An Obsidian Watch Group investigation of Tennessee Public Chapter 526 (HB1376 / SB1413), the THCA-banning bill that transferred hemp regulation to the Alcoholic Beverage Commission.
THIS IS A LIVE, ACTIVELY-UPDATING REPOSITORY.** Findings, sources, and reports are committed as they emerge. Pushes may occur many times per day. **Subscribe to releases / watch this repository to track updates as they happen.
This repository is a public-interest research and analysis archive intended for use by researchers, journalists, academic and policy think tanks, regulators, law enforcement, civic organizations, educators, and members of the public. Please read INTENDED_USE.md before working with the materials. It documents the intended use, correction policy, license, warranty disclaimer, and contact channel for research inquiries, tooling disclosure requests, and correction of any finding shown by the documented record to be inaccurate.
** Every commit is
PGP-signed by the lead investigator's key; the chain of custody is append-only and cryptographically verifiable end-to-end. New evidence is folded in continuously: this is not a one-shot publication, it is an ongoing public-interest disclosure.
This is ABC's bill, not the people's voice.
The Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission ended up with control of the THCA market: the alcohol industry's primary substitute product: and the people who pay for the consequences had no say.
In 2023, the Tennessee General Assembly expressly legalized hemp-derived cannabinoid products. Thousands of Tennesseans: multiple-sclerosis patients, military veterans, immigrant small-business owners, working-class entrepreneurs: built lives, livelihoods, and treatment regimens around that legalization. In 2024, the Tennessee Department of Agriculture issued regulations that effectively criminalized the products the legislature had legalized; the Davidson County Chancery Court enjoined those rules. Five weeks after that injunction, in February 2025, Rep. William Lamberth and Sen. Richard Briggs filed HB1376 / SB1413. The bill cleared introduction to governor's signature in 110 days. It bans THCA. It moves hemp regulation to the Alcoholic Beverage Commission. It creates a $750,000 capital-access requirement for hemp wholesale licensure that no small operator can clear. It was signed into law as Public Chapter 526 on May 27, 2025. Its wind-down protection for pre-existing licensees expires June 30, 2026.
This investigation documents what was paid for the bill, by whom, to whom, over how long, and against the documented preference of a majority of Tennesseans of both parties.
This repository is structured as an Obsidian vault. You
can read every file as plain Markdown on GitHub or in any text editor, but
opening the repository in the Obsidian desktop application turns the
investigation's [[wiki link]] cross-references into clickable navigation and
surfaces the connections between findings, reports, sources, and chain-of-
custody entries as a graph view.
To open the investigation in Obsidian:
- Download Obsidian for your platform from obsidian.md/download (Linux AppImage / deb / snap, Windows installer, macOS dmg).
- Install it.
- Launch Obsidian and choose Open folder as vault.
- Point Obsidian at the directory where you cloned this repository.
The full vault guide (structure, naming conventions, wiki-link syntax, how to
add findings, plugins, search) is in
OBSIDIAN_VAULT_GUIDE.md.
Obsidian is created by Shida Li and Erica Xu at Dynalist Inc. It is free for personal use, with a commercial license for business use and a paid Catalyst tier that funds development. This investigation depends materially on Obsidian's plain-Markdown-on-disk architecture and the local-first model that keeps the public record in a format that survives the tool. Thank you to Shida, Erica, and the Obsidian team for the work. If this investigation is useful to you and you can afford to, please consider supporting Obsidian by purchasing a license at obsidian.md/pricing. We have no commercial relationship with Obsidian or Dynalist Inc.; the acknowledgment is voluntary and reflects the investigation's actual reliance on their software.
- Reports/R-000 Executive Summary. start here.
- _Investigation.md. full scope and central argument.
- METHODOLOGY.md. reproducibility manual + OpSec.
- CHAIN_OF_CUSTODY.md. every primary-source acquisition with timestamps, tool settings, egress IP, and SHA-256 hashes.
