Wes Moore holds stock in a cannabis company that profits when Maryland’s hemp market is eliminated. His administration went to court to make sure it was.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
When Maryland’s Appellate Court issued its ruling on September 9, 2025, the caption told the story before the opinion did. The case was styled Governor Wes Moore, et al. v. Maryland Hemp Coalition et al. The governor of Maryland had personally litigated — as a named party — to shut down an unlicensed hemp market. The ruling went his way. Hemp-derived psychoactive products, the court declared, “are now and have always been illegal in Maryland.”
What the court caption did not note: the governor’s single largest financial asset is nearly $1.2 million in stock in Green Thumb Industries, a multistate cannabis company that operates licensed dispensaries in Maryland. Green Thumb does not sell hemp-derived products. It sells licensed cannabis. Every hemp retailer pushed out of the Maryland market is a customer redirected to businesses like the ones Green Thumb operates.
The blind trust Moore created in May 2023 is his answer to questions about this arrangement. His spokespersons have argued it removes him from the appearance of conflict. But a blind trust does not eliminate a financial interest — it only obscures who is managing it. The governor still benefits when Green Thumb’s market position strengthens. And his administration has now spent years in court ensuring it does.
The Asset
Moore’s relationship with Green Thumb Industries predates his political career. In 2018, he was awarded more than $1.6 million in GTI stock and joined the company’s board of directors — a position he held until March 2022, shortly before launching his gubernatorial campaign. He resigned from the board, but kept the stock.
GTI is not a small player. The Chicago-based company operates 75 retail locations across 15 U.S. markets. In Maryland, it holds cultivation and processing licenses through operations in Centreville and runs dispensaries in Bethesda, Silver Spring, and Joppa under the RISE brand. These are licensed, regulated businesses operating within the exact framework that Moore’s Cannabis Reform Act established, and his administration has defended in court.
When Moore filed his financial disclosure in 2023, GTI stock represented roughly 46 percent of his total disclosed portfolio — nearly $1.2 million in a $2.5 million blind trust. No other single holding exceeded nine percent. Under Armour, his second-largest holding, was a distant second.
“This blind trust is a continued effort on behalf of Governor Moore to serve Maryland in the most transparent way possible.”
— Carter Elliott, Moore Spokesperson, May 2023
Ethics experts were less sanguine. John Pelissero, a senior scholar in government ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, noted at the time that, unlike a state legislator who could recuse from a single vote, a governor cannot step aside from executive functions. “An executive has to make decisions,” Pelissero said.
The trust terms require diversification — GTI’s share of the portfolio must eventually fall below 30 percent of total assets — but the trust is not required to publicly disclose its current holdings. Future annual reports to the State Ethics Commission will log any sales, but the public will not see what remains. The opacity is baked in by design.
The Market
Maryland legalized adult-use cannabis in July 2023 under the Cannabis Reform Act, which Moore signed into law. The legislation did two things simultaneously: it created a path for licensed cannabis dispensaries to enter the recreational market, and it banned the unlicensed sale of hemp-derived psychoactive products — specifically any cannabinoid “not derived from naturally occurring biologically active chemical constituents.”
In plain terms: delta-8 and delta-10 THC products, which had proliferated in CBD shops, gas stations, and hemp retailers across Maryland following the federal 2018 Farm Bill, were now illegal outside of licensed dispensaries. The hemp market that had operated in a gray zone for years was effectively regulated out of existence for independent retailers.
The Maryland Hemp Coalition — representing hemp farmers, processors, manufacturers, and retailers — sued in July 2023, arguing the licensing framework was unconstitutional. A Washington County Circuit Court sided with the hemp industry in October 2023, issuing a limited injunction that blocked enforcement of the provisions. That injunction kept independent hemp businesses operating for nearly two years.
The state — with Moore as the named defendant — appealed. On September 9, 2025, the Appellate Court of Maryland reversed the injunction. The three-judge panel ruled that hemp-derived intoxicating cannabinoids had never been legal in Maryland. All retail establishments selling those products were put on notice: enforcement was coming.
The Case Caption
It is worth pausing on the procedural posture. Governor Wes Moore, et al. v. Maryland Hemp Coalition was not a passive exercise in defending an inherited law. Moore’s administration actively litigated, on appeal, to eliminate the protected status that the lower court had granted to the hemp industry. The governor chose to spend state legal resources pursuing this outcome. The outcome directly benefits the licensed cannabis sector — including the company whose stock constitutes nearly half of his disclosed personal wealth.
Moore’s office would argue that the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Cannabis Commission, not the governor personally, drove enforcement decisions. It would note that the Cannabis Reform Act was a General Assembly product signed into law with broad legislative support. These points are accurate. But they do not address the structural problem: the governor of Maryland cannot credibly claim neutrality in cannabis market regulation when his largest personal financial stake is in a cannabis company positioned to benefit from that regulation.
