The outcome of the Texas U.S. Senate race was always going to be disturbing given the low quality of the two leading candidates. It's not that there was no good option in the race; Ted Brown is a staunch supporter of free markets, civil liberties, small government, and a humane immigration policy. But Brown ran as a Libertarian in a country that treats a decrepit two-party system as an immutable natural feature. Even if given a choice between Hitler and Mao as major-party candidates and saints running on third-party or independent tickets, voters will almost always confine their votes to one or the other incarnation of evil. That electoral history pretty much guaranteed that the winner would be either Republican Ken Paxton or Democrat James Talarico.

Sure enough, Talarico walked away as the winner.

Bad Candidates With Ideas and Behavior To Match

For sure, Paxton and Talarico aren't Hitler and Mao. They're garden variety terrible politicians who believe in bad things and behave even more questionably.

In 2020, as a state lawmaker, Talarico described the free-market capitalism that made the world prosperous as an "oppressive system" that he linked to "white supremacy" in a discussion with Sierra Club activists. He also was hostile to oil and gas as energy sources (in Texas!) and fudged important details of his history as a teacher.

The Democrat has since disavowed some of his earlier radicalism, including uberwoke posturing, and now calls himself a "proud capitalist." Political candidates certainly have the right to change their minds, but it's unusual to see such an extreme ideological evolution in a 30-something adult who held elected office throughout the alleged transformation. An explanation more convincing than "I want to hold statewide office in Texas" would have been appropriate for the sudden flip.

Talarico also continued to bash "billionaires" in his campaign in language closely aligned with the Democratic Party's very not-market-oriented progressive wing. Ironically, he took gobs of cash from very wealthy donors including $10 million to a Talarico-supporting Super-PAC by billionaire Reid Hoffman.

Maybe billionaires are OK so long as they support the correct brand of politics.

Ken Paxton's most serious woes are of the personal ethics variety. Basically, it's not clear that he has any.

In 2024, Paxton agreed to pay $300,000 in restitution to end criminal securities fraud charges that dated from 2015 and his time as a state legislator. The settlement came just weeks before he was scheduled to stand trial on felony charges.

That conclusion followed an extended battle against state legislators from his own party who impeached him for misconduct, bribery, and corruption. His acquittal by the Texas Senate allowed him to resume his role as state attorney general. With the impeachment case resolved, the federal government dropped related criminal charges against Paxton in 2025 based on information his own staff brought to the FBI.

The loose ends were wrapped up in time to clear the way for Paxton's U.S. Senate run, but they hung over his campaign, as did his participation in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Why Look for Good Options When You Can Choose Your Doom?

Fundamentally, if you were looking for well-adjusted, trustworthy standard-bearers who offer constructive platforms for preserving a free-market society of limited government and personal liberty and building on its best qualities, these are not two individuals you would pick. If, instead, you sought cartoonish embodiments of stereotypes about the major political parties to dare the voters to cast ballots for them anyway, Paxton and Talarico certainly fit the bill. And one of them is going to Washington, D.C.

There really were other options. In addition to Talarico, Paxton, and the above-mentioned Brown, Ballotpedia lists four recognized write-in independent hopefuls for the office. There's also the option of skipping the Senate line on the ballot or ignoring Election Day entirely, so you can spend it doing something more productive like changing oil in the car or going on a drinking binge. Voting, after all, isn't mandatory.

In fact, there's absolutely no obligation whatsoever to stare at a ballot contemplating the grim choice between an obvious crook on the "R" line and a disingenuous loon with a "D" next to his name. There's little reason to anticipate any sort of good to come from sending one of them off to collect a salary at taxpayer expense ($174,000 at the moment, plus perks), and to enjoy a shockingly high likelihood of becoming much wealthier in office.

To my taste, if you were going to cast a vote in the Texas Senate race, Brown was a much more attractive candidate. The retired insurance adjuster offered a platform of resisting government surveillance, implementing an "Ellis Island"-style immigration system, free trade, lower taxes, overall civil liberties including self-defense rights, and non-intervention overseas.