- Findings/. F-001 through F-016+. individual evidence files, each citing primary sources by file + SHA-256.
- Reports/. R-001 through R-005 are per-legislator close-outs covering Rep. William Lamberth, Sen. Richard Briggs, Lt. Gov. Randy McNally, Sen. Todd Gardenhire, and Sen. Bobby Harshbarger.
- Sources/. every primary artifact in raw form with
.meta.mdprovenance sidecars. SHA-256 hashes published in the chain-of-custody entries match the file contents.
Every finding in Findings/ cites a primary source in Sources/. Every
source has a .meta.md sidecar documenting acquisition (URL, date, tool,
settings, egress IP, user-agent, server response, byte count, SHA-256
hash). Every chain-of-custody entry mirrors the same data.
To independently verify:
cd Sources/
sha256sum -c <(grep -h '^| SHA-256 ' */*.meta.md | sed 's/.*\| `\(.*\)` |.*/\1/' | paste -d' ' - <(ls *.html *.pdf *.json *.csv 2>/dev/null))Or read the chain-of-custody entries by hand against the Sources/
contents. The discipline is that the hashes are the contract.
Lead investigator (named, on record):
Jay Puckett: investigations@obsidianwatch.org.
PGP fingerprint 9267 A71E 3F0A 4EED 2F97 3F9B A3E2 52F2 4635 CC6C.
Investigation team: Obsidian Watch Group investigation team. Individual analysts are redacted in all artifacts for safety and operational security per METHODOLOGY.md §6. The responsibility chain runs through the lead investigator; the team's contributions reach the public through the lead's named signing.
This investigation relies heavily on the Tennessee Lookout / States Newsroom and on reporter Adam Friedman, whose Cash for Clout database made the underlying TN Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance data queryable. The Lookout's investigative reporting on the Harshbarger / Datwyler / East Tennessee Conservatives PAC ethics referral and the broader TN campaign-finance landscape is cited throughout this investigation. Their work is the public-interest journalism this report builds on, and they deserve direct readers and support.
WSMV4 Investigates, Fox 17 Investigates, WKRN, WPLN, and Marijuana Moment are also cited for primary investigative reporting on the Tennessee Highway Patrol DUI patterns, the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission's enforcement record, and the Davidson Chancery THCA litigation.
The Vanderbilt Poll (Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions) is the gold-standard TN public opinion source used in Finding F-005.
Pick any finding in Findings/. Read the claim. Read the cited primary
source. Re-hash the source file. Re-derive the conclusion. If the
documented record doesn't carry the conclusion, the finding is wrong
and we want to know.
For corrections, contact: investigations@obsidianwatch.org (PGP-encrypt to fingerprint above).
This repository is published under a dual license:
- Code, scripts, and methodology: MIT License
- Report content, findings, and synthesized analysis: Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0, with an additional grant for journalistic / public-interest republication with proper attribution
Primary-source acquisitions in Sources/ retain their original publishers'
copyright; their inclusion here is for chain-of-custody verification under
fair use for public-interest reporting.
The lead investigator (Jay Puckett) is a Tennessee resident living with
multiple sclerosis who has used THCA-derived products as part of a
symptom-management regimen. The personal stake is disclosed here,
documented in _Investigation.md, and does not disqualify the
investigation. The methodology requires that every claim be defensible
from public-source evidence independent of any investigator's personal
position. The documented record stands on its own; the disclosure is
provided so readers can weigh it.
pg420 v0, initial publication. Findings F-001 through F-016 are
draft-internal-grade with primary sources archived. The neutrality scrub
on public-facing reports (R-000 through R-005) is in progress. Subsequent
publication waves will extend per-legislator close-outs to additional Aye
voters and the Nay-voter control group, integrate the personal financial
disclosure pulls, and document the affected-class on-record profiles
(veterans, immigrants, small-operator farmers).
The investigation is ongoing. Updates will be committed to this repository with chain-of-custody continuity. Each release of formal reports will be PGP-signed by the lead investigator before being attached as a release asset.