The Consumer
A Hagerstown resident and medical cannabis patient, sent a tip to MDBayNews after the hemp enforcement regime took effect. “I am a medical marijuana patient who relied on the CBD market to supplement the ‘legal’ weed for my care,” they wrote. “With making CBD sales against the law in Md he effectively dissolved his businesses competition. I now have to cross state lines in order to purchase the needed CBD instead of 5 mins down the road.”
Their framing conflates CBD and delta-8, which carry different legal statuses under the 2023 law. Non-intoxicating CBD products — topicals and tinctures with less than 0.5mg THC per serving — remain legal in Maryland. What the law eliminated were the intoxicating hemp-derived products that many medical patients used as accessible, lower-cost alternatives to dispensary cannabis. If their products fell into that category, their description of the regulatory impact is accurate even if the legal shorthand is imprecise.
Her broader point — that Moore’s administration eliminated market competition that benefits a company he holds stock in — is documented.
Timeline
What the Company Said
GTI does not break out state-by-state revenue in its public earnings releases — standard practice for multistate cannabis operators. But the company’s own filings name Maryland repeatedly, and the timing is notable.
In its Q4 2024 earnings report, filed February 26, 2025 — while the hemp industry’s injunction was still in place and the state’s appeal was pending — GTI cited “continued growth in our existing markets of New York, Florida, and Maryland” as a driver of full-year retail revenue growth. Maryland was named alongside the company’s two largest adult-use expansion states as a market producing measurable results.
Then came Q3 2025. The quarter ended September 30, 2025 — three weeks after the Appellate Court issued its ruling in Moore v. Maryland Hemp Coalition, lifting the injunction and authorizing enforcement against hemp retailers. In GTI’s earnings release for that quarter, company President Anthony Georgiadis stated that the company was seeing “meaningful third-quarter gains in key markets including Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland.”
Maryland called out for “meaningful gains” in the same quarter its hemp competition was legally eliminated. GTI does not explain what drove those Maryland gains, and no causal claim can be made on this record alone. What can be said: the company’s own executives named Maryland as a bright spot in the same earnings window that the governor, whose name is on the case — and whose largest financial holding is GTI stock — delivered a court victory shutting down that market’s unlicensed competitors.
GTI’s own SEC risk disclosures make the competitive stakes explicit. The company lists among its material risks “hemp products that are actually or purportedly compliant with the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018 (the Farm Bill)” as a direct competitive threat. GTI tracks hemp retailers as competition. Moore’s administration eliminated them. The company then reported Maryland gains.
The Standard
Maryland’s ethics law states that, in most instances, a public official “may not have a financial interest in or be employed by an entity having or negotiating a contract with the agency with which he or she is affiliated.” The cannabis framework is not strictly a contracting relationship — it is a regulatory one. But the underlying principle is identical: the governor of Maryland should not hold a significant financial stake in an industry he directly regulates, appoints commissioners to oversee, signs legislation affecting, and defends in court.
The blind trust was designed to provide the appearance of distance. It does not provide the substance of it. Moore’s name remains on the case. GTI’s Maryland dispensaries remain open. The hemp retailers they competed with are now illegal. And the governor’s largest single financial holding is stock in a company that benefits from exactly that outcome.
Sources:
- Capital News Service / CNS Maryland, April 29, 2022 — Moore financial disclosures and GTI holdings
- Maryland Matters, May 1, 2023 — Blind trust formation and GTI stock valuation
- Baltimore Sun, May 1, 2023 — Trust terms and portfolio composition
- Washington Post, May 1, 2023 — Blind trust reporting
- Daily Caller News Foundation, May 12, 2023 — Ethics watchdog commentary
- Maryland Cannabis Administration, HB 556/SB 516 Summary (2023)
- Frier Levitt, January 2026 — Maryland Appellate Court ruling analysis
- Cannabis Business Times, September 12, 2025 — Moore v. Maryland Hemp Coalition ruling
- MJBiz Daily, September 17, 2025 — Delta-8/Delta-10 ruling coverage
- ATCC Maryland, September 15, 2025 — Enforcement notice
- Green Thumb Industries Q4 2024 Earnings Release (SEC Form 8-K, February 26, 2025) — Maryland named as retail growth market
- Green Thumb Industries Q3 2025 Earnings Release (SEC Form 8-K, November 5, 2025) — Maryland named for “meaningful gains” same quarter hemp injunction lifted
- Green Thumb Industries SEC Risk Disclosures — hemp products identified as competitive threat
- Tip correspondence, Hagerstown MD resident
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