"You need someone who is independent, who is going to defend the people of Texas as long as what they want is constitutional, and defend the U.S. Constitution, and most of what they do in Washington is unconstitutional. So, I'd be like a thorn in the side of everybody there and you need somebody like that," Brown told Reason's Nick Gillespie last month.

Talarico Is the Lone Star State's Next Senator

That would have been a welcome change from political business as usual. But Americans seem committed to turning every Election Day into a choose-your-doom scenario, and that looks to be what Texans opted for with their Senate votes this year as they confined themselves to the unsavory either/or of Paxton and Talarico.

By popular acclaim, the unsavory candidate Texans chose was James Talarico. If we're lucky, in office we'll see the somewhat moderated Talarico of recent years rather than the wacky anti-capitalist radical of the past.

Don't mess with Texas has become an unofficial slogan for the Lone Star State. But there's nothing to stop Texans from messing with themselves. And the messy choice they've made may mess with the rest of us after Talarico takes his seat in the U.S. Senate.

The post Voters Pick James Talarico To Mess with Texas—and the U.S. Senate appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Voters have clearly embraced Democratic candidates tonight—not necessarily because they like them, but because they like President Donald Trump considerably less.

Granted, a president's party is expected to lose seats in the midterms. But Trump has behaved so poorly during his second term that Georgia voters handily reelected Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, who was once considered a longshot.

In November 2020, when voters ejected Trump from the presidency, there were reverberations further down the ballot. In Georgia, two U.S. Senate races went to a runoff, where Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, two Democrats with no prior experience in elected office, won the state's Senate seats.

Georgia had not elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 2000, and it now had two.

Democrats were ecstatic, but any claims of Georgia going permanently blue were short-sighted: Ossoff and Warnock each had the advantage of running at a time when Trump made Republican candidates adopt his harebrained rhetoric about stolen elections. It's difficult to inspire your base to turn out and vote when you're simultaneously telling them the system can't be trusted to count it properly.

Two years later, when Warnock ran for a full term, he had further good fortune when Trump interceded and convinced Georgia Republicans to nominate Herschel Walker, a former football player with a sordid history who didn't even live in the state. Warnock won again.

Still, a permanently blue Georgia looked like a progressive fantasy. Trump won the state handily in 2024 on the way to recapturing the presidency.

But once back in office, Trump governed in a slash-and-burn fashion: signing dozens of executive orders on his first day, imposing double-digit tariffs on nearly every other country on earth, and deploying armed, masked federal agents into American cities. Going into the election, inflation stood at 3.7 percent—whereas the New York Federal Reserve calculated that without Trump's tariffs, many prices would have fallen.

And then, of course, there's his war against Iran, the gasoline and diesel price hikes that the war caused, and the flagrant corruption to enrich himself and his family.

Over the past year, Ossoff made corruption a major theme of his campaign, railing against Trump and the "Epstein class." Not only did that raise Ossoff's profile, but he is now spoken of as a potential 2028 presidential candidate.

One year ago this week, Roll Call listed Ossoff as his party's most vulnerable U.S. senator; on Tuesday, barely an hour after the polls closed, the Associated Press called the race in his favor.

Maybe a more competent Trump could have saved the Georgia Senate seat, and maybe not. But given Democrats are flipping seats in even such reliably red states as South Carolina and possibly Kansas, it's looking a lot like Trump's utterly unhinged record is to blame.

The post Jon Ossoff, Once the Senate's Most Vulnerable Democrat, Won Reelection by Running Against Trump's Corruption appeared first on Reason Magazine.

The votes are still being counted, but news outlets have already called the D.C. mayor's race for Councilmember Janeese Lewis George.

In the overwhelmingly liberal city, it's been treated as a foregone conclusion that the Democratic nominee would easily win the election to replace three-term retiring incumbent Muriel Bowser. It's no surprise then that, with 72 percent of the vote counted, Lewis George is leading with 84 percent of the vote.

