Cannabis MSOs Under Fire:
Prohibitionists, Class-Action Litigation,
and Controlling the Narrative

 

Thomas Andersen

Managing Editor

[email protected]

May 8th, 2026

A new class of activists has entered the chat, as dangerous as a serial arsonist: prohibitionist, opportunistic, and clout-chasing attorney activists who leverage their social and professional positions to spread false rhetoric around “The Great Cannabis Debate.”

Controlling the narrative has been a Devon Larratt-worthy arm-wrestling tourney for the last several years, between advocates and prohibitionists, as cannabis becomes normalized. The fight is no longer only about whether cannabis should be legal, as the recent cannabis rescheduling order and actions have indicated.

The Great Cannabis Debate is increasingly about whether legal cannabis can be constrained through consumer-fraud and consumer-protection lawsuits targeting how products are described, marketed, warned against, and ultimately, normalized.

Much like the fax-blast litigating bounty hunters of the past, these cause-shopping attorneys seek financial and reputational gain through frivolous lawsuits that split hairs rather than address substantive matters; in the cannabis sector, more substantive issues include age-gating and child-appealing marketing considerations.

As cannabis rescheduling inches forward and MSOs push deeper into mainstream consumer markets, ambitious attorneys like Patrick D. Kenneally and allied prohibitionist activist litigators are testing a new front in the anti-commercialization playbook: class-action litigation.  

The Lawsuit at the Center of the Story

A new federal class-action lawsuit against cannabis multistate operators has put Patrick D. Kenneally back in the center of a long-running fight over cannabis marketing, health claims, and consumer warnings. 

The timing is remarkably convenient: the suit filing occurs as federal cannabis rescheduling efforts are underway, and prohibitionist organizations look for more “creative” methods to circumvent cannabis legalization. 

Several dozen individual plaintiffs from 12 states sued Cresco Labs, Green Thumb Industries, and Verano Holdings, alleging that the companies deceptively marketed adult-use cannabis products by promoting medical, health, or therapeutic benefits while failing to warn consumers about alleged risks. 

This lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and an order limiting claims about the medicinal or therapeutic benefits of cannabis sold through adult-use retailers.

Cresco, GTI, and Verano all operate across a mix of medical-only and dual-use state markets. That makes the lawsuit’s distinction between adult-use marketing, medical-adjacent claims, and dual-permit retail environments especially important.

Company	Medical-only states with dispensaries	Dual-use states with dispensaries
Cresco Labs / Sunnyside	Florida, Pennsylvania	Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio
GTI / RISE	Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia	California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island
Verano / Zen Leaf / MÜV	Florida, Pennsylvania, West Virginia	Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio

Who Is Patrick D. Kenneally?

Patrick D. Kenneally is not a new entrant to cannabis litigation. Mr. Kenneally is a former Illinois county prosecutor now in private practice, and he has used similar tactics before. Mr. Kenneally is affiliated with Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a leading anti-legalization organization, and Mr. Kenneally was also the attorney of record in a March 2026 lawsuit challenging a federal cannabis/CBD-related reimbursement policy.

His current professional profile helps explain the legal strategy. 

Burke Law Group lists Patrick D. Kenneally as a partner and describes him as a commercial litigator focused on white-collar defense, products liability, employment law, environmental law, complex civil litigation, and general counsel matters. 

As a previously elected State’s Attorney for McHenry County, Illinois, he handled felony prosecutions, including drug-trafficking cases. 

A Record of Challenging Cannabis Commercialization

Compliance shakedown litigation is nothing new. To prohibitionist and opportunistic litigators, the weed isn’t the problem; it’s how it’s advertised and sold. 

Kenneally’s cannabis work has not been limited to criminal enforcement actions. His more distinctive public record while in private practice is primarily consumer-protection-oriented: challenging cannabis advertising, forcing warnings, and framing adult-use cannabis marketing as deceptive or dangerous.

