Following accusations of hazing, the University of Virginia suspended the fraternal organization agreements of the Theta Chi and Sigma Alpha Mu fraternities and terminated the FOA of Pi Kappa Alpha (pictured).
Staff photo.
On April 18, 10 days after the termination of its fraternal order agreement with the University of Virginia, the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity posted an unlisted video to its YouTube channel.
In the video, Justin Buck, the national organization’s executive vice president, sternly addresses his fraternity brothers.
“For the first time since March 1, 1868, Pi Kappa Alpha is without its Alpha chapter,” Buck says, referencing the organization’s founding at 47 West Range on the edge of Jefferson’s historic Academical Village, marking the UVA chapter Pi Kappa Alpha’s first (or “Alpha”) chapter. “The chapter [was] expelled from the University of Virginia for a minimum of 4 years … following the confirmed, detestable, and abhorrent hazing activities by individuals.”
Pi Kappa Alpha representatives did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
“The University found that Pi Kappa Alpha engaged in serious hazing behavior and decided to terminate the chapter’s fraternal organization agreement with the University,” says UVA Deputy Spokesperson Bethany Glover via email. “In addition, the Policy, Accountability, and Critical Events (PACE) unit in Student Affairs initiated disciplinary action against individual students for their alleged involvement in hazing.”
Aside from Pi Kappa Alpha’s termination, two other fraternities had their FOAs suspended pending an investigation: Theta Chi and Sigma Alpha Mu. If the charges are validated and confirmed, it would be the first time both organizations have had their FOAs revoked.
It is, however, far from Pi Kappa Alpha’s first time in trouble, and that includes its Alpha chapter. The Cavalier Daily reported in 2022 that the university had terminated the FOA of both Pi Kappa Alpha and Sigma Nu in 2014, but they appealed the decision, and both frats were accepting new members in 2015. Glover did not provide a comment on the 2014 incident by press time.
The fraternity’s history of controversy goes back much further nationwide with over a dozen incidents reported in the last 20 years. As early as 1976, when a pledge at Texas Tech was killed by a train during a hazing activity described as a “scavenger hunt,” the fraternity has fought to keep itself on the straight and narrow—and not just for hazing. In 1988, a sexual assault was alleged to have occurred at the fraternity’s house on the campus of Florida State University. More recently, in March of 2021, the fraternity was again the subject of nationwide outrage when Stone Foltz, a pledge at Bowling Green State University, died due to alcohol-induced heart arrhythmia.
Details about the recent incident at UVA have yet to be released publicly, but thanks to Adam’s Law, named for Adam Oakes, a VCU student who died in a hazing incident in 2021, the university is legally required to post the details on its school website.
“Thanks to the transparency laws in Virginia, you’ll be able to read about [the incident] for the next 10 years on the University of Virginia’s website,” Buck says. “We will have a constant reminder of the embarrassment that these men have caused our fraternity. However, it will not be the names of these individuals who will be listed on this website, although they should be. It will be the name of our fraternity.”
Buck says the national Pi Kappa Alpha organization will seek civil litigation against the president and the leadership of its Alpha chapter for the “financial and reputational damages” caused by the incident.
Glover says the timeline for the release of the details in all three fraternity actions is in “the coming weeks.”
“The university does not tolerate hazing activity,” she says, “and we act quickly to investigate and pursue necessary disciplinary action when reports are made.”
Long before he was a successful businessman, pilot, and entrepreneur, it was evident that Bill Crutchfield’s fate was to be the main character of his story, whatever that may be. In 1950, at 8 years old, he built his first radio. At 13, he built what was, to the best of his knowledge, “the first stereo system in Virginia.”
“It was very crude by today’s standards,” he says. “I combined two sets of speakers connected to two separate mono hi-fi amplifiers in my bedroom. They were connected to a two-channel tape head mounted to an old office reel-to-reel tape recorder.”
Crutchfield’s father was the head of neurology at the University of Virginia, and a man his son describes as “an early adopter of technology.” That forward-thinking, open-mindedness wouldn’t simply be passed down to his son—it would be amplified by his talent, augmented by his experience, and harnessed as one of Bill Crutchfield’s greatest assets as an entrepreneur.
This aptitude for detecting trends, and Crutchfield’s ability to detect problems and solve them before they exist, were what helped him turn his modest car stereo business into an electronics empire that became one of Charlottesville’s flagship businesses.
“I wanted to restore old Porsches,” Crutchfield says. “And that’s when I noticed that there was a real lack of car stereo retailers. I thought it was a market that was really underserved at that time. That’s how I found my niche.”