The question now is how Lewis George, a solidly progressive voice on the D.C. Council and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, will govern.

As I covered in a recent profile of the incoming mayor, Lewis George's primary bid was given a major boost by city residents' anger at President Donald Trump's meddling in the district.

After 11 Years of Muriel Bowser, D.C. Readies Itself for Its First Socialist Mayor

The Trump administration might have gotten the fountains in Meridian Hill Park working again. But he fired a lot of D.C. residents through his DOGE cuts and angered many more with his deployment of federal law enforcement officers and National Guard troops onto city streets.

Throughout all these challenges to D.C.'s conditional autonomy, Bowser has generally tried to calm public sentiment and cooperate with the feds. Lewis George promised a more confrontational approach with the current occupant of the White House—and voters, by her estimation, have rewarded her for it.

Shortly before the Democratic primary, Trump threatened to revoke D.C.'s home rule status and run the district directly if Lewis George won.

"Residents said to me, 'If Trump doesn't like you, I love you,'" she told a reporter on the night of the Democratic primary.

But it's one thing to talk tough on the campaign trail and another once in office to go to war with an administration that has major leverage over the District's local government.

Meanwhile, D.C.'s budget has been posting larger and larger fiscal gaps each year. Those, by law, need to be plugged. And a sluggish local economy leaves only so much room to use tax increases to balance the budget before residents and businesses start fleeing.

That would seem to give Lewis George little room to enact her long list of progressive spending priorities, from universal child care to city-funded "social housing" development.

At the end of the day, being a mayor of a big city isn't a great job for a leftist to have. You've got to balance the budget. You can't print money. There isn't even any agricultural land to collectivize.

In D.C., the situation is even worse. At the drop of a hat, Donald Trump could take control of your police force.

We'll soon see whether Janeese Lewis George groks the limits of her position or sticks to her ideological guns and goes out in a blaze of glory.

The post Socialist Janeese Lewis George Easily Wins D.C.'s Mayoral Election appeared first on Reason Magazine.

However they voted, Americans waking up Wednesday morning can probably sympathize with Rep. Haley Stevens (D–Mich.), who surprised campaign watchers by rescinding her support for her party's Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, and endorsing Republican Mike Rogers in the race. After her past harsh words for the GOP hopeful, Stevens seems an unlikely Rogers fan. Instead, it appears she concluded that he sucks less than the Democrat and cast her lot accordingly. Most voters can sympathize.

Picking a "Grifter" Over "Hate"

In the past, Stevens called out Rogers as a "MAGA grifter" and "an out-of-touch, out-of-state millionaire." That's pointed, but it's standard-issue political rhetoric for 2026. Those taunts pale in comparison to the charge, leveled in her video announcing the about-face, of "hate… from our Democratic nominee." Stevens also criticized El-Sayed's association with Hasan Piker, the communist-curious influencer who frequently lashes out at Israel and Jews.

Stevens, whose pro-Israel stance is well-known, broke with El-Sayed after he refused to denounce an antisemitic ad targeted at Rogers that had been produced by a PAC associated with Piker's uncle, media personality Cenk Uygur. Earlier this year, El-Sayed also infamously shrugged off a terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue by saying "hurt people hurt people."

It's easy to see how Stevens could conclude that a grifter is less odious than El-Sayed's inclinations.

Americans seem to make similar calculations as their political choices swing wildly between America's two entrenched major parties, through the ideological mutations suffered by those organizations.

Americans Habitually Pick What They Hope is the Less Awful Option

In May, Pew Research reported that "58% of U.S. adults have an unfavorable view of the Republican Party" while "a nearly identical share (59%) have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party." Twenty-six percent can't stand either one.

That's not to say the Democratic and Republican parties no longer have enthusiastic partisans—they certainly do. True believers loyally cast primary ballots to select party standard-bearers who seem increasingly capable of ginning up excitement among a small segment of the population while repelling normies. In 1988, the earliest year surveyed by Gallup, voters roughly divided themselves in thirds among Democrats, independents, and Republicans. The two parties now each claim the support of just over a quarter of the electorate while independents represent 45 percent of voters.