In 2023, as McHenry County State’s Attorney, Mr. Kenneally threatened local dispensaries with consumer-fraud lawsuits unless they posted warnings about mental-health risks. The required signage warned that cannabis use may contribute to psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia, increased suicidal thoughts and attempts, anxiety, and depression.

The McHenry County “Warning-Label Playbook”

The McHenry County settlement became a template for his later arguments. In Kenneally’s article for Smart Approaches to Marijuana, he asserted that dispensaries in McHenry County became, in September 2023, the first in the country required to warn customers through in-store signage about cannabis-related mental-health dangers and to stop marketing products as medicine. 

Mr. Kenneally described the settlements as consumer protections accepted in lieu of consumer fraud actions. Although he failed to definitively substantiate that any consumer fraud had occurred, this did set a precedent and open the door to further litigation. The cannabis industry is becoming the new hunting ground for statutory-damages arbitrage: the same playbook junk-fax bounty hunters used in the 2000s, repackaged around texts, labels, privacy pixels, and other compliance tripwires.

From Local Enforcement to National Class-Action Strategy

The new lawsuit appears to extend the same theory from county-level enforcement to national class-action litigation. The complaint targets medical cannabis marketing materials discussing cannabis strains for depression and claims about cannabinoids or terpenes. 

It’s the return of statutory bounty hunting: lawyers turning technical compliance misses into bet-the-company class actions. 

The plaintiffs do not appear to be challenging physician-directed medical cannabis purchases; rather, the focus is on adult-use products allegedly marketed with medical or therapeutic messaging, purchased as adult-use sales.  This rhetoric is a further perpetuation and delineation of federal cannabis bifurcation (as it stands at the time of the publishing of this article). 

Cannabis companies are already pushing back. MJBizDaily quoted a Verano spokesperson calling the case “part of a broader litigation campaign that plaintiffs’ counsel has brought against several multi-state cannabis operators,” and that the suit “mirrors claims that have been rejected by courts in similar legal actions against multistate operators in the industry earlier this year.” 

TL; DR

TL;DR #1: 

The lawsuit against Cresco, GTI, and Verano is less about whether cannabis is legal and more about whether adult-use cannabis can be marketed with wellness, relief, or medical-adjacent language.

TL;DR #2: 

Patrick D. Kenneally’s latest class-action strategy appears to extend his McHenry County warning-label playbook into a broader, coordinated national campaign against cannabis commercialization.

TL;DR #3: 

If courts entertain these claims, MSOs could face expanded discovery, damages exposure, warning mandates, marketing restrictions, and copycat suits, even in legal markets.

TL;DR #4: 

Cannabis rescheduling may move the industry forward, but prohibitionist litigation is emerging as a parallel strategy to constrain how cannabis companies advertise, sell, and normalize their products. 

Parting Insights

Whether the lawsuit survives is a question for the courts. Notably, a Federal judge dismissed a similar class-action lawsuit against Verano this March.  

The broader insight is that Kenneally’s role as a prohibitionist and activist litigator is not simply that of a former prosecutor with anti-marijuana views, but rather, a prime example of a greater pattern that has been anticipated and is emerging: rescheduling may ease cannabis’s federal burdens, but it will also make the industry a larger target for technical class actions. 

Marketing lawsuits over texts, labels, privacy tools, and medical claims on recreational products echo the junk-fax era: plaintiffs’ lawyers converting statutory tripwires into high-pressure, high-volume settlement leverage. 

Be prepared: rescheduling will not end cannabis litigation risk. Rescheduling will professionalize risk, expand it, and reward those who can spot the next statutory tripwire before plaintiffs’ lawyers do. 

The prohibitionist legal strategy behind the lawsuit is clear: by recasting cannabis marketing as a consumer-fraud and products-liability issue, rather than merely a drug-policy debate, the fight becomes a war of attrition: a death by a thousand cuts, or class-action suits.