Prior to the 1970s, car audio systems were something that came stock from the factory, and their availability from third-party retailers was extremely limited. Until the advent of the 8-track tape, the sound system in a vehicle was thought of as a luxury by many—an afterthought. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, as cassette tapes became the popular album format, car audio exploded into a million-dollar industry. By that time, Crutchfield had already established itself as one of the premier names in the business, not through the promulgation of retail stores like most of their main competitors, but through their mail-order business and the Crutchfield “magalog.”
“Our first catalog was a disaster,” Crutchfield says. “A lot of it was wiring diagrams we drew ourselves, and it just didn’t work very well. Our second one wasn’t much better. I thought it would be a good idea to start including articles about installing these devices in our catalog, but it went against everything people knew about advertising and marketing back then to use space for anything other than sales copy. But that was when we really started seeing some success, was with our ‘magalog.’”
While Bill Crutchfield was building his business, he says he worked 100 hours or more almost every week. He credits this work ethic, along with finding the right niche and even his name, as possible reasons for the success of his 50-year-old company. Photo by Eze Amos.
As the company was making its name in the mail-order business, Crutchfield’s retail store was becoming more popular in Charlottesville, and its advertising on radio and television in the area became inescapable. The company outgrew building after building, eventually constructing its headquarters and fulfillment center beside the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport.
Arriving at 1 Crutchfield Circle for the first time, I notice that the building is earth-sheltered, with the ground built up around it for temperature regulation. Forty years before “going green” was a thing, Crutchfield designed his company headquarters to be one of the most energy efficient commercial buildings in the world at that time. I walk through the door and, after a firm, old-school handshake, Crutchfield invites me to tour the facility with him.
We hop in his electric Mercedes-Benz, and silently glide through the rain between the three different properties that make up the Crutchfield complex. The first stop on the tour is the call center, a soft-white cubicle matrix dotted with personalized workspaces, comfy chairs, and baby gates used to keep people’s dogs confined in their own workspaces.
“We’re a dog-friendly company,” Crutchfield says, a bit of an understatement, given that every third person seems to have a furry friend with them.
Everywhere we walk, inspirational messages adorn the walls. At first glance, they seem like the pseudo-spiritual posters created to motivate employees stuck in the daily office grind. What I don’t realize is that what hangs on the walls at Crutchfield isn’t the trite clichés so commonly used as filler for blank office spaces. I am reading Bill Crutchfield’s core values, something everyone takes seriously, and with good reason: They saved his company.
It was the 1980s, and Crutchfield was struggling.
“Our 1982 sales grew significantly while our profits nosedived,” Crutchfield says. “In 1983, our financial situation worsened. Sales fell by 10 percent, and earnings turned negative. Our cash reserves dwindled rapidly because of these losses. By spring, I had to take out more short-term bank loans to help cover these losses.”
He sought help, and one vice president was vocal about his belief that Crutchfield needed to spend less on the quality of his magazine and customer support, and focus on matching his competitor’s prices. Crutchfield even got input from the University of Virginia undergraduate business school (for which he chaired the advisory committee). A professor wrote a case study that concluded, “Crutchfield Corporation has gotten bigger than Bill Crutchfield can handle.”
Crutchfield spent several weeks and months contemplating the problem, and the conclusion he came to was that the issue with his company was one of culture and not of capital.
“During this lonely intellectual probing, I read a statement which was so appropriate to our situation that it was almost uncanny,” Crutchfield wrote on the company website in a retrospective post. “It was made by Thomas Watson, Jr. during a lecture at Columbia University in 1962. The IBM chair said, ‘I firmly believe that any organization, in order to survive and achieve success, must have a sound set of beliefs on which it premises all its policies and actions. Next … I believe that if an organization is to meet the challenges of a changing world, it must be prepared to change everything about itself except those beliefs as it moves through corporate life.’
“Now I understood exactly what the problem was,” Crutchfield continued. “My company once had a set of common beliefs—my beliefs. When the company was much smaller, I was instinctively able to ensure that everyone adhered to my beliefs. As it grew, I had to delegate decision-making to others. As a result, my beliefs and the company’s beliefs gradually started to diverge. By 1983, they were vastly different. Since this change had occurred so slowly, I never fully recognized the problem until I read Mr. Watson’s comments.”