Ultimately, those independents generally fall into line to vote for Republicans or Democrats, but they do so as less-bad alternatives to what they really dislike.

"Majorities of Republican leaners (56%) and Democratic leaners (64%) say a major reason they lean toward their preferred party is that the other party's policies are harmful," Pew noted last month. "Relatively few Republican leaners (34%) and Democratic leaners (27%) say a major reason they lean toward their preferred party is the perceived good of its policies."

The Trick Is Selling the Other Guy as Worse

We've created a political system in which everybody gets to be Haley Stevens for a day—or much longer, really, given the now never-ending nature of campaigning. We all pick the (we hope) less bad option.

The trick, of course, is deciding which candidate or party is awful rather than evil, and therefore less undeserving of a vote and election to political office. That's why so little of our political discourse delves into the relative merits of competing policy proposals and so much involves warnings about the inevitable doom to befall us if those people win. We hear very little "candidate X is great" and a lot of "candidate X is a corrupt pedo who will raise prices and end the republic."

That's pretty much the tone of the political ads in the piece of Arizona where I live.

What's remarkable is that there's little evidence that political advertising works. A 2020 Yale study found that "ads' effect on whom individuals intended to vote for was…a statistically insignificant 0.007 of a percentage point." That said, 2021 research from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management found some impact from political advertising, but that "negative ones were more effective at swaying voters' decisions."

Advertising also boosts name recognition. So, if you're going to do it at all, it makes sense to go with the odds and the tone of the moment and embrace the dark side.

That doesn't mean voters all come to the same conclusion about which party or candidates are more repulsive. Based on their values and priorities, and the degree to which they're angry about the state of the world around them, Americans make very different decisions about who sucks less. They argue about those conclusions with friends, neighbors, and strangers who make contrary choices about who to vote against, with participants absolutely convinced that this time they've identified the real danger.

Buyer's Remorse Is the Inevitable Outcome

Often, these debates take place among people who came to different conclusions about who was the bigger threat in the last election cycle, and the one before that. Voters then typically suffer buyer's remorse over the conduct of politicians who emerged victorious from the last round of balloting.

"Since 1946, there have been 20 midterm elections," Robert A. Strong, a senior fellow at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, wrote in January. "In 18 of them, the president's party lost seats in the House of Representatives. That's 90% of the midterm elections in the past 80 years."

In September, a survey by Navigator Research "found 18 percent of 2024 Trump voters regretted their vote." That's pretty close to the 20 percent of voters who cast their votes for Joe Biden in 2020 that told Zogby pollsters the next year they regretted how they filled out their ballots.

In a world where many people cast votes against the candidates they think are worse, it's unsurprising that dissatisfaction with the victors is a regular feature of the political process.

It's fair to ask, at this point, who I'm voting against. Well, after years of trying to parse the most pressing danger in each election cycle only to see the winners, some of whom I supported, treat the aftermath of the election as a hold-my-beer moment, I decided not to cast a ballot at all.

This year, I experience no buyer's remorse for my political decisions. I only have to suffer the consequences of others' bad choices. Like Haley Stevens, I'm sure they all hope they chose less wrong.

The post On Election Day, We All Get to Be Haley Stevens and Pick the (Hopefully) Less Lousy Candidates appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Martha Stewart is poor. Didn't you know? She is homeless and filthy and hungry and has excellent taste in candles, which are now on sale.

This is Halloween 2026, when one of the richest women on Earth—the world's first self-made female billionaire—dressed as a homeless woman, her face smudged with dirt, a sign beckoning for food. Hopefully help is on the way. The titan of home decor unveiled her costume in an Instagram carousel hawking her flameless Halloween candles, available on QVC. She is on brand even when off brand.

The bit was short-lived. It quickly became a casualty of internet commentators, some of whom were not impressed by the delta between Stewart's wealth and the lack thereof held by those who live the reality she briefly cosplayed. You mean to say a rich person would pretend to be poor? In this economy?

Stewart deleted the post and attempted to make it right. The costume was supposed to "bring more awareness to the very serious subject of homelessness," she said in a statement. This subject "continues to remain one of America's greatest challenges and ongoing crises," she added, "something that I care deeply about and I have spent a significant amount of time and effort supporting charities that combat this ongoing social epidemic."

I do not know anyone who is unaware of homelessness, though it is possible such a group exists. If awareness was the goal, perhaps Stewart could have suited up in a construction vest and mummified her body in red tape while tossing off citations like she does one of her salads. I may even have bought a candle.

There's always next year. This year, however, it is too late. What can Stewart do to atone for this, then?

On the one hand, nothing. Her apology will not soothe the loudest people who were angry with her. That's usually how this goes. Often it just makes it worse. 

On the other hand, also nothing. Halloween costumes allow the wearer to embody something they are not. That is, by definition, what a costume is. Martha Stewart is not homeless. While she is famous in part for gardening, I still picture the dirt ricocheting off her face when she pulls up flowers, because she is Martha Stewart. That is not to diminish the misery of being homeless, or the importance of compassion toward those experiencing it.

If this is the line we are to draw, though, we should probably cancel Halloween, because it is difficult to see how the holiday's tradition survives that level of scrutiny. This year, Elizabeth Holmes—the entrepreneur convicted of fraud in connection with her bogus medical startup Theranos—was a popular choice, notwithstanding that her actions allegedly cheated people out of millions and millions of dollars. People have dressed as Jeffrey Dahmer, a name synonymous with "serial murderer." They have dressed as Satan himself (but make it sexy). The author of this piece dressed as an engorged duck on his way to slaughter. Are we really drawing the line at homeless people?

Stewart, of course, is no stranger to controversy. Nor is she a stranger to being misunderstood. Her most notable black mark—that 2004 criminal conviction—was not, as many people believe, for insider trading. She didn't even go to trial for that. It was for lying to investigators.

Above all, though: She is no stranger to bouncing back. Stewart achieved what feels like the impossible: reclaiming her spot as America's spotless hostess after spending time in federal prison. This is not a trajectory we typically associate with people famous for icing cookies and curating the perfect dinner party. But that's Martha Stewart. Her legacy is defined by identities that appear wildly at odds yet somehow fuse into an unlikely whole; her closet includes prison khakis beside pressed aprons. In that way, what costume is more appropriate for her than the one she wore this year?

The post Martha Stewart's Homeless Halloween Costume Was Perfect for Her appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Americans should really be grateful to the U.K. for so frequently reminding us to value the First Amendment. The latest British contribution comes courtesy of the Crime and Policing Act of 2026, which makes it a crime to publish or possess certain genres of pornographic content.

Violators of the new rules could face two to three years imprisonment. That's a pretty steep punishment for merely possessing porn that features consenting adults engaging in sexual activities or fantasies of which the government disapproves.

'Face Sitting' Porn Banned?

Specifically, the new law bans imagery that depicts strangulation or suffocation. It also bans porn featuring sexual roleplay involving people pretending to be closely related or "where a reasonable person would think at least one person is, or is pretending to be, under 16."

Some have suggested that the law explicitly bans "BBW face sitting," "breast smother[ing]," and other specific acts, but they appear to be circulating a list of categories that the porn platform iWantClips has said it will suppress to comply with the law.

The law itself does not explicitly define either strangulation or suffocation.

Strangulation "generally means one person applying pressure to another person's neck," stated the Ministry of Justice. "Suffocation will generally mean depriving a person of air in a way that affects their ability to breathe."

Whether a particular act falls under the parameters of the law will be determined in court on a case-by-case basis, the Ministry of Justice said.

That may be worse than if the government had directly defined illegal acts—and not just because it deprives us of Parliamentary debates around "feet smothering" and "ass smothering." Unsure exactly what counts as illegal content, adult creators and platforms will interpret the mandate broadly in order to stay safe, as the iWantClips list highlights.

