Spanberger Tried to Make Public Pot Smoking a Crime. Her Own Party's Legislature Said No.

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger had two asks when the state's retail marijuana bill landed on her desk. She wanted to push the retail start date from January 2027 to July 2027. And she wanted to make smoking marijuana in public a criminal misdemeanor — not the twenty-five dollar civil fine it currently is, but an actual crime, on your record, with the consequences that come with that.

The House of Delegates looked at both amendments and passed the original bill without them. The amendments are dead. The bill goes back to Spanberger for a signature or a veto.

The civil rights critique of her proposed penalties was swift and direct. JM Pedini, development director at the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, put it plainly: 'These amendments would not improve public safety, but what they would do is disproportionately impact Black, brown, and young Virginians.' That is not a fringe position. It is a documented pattern. Public consumption laws — the kind Spanberger wanted — are enforced unequally. They always have been. The data on this is not ambiguous.

Virginia legalized marijuana possession for adults in 2021. The state has been blocking retail sales ever since, which has had the reliable effect of keeping the illegal market alive while the legal one waits for permission to operate. The legislature's bill was supposed to fix that, finally establishing a retail framework with a January 2027 start date. Spanberger wanted six more months on top of that. She also wanted new criminal teeth on public use.

Virginia's legislature rejected Spanberger's push to add criminal misdemeanor penalties for public marijuana use.

The legislature decided they had waited long enough and the teeth were the wrong kind.

It is worth pausing on what Spanberger was actually proposing. A Democratic governor — one who ran on a platform that included criminal justice reform — asked her legislature to expand the category of criminal behavior around a drug that her own party has spent years arguing should not be criminalized. The legislature, also Democratic, looked at the racial impact data and said no.

The politics here are not complicated, but they are revealing. Spanberger is a former CIA officer who has always governed closer to the center than her party's left wing would prefer. Her marijuana amendments were consistent with that posture — cautious, enforcement-minded, attentive to the concerns of constituents who are not enthusiastic about visible public drug use. What they were not attentive to was who gets arrested when you give police a new misdemeanor to enforce.

The bill returns to her desk. She can sign it, veto it, or let it become law without her signature. What she cannot do is pretend the legislature's rejection of her amendments was anything other than a rebuke — from her own party, on a bill that should have been straightforward — of her instinct to add criminal penalties to a decriminalization framework.

Virginia has been getting out of the marijuana enforcement business in stages since 2021. Spanberger tried to add one stage back in. The House said no. The question now is whether she signs a bill she tried to amend or whether she vetoes legislation her own party passed to protect a set of proposals they already rejected.

Her answer will tell you a lot about who she actually is.