Tennessee

Tennessee issues no cannabis licenses of any class and operates no cultivation, retail, manufacturing, or delivery program. There is no track-and-trace system, no application or license fees, no municipal opt-in framework, and no vertical-integration rule, because the state has no legal cannabis industry to regulate. Every market-access metric is null by structure rather than by a gap in reporting. A separately licensed market in hemp-derived cannabinoids comes under Alcoholic Beverage Commission oversight effective January 1, 2026, but that framework governs hemp products, not cannabis.

Tennessee permits no legal cannabis use or possession. Home cultivation is prosecuted as manufacture of cannabis under Tenn. Code Ann. 39-17-417, a felony beginning at a minimum Class E grade for 10 plants or fewer, with no personal-grow exception. There is no legal possession limit because no amount is lawful; the one-half-ounce figure in Tennessee law is the misdemeanor-felony dividing line, not a permitted quantity. Cannabis delivery and consumption lounges do not exist as legal categories. No cannabis product forms are lawful for adult or medical use; the only cannabis-derived product legal to possess is cannabidiol oil containing less than 0.9 percent THC, for patients with qualifying diagnoses under Tenn. Code Ann. 39-17-402(16), which cannot be lawfully produced or sold in the state.

Tennessee levies no cannabis excise, sales, potency, or wholesale tax and collects no cannabis tax revenue. The state's general sales tax does not reach a market that does not legally exist. All fiscal metrics are null because there is no taxable legal cannabis market. The state does impose a 6 percent retail tax on hemp-derived cannabinoid products, in addition to the general sales tax, but that levy applies to hemp products and is outside the scope of the cannabis fields here.

Tennessee has no legal cannabis operators, sales, licenses, or published prices. No figures exist for market size, per-capita sales, wholesale or retail pricing, or license attrition, because there is no legal industry. Any cannabis commerce occurs in the unregulated market and is not captured in any public dataset.

Tennessee has no legal cannabis market, so there is no per-capita legal sales figure, dispensary density, or published retail price trend. No primary estimate of legal-market capture exists, because there is no legal market against which to measure it.

Tennessee operates no social-equity program, no cannabis equity or reinvestment fund, and no cannabis-specific or automatic record-clearing mechanism. Because the state has enacted no legalization statute, there is no licensing system in which equity provisions could exist. Record relief for a cannabis conviction is available only through the general petition-based expungement statute, Tenn. Code Ann. 40-32-101, which is not cannabis-specific and requires the petitioner to file and meet statutory conditions. These are settled negative answers rather than gaps in reporting.

Tennessee has no cannabis regulatory agency, regulatory budget, inspection regime, testing requirements, or licensee-enforcement program, because there are no licensees. Enforcement of cannabis law in Tennessee is ordinary criminal law enforcement carried out by police, prosecutors, and the courts, reflected in the arrest figures reported under criminalization rather than in regulatory metrics. The operational enforcement statistics a regulated state would publish are not available because no such regulator exists.

Tennessee prohibits cannabis in all forms and provides no legal possession allowance. Simple possession or casual exchange of one-half ounce, recorded as 14 grams, or less is a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to 11 months and 29 days in jail and a $250 mandatory minimum fine on a first conviction, rising on subsequent convictions, under Tenn. Code Ann. 39-17-418. Possession of more than one-half ounce supports a rebuttable inference of possession with intent to sell or deliver, a felony under Tenn. Code Ann. 39-17-417. Cultivation is charged by plant count under the manufacture statute: 10 plants or fewer is a Class E felony, rising through grades to 500 or more plants as a Class A felony carrying 15 to 60 years and a fine up to $500,000. Sale, delivery, and possession with intent are charged by weight: one-half ounce to 10 pounds is a Class E felony, rising to 300 pounds or more as a Class A felony carrying 15 to 60 years and a fine up to $200,000, with enhanced penalties for sale to a minor or within 1,000 feet of a school. Tennessee sets no per se THC blood limit for impaired driving, relying instead on an impairment standard under Tenn. Code Ann. 55-10-401. The state has no cannabis-specific or automatic expungement program. The one discrete change to its cannabis criminal-penalty schedule since was a softening: 2016 legislation reclassified a third or subsequent simple-possession conviction from a felony to a misdemeanor, and no cannabis criminal penalty has been increased since. Total cannabis arrests were 12,586 in calendar-year 2024, comprising 11,574 possession and 1,012 sales arrests, and have fallen each year from 23,173 in calendar-year 2018. These counts derive from secondary compilations of FBI Uniform Crime Reporting and NIBRS data, which understate true totals. The most recent published racial-disparity estimate, drawn from 2018 federal data, found Black residents arrested for cannabis possession at 3.2 times the rate of white residents, at 820 versus 255 per 100,000.