The Law Takes Effect This Week, Applies Retroactively

Starting November 6, 2026, it's a crime not only to publish videos or images featuring these newly banned categories of porn but also to possess them.

"Possession is a continuing act," the Ministry of Justice states. "If you already possess an image covered by these offences, you will need to permanently delete it or otherwise get rid of it before 6 November 2026 to avoid committing an offence once the offences come into force."

Having published such an image at any time in the past would also leave one liable now. That leaves an array of professional porn producers and peddlers in potential trouble.

The law stops short of cracking down on amateurs who have filmed or photographed themselves and a partner engaging in banned activities, so long as they keep it private and everything was consensual.

Still, this seems like it could open people up to investigations over private sexual activity in which they partook, especially if it's not immediately clear who is in a video or photo, or if the other party isn't readily available to avow consent.

It is absurd to throw people into prison for such content, whatever you think of such content yourself. No one is harmed by two adults agreeing to engage in gentle choking during sex. No one is harmed by two adults pretending having sex while pretending to be brother and sister. I mean, ew on the latter, but whatever. Some people are turned on by taboo. And I'm highly skeptical of the idea that watching "incest porn" will somehow induce people to go out and try to sleep with their family members in real life.

First they came for bbw facesitting and I did speak out but it was muffled by the bbw facesitting

— ailís malaru (@themalaru) October 30, 2026

If At First You Don't Succeed…

This isn't the U.K.'s first attempt at something like this.

Back in 2014, it banned a whole array of specific fetish acts in porn (prompting protests with slogans like "Sit on Santa's Face").

Those earlier regulations were reversed in 2019, with authorities saying such acts could be depicted so long as everyone involved was consenting, no one was harmed, and the content wasn't likely to viewed by anyone underage.

But the British censors never gave up the dream of ensuring that people don't take this Monty Python classic to heart.

In the News

Another fake 'trafficking' sting. Florida's Polk County Sheriff's Office is at it again, announcing "281 arrests during human trafficking and child predator enforcement operation 'Polk Around and Find Out II' when the vast majority of the arrests were adults arrested for trying to do consensual sex work or to pay an adult sex worker for services. "There were 117 suspects arrested for soliciting a prostitute," says a Polk County press release, and 122 suspects arrested on suspicion of prostitution.

"Seventeen police agencies, some prosecutors, and a non profit" participated in this operation, points out Tara Burns.

Among the 31 arrests "related to child sexual predators," there were no actual victims, just undercover police. The cops posed online as 13- or 14-year-olds or their guardians.

The fact that those arrested on child-related charges were really talking with undercover cops doesn't make their (alleged) willingness to engage in sexual activity here any better. But it does mean that none of these cases involved actual children being harmed. (It also leaves open the possibility that not everything went down exactly as police are claiming here.)

That's relevant because people are always pointing to stings like these as evidence that sex trafficking of minors is at epidemic proportions. But nothing in this sting (or the many similar stings conducted in Polk County, Florida) suggests that.

More Sex & Tech

• Noticing more and more—on the internet and in in-person conversations—that younger people are accusing older adults of being the ones who really have problems with their phones. In New York magazine, Jessica Lucas looks at what happens when boomer-and-up screen time collides with the beginnings of cognitive decline.

• "Sexually explicit footage appeared on digital LED billboards in Egypt, Malaysia, Brazil, and reportedly Iraq and China on Thursday," reports Gizmodo. "Following these incidents, a group on Telegram claimed responsibility for an operation it described as simple enough that 'anyone with two brain cells' could have pulled it off."

• Manosphere types often argue "that men are primarily attracted to much younger women (often including girls under the age of consent) and lose attraction somewhere around thirty, certainly by forty," by way of suggesting that women should "settle down as quickly as possible (presumably to someone much older, who is not very impressive physically) so they don't miss their supposedly brief window of desirability," notes Cartoons Hate Her. "But taking this belief literally—as some women actually do—will yield very different results."