Crutchfield’s campaign to reinstill his values into the company he built began with the obvious task of defining those values. First, the total satisfaction of the customer is paramount. Second, respect for dedication to your fellow employees. Third, maintaining a commitment to excellence. Paramount above all three things, though, is a very simple, ancient maxim: Treat others as you want to be treated.
Through training, innovation, incentives, and discipline, he began to regain control of his company’s culture and morale. It was a crucial time, and it’s why many people, including Chief Human Resources Officer Chris Lilley and Chief Content Officer Amy Lenert, say the culture and camaraderie within the company is what makes Crutchfield such an amazing place to work.
“Working in creative [departments], there can be a certain amount of egos involved,” Lenert says. “That really just … doesn’t exist here. Honestly. Everyone’s really on the same team.”
“I came on in ’94,” Lilley says. “I thought I would be here maybe a couple years.”
Lilley says it was during the COVID-19 pandemic that the true commitment toward each other and the business really shined.
“We were open because the governor kept a lot of businesses with shipping capacity open in case they needed the distribution access for PPE,” he says. “So we were dealing with that, plus all the people working remotely, and in the middle of all that, sales went through the roof. It was up, like, 30 percent. I mean, it was crazy. And in the middle of all that, Bill came and we were talking and he said something I’ll never forget. He said, ‘You need to understand: You and I are responsible for 400 families.’ I think it’s even more than that now. But I think that’s what really makes me love my job, is having someone who shares my values and really wants to take care of people.”
When Lilley talks about Crutchfield—both the company and the man—“taking care of people,” it isn’t euphemistic. Crutchfield was the driving force behind smoking cessation programs in his company in the ’80s, back when you could still smoke on some airplanes. He was concerned about the environment when he built his primary corporate headquarters building in 1977. When Crutchfield recognized the negative environmental impact of styrofoam packing peanuts, he came up with a biodegradable, starch-based replacement that is manufactured in-house.
“Sometimes, I tell people from Charlottesville I work for Crutchfield,” Lenert says. “And sometimes they’re like, ‘the stereo store?’” in reference to the company’s retail space on 29 North near Rio Hill. “We’re a multi-million dollar company, with four huge buildings, hundreds of employees. … All I tell them is, ‘it’s so much more than a store.’”
On a recent cool morning in Gordonsville, a cadre of a half-dozen cops in street clothes assembled next to the local fire department. Their commanding officer for the day, Lt. Patrick Sheridan of the Louisa County Sheriff’s Office, was ready to get started.
“8:25!” Sheridan shouted. It was the time that the trail was laid; crucial information for anyone using a man-trailing animal, and served as the green flag in this particular race.
The first one to take him up on the challenge was Charlottesville Police Department’s Darius Nash and his 18-month-old bloodhound, Blue. Nash walked to his cruiser, cracked the back door, and out shot an energetic hound who was clearly in need of two things: affection and a bathroom, in that order.
After some slobbery kisses and a quick stop in a grassy patch next to the fire department, it was time for Blue’s favorite game: hide and seek.
Gordonsville was the site of Group A’s first day of training in the 12th annual Louisa County Bloodhound Training Seminar. The group was led by Sheridan, who has owned, trained, and employed bloodhounds in his work for over 20 years. In that time, he has traveled across the country and to Europe, both as teacher and student, and has been the driving force behind Louisa’s annual Bloodhound Training Seminar, where dozens of law enforcement organizations from throughout the state and the country send their handlers to learn from some of the best canine officers and search-and-rescue personnel in the country. The event has become so popular that there’s a substantial waiting list to attend.
“I got Annie, my first dog, in 1997,” Sheridan says. “Then there was Maggie, then Rizzo, and now Ally, so I’ve had four dogs in my career.”
He was brief in mentioning the name of K9 Maggie. Her’s is a story he doesn’t tell very often, but it’s one that, for many people in this area, he doesn’t have to: In December of 2011, Maggie was attacked by another dog while on a call for service. Initially, the attack appeared survivable, but a bacteria from the other dog’s saliva got into her bloodstream and Maggie passed away as a result. Her image can be found everywhere in Sheridan’s life, from his social media pages to the walls of his home.
Patrick Sheridan, pictured here with Ally, is a K9 officer and patrol lieutenant for the Louisa County Sheriff’s Office. As a handler and trainer for the office’s bloodhounds, he also shares his knowledge and expertise with agencies across the nation and in Europe. Photo by Stephen Barling.
Sheridan’s successes have been as well-known as his tragedies. He has been in the news often, both in this area and nationwide, and has set important case law in Virginia. Along with former Louisa County Sