Vermont’s cannabis regulator will ease some of its restrictions on how retailers can market their products as part of a settlement announced this week with a cannabis dispensary in Middlebury and a statewide group that lobbies for the cannabis industry.

The deal resolves a lawsuit that FLŌRA Cannabis and the Vermont Cannabis Action Fund brought against the state’s Cannabis Control Board last December. The civil case, filed in Addison County Superior Court, argued that Vermont’s cannabis advertising rules infringed on retailers’ constitutionally protected rights to free expression.

A judge still needs to sign off on the settlement, which is expected to happen within the next several days, Dave Silberman, co-founder of FLŌRA Cannabis, said Friday.

The settlement “provides immediate, meaningful relief to an industry that has earned the right to be treated with respect rather than contempt, and avoids a lengthy and expensive trial,” Silberman said in a Thursday press release announcing the deal.

Existing Vermont law requires the Cannabis Control Board to approve advertisements that retailers have designed before those ads can run. That generally won’t change under the settlement, though the board now has a limited time window to do its review. If regulators don’t make a decision on whether an ad is permissible within five business days, the ads will automatically be granted approval.

The settlement also gives cannabis retailers more leeway to market on social media. They’ll now be allowed to advertise specific products on their feeds, provided the ads do not use images of those products. As part of the deal, retailers will also have to give the board a list of all of their feeds so that regulators can keep an eye on those posts.

Another measure in the settlement will reduce the frequency with which retailers have to get state approval for recurring ad campaigns, such as a weekly newsletter. Now, once the board signs off on a basic template for recurring ads, that approval will be valid for a year. That limits the possibility of a retailer needing to get each individual installment of an ad campaign approved by state regulators.

The control board has also agreed to develop a shorter version of a warning describing potential health risks from consuming cannabis that’s required to be part of retailers’ TV and radio ads. James Pepper, the board’s chair, said the current warning takes about 30 seconds to read, but the board is working on a new version, in conjunction with the state Department of Health, that could be read in five seconds or less. 

Pepper said Friday that, overall, the control board is happy with the settlement and noted the changes would reduce some of the workload for his staff, too. 

“What we agreed to is actually, I think, a really common sense approach — a pathway forward that maintains the intent of what the (Vermont Legislature) wanted with respect to cannabis advertising, while reducing administrative burden, both internally and for the cannabis industry,” he said.

Pepper and Silberman said they expect to continue discussing changes to the state’s cannabis regulations with lawmakers when Vermont’s 2026 legislative session starts in January. All of the changes included in this week’s settlement impact how the control board enforces the state’s laws, not the underlying legal language itself.

Silberman said Friday that he and others in the retail cannabis industry are eager to eliminate the requirement that they submit their ads for regulators’ review entirely, a process they see as “blatantly unconstitutional.” He said he wants cannabis to be regulated like other similar industries, such as alcohol production.

“This is a top priority for the industry,” he said. “We do good for this state — and it’s time for the Legislature to recognize that, and stop treating us like we are a threat to society.”