant to serve.

The Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection, which oversees the state’s cannabis licensing system, would carry out the new rules if the Senate concurs and Gov. Ned Lamont signs the legislation.

The Senate’s timeline for taking up the bill is not yet set. Rutigliano and other opponents are expected to press their public health argument there, and the chamber’s response will reflect whether the economic case Lemar built in the House holds across a broader coalition. Cannabis tax data from the Department of Revenue Services, available through the state’s open data portal, shows the market has grown steadily since 2021, though projections for how regulatory changes would shift those numbers were not attached to Monday’s debate.