• Trump 1.0 conspiracy theory deep cut here, but remember Pizzagate? Anna Merlan suggests that "until the Trump administration—or the larger political establishment—holds Jeffrey Epstein and his associates to account, Pizzagate can never really die."

• An interesting podcast conversation about AI between the political scientist Yascha Mounk and the philosophy professor Dan Williams. "In many ways you should think of large language models as the anti-social-media," Williams says. "Whereas social media, because it has this engagement-maximizing character, tends to amplify this sensationalist, conflict-oriented style of communication, at least at the moment, Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, even Grok, which is Elon Musk's large language model, tends toward a pretty dry, respectful, accuracy-oriented style of communication."

The post U.K. Bans Possession of Porn Depicting Choking, Suffocation, or Pretend Incest appeared first on Reason Magazine.

New York legalized recreational cannabis in 2021, yet the illicit market still dwarfs the legal one, thanks largely to heavy regulations. Lawmakers might finally be catching on to this problem.

Last week, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, rejected key provisions of Senate Bill 10643, which among other things aimed to raise the minimum wages for cannabis workers in the state.

The bill, which passed both chambers of the New York State Assembly in June, would create a three-member Cannabis Wage Board to classify cannabis workers based on their roles and recommend a minimum wage to the governor's office and legislature. Another section would make marijuana license applicants disclose their "full ownership structure," any management service agreements they've signed, and the pay and scheduled hours for every paid position to the Cannabis Control Board. The bills authors say that the wage board would be there to help to "ensure workers in the industry are treated fairly," but the average New York cannabis worker actually makes $5 per hour more than an average retail worker in the state, according to the Albany Times Union.

​After the bill passed, the Cannabis Association of New York (CANY) told Marijuana Moment the bill would "create significant uncertainty for operators at a time when many are finally beginning to find their footing after years of regulatory delays, capital constraints, and continued competition from the illicit market."

"It poses particular risk to the small, equity businesses that are the backbone of our industry," CANY added.

Last Wednesday, Hochul signed S.B. 10643 on the condition that legislators eliminate the wage board and the additional reporting requirements. In a memo regarding her decision, the Times Union reports, she wrote: "The bill, as passed, would create uncertainty in the industry by imposing a burdensome reporting requirement on applicants, and by creating a wage board that could raise costs for licensees and drive consumers to the illicit market."

Hochul also signed a law repealing the state's requirement that cannabis businesses sign labor peace agreements (LPAs)—contracts businesses sign with unions agreeing not to oppose a union's effort to organize its workers—to get a license. Hochul instead agreed to give the Cannabis Control Board the discretion to prioritize applicants who voluntarily enter such agreements.

That's good news for the state's dispensaries, which have questioned the rule's legality. In April 2025, Hybrid NYC, which operates the Gotham dispensary in Brooklyn, sued the state, arguing that the LPA mandate is preempted by the National Labor Relations Act, which governs private sector labor relations. (A federal judge denied the state's motion to dismiss the suit in December 2025, and the suit was still in motion before Hochul repealed the law.)

Similar battles have been playing out nationwide. In August, a federal judge vacated New Jersey's LPA mandate for its cannabis industry, ruling it was preempted by federal law. Oregon's mandate was struck down for the same reason in 2025. Meanwhile, Virginia imposed a similar mandate to New York's. In public comment to Virginia's Senate Rehabilitation and Social Services Committee earlier this year, Geoffrey Lawrence, research director at Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes Reason), warned lawmakers that the mandate would preempt federal law. Another challenge is currently underway in California.

The continued dominance of illicit weed in New York demonstrates that cannabis users and sellers prefer a freer market. Rolling back the LPA mandate and blocking a cannabis wage board won't fully fix the regulatory landscape, but they are promising signals that the state might finally be realizing that red tape is hindering the legitimate cannabis market.

The post New York Takes Steps Toward a Freer Cannabis Market appeared first on Reason Magazine.