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Corrections

We are going to get something wrong eventually. Here is exactly what happens when we do.

Policy published July 13, 2026

We correct errors in public, on the same page as the error, with the date and a note saying what changed.

We do not quietly edit. We do not delete and repost. We do not pretend it did not happen. If a claim in our work turns out to be wrong, the correction sits on top of the thing that was wrong, where the people who read the mistake will see it.

Why we do it this way

Drug Policy Watch is a one-person newsroom that reports on people and organizations with far more money and far more lawyers than we have. The only thing we actually own is whether people can trust what we publish.

An outlet that hides its mistakes is not more credible than one that shows them. It is just harder to check. A visible correction record is not an admission of weakness. It is the receipt that proves someone is doing the work.

So we publish the correction where the error was, and we keep a permanent log of every one on this page. Nothing gets scrubbed.

What counts as a correction

  1. A factual error. A wrong number, date, name, title, quotation, or citation. We fix it, we mark it, we log it here.
  2. A claim that outran its evidence. If we stated something more confidently than our sources supported, that is an error even if it later turns out to be true. We will say so and rewrite it.
  3. A missing or broken source. Every factual claim we publish should be checkable. If a link is dead or a document cannot be found, tell us and we will replace it or pull the claim.
  4. Unfair characterization. We aim at systems and patterns, never at a person. If we described someone by anything other than their office and their public acts, we want to know.

A disagreement is not a correction, and we will not pretend otherwise. If you think our analysis is wrong but our facts are right, say so and we will publish your argument. We will not label it an error, because it is not one.

How to tell us

Write to contact@drugpolicywatch.info

Tell us which article, quote the line, and tell us what is wrong with it. If you have a source, send it. We will look at it the day it arrives.

If you are a person or an organization named in our work and you want to respond, we will publish your response in full and unedited, on the same page as the article. Not a summary of it. Not an excerpt. The whole thing, in your words. That offer does not expire and it does not depend on whether we agree with you.

We will not remove accurate, sourced reporting because someone would prefer it were not there. But we will always publish the other side of it, and we will always fix what is actually broken.

What we will not do

We will not take down a true story because a letter arrived. We will not trade a correction for access. We will not agree to keep an error quiet.

And we will not correct something we do not believe is wrong just to end an argument. If we are right, we will show you why, in public, with the documents.

The correction log

Every correction we have ever published, newest first. This list is permanent and it is never edited except to add to it.

Corrected July 18, 2026

Eight state briefs carried enclosure scores the re-score had already replaced. In July 2026 we re-scored all 51 jurisdictions under one rule: a state with no legal market is a fully enclosed state. A commons the community cannot lawfully enter is a closed commons, whoever holds the gate. The 50-State Matrix on our homepage carried the new scores. Eight individual state briefs did not. The briefs for Wyoming (which said 2), Wisconsin and North Carolina (which said 3), and Tennessee, Indiana, Nebraska, Kansas, and South Carolina (which said 4) still showed their old scores and, in some cases, still argued the old reasoning. For nine days a reader could click from a 5 on the matrix to a brief that said 2 and explained why.

We found it ourselves in a full audit of every page against our source data. All eight briefs now carry the corrected score of 5, each notes its prior score in place rather than pretending it always said 5, and the reasoning on each page now argues the score it shows. No underlying fact about any state changed. What changed is that the site now says one thing instead of two.

Corrected July 13, 2026

When 280E relief actually began. Five state pages and the federal brief. Correcting the signing date above led us to audit the whole site, and we found a worse error underneath it. Our state pages disagreed with each other about when the April rule took effect, and every one of them was wrong. Arkansas said the order became effective April 23. Alabama, Maine, and New Jersey said April 22. The rule took effect on April 28, 2026. That is the date state-licensed medical operators actually stopped being subject to Section 280E, and it is the date that matters to anyone counting a tax year.

Corrected on Alabama, Arkansas, Maine, New Jersey, Missouri, and the federal brief. Missouri had separately said the federal order was signed the same day as HB 2641; it was not, it was signed one day earlier. The federal brief also cited the wrong Federal Register document for the final rule, pointing at 2026-08177 (the hearing notice) instead of 2026-08176 (the rule itself). It also hedged that Todd Blanche's title was unconfirmed. It is confirmed, in the signature block.

This is the correction we are least proud of and the one most worth publishing. A wrong signing date is a footnote. A wrong effective date tells a dispensary its taxes changed on a day they did not.

Corrected July 13, 2026

The date of the April rescheduling rule. Three articles. We repeatedly dated the DOJ and DEA final rule to April 23, 2026. That is wrong. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed it on April 22, 2026. It was filed April 27, published in the Federal Register on April 28, and took effect that day.

We found this ourselves, on the day we published the newest of the three pieces, by checking the signature block of the rule (91 FR 22714, AG Order No. 6754-2026) against what we had written. We do not know where our April 23 came from. It is not in the document, so we have replaced it everywhere with the date the document itself carries.

The error appeared in three articles, and each now carries a correction notice on the page: They Are Rebuilding Prohibition Out of the Tax Code, The Strangest Bet in Weed, and Follow the Money: The June 29 Hearing. It changes no argument in any of them. It was still wrong three times, which is worse than being wrong once, so we are saying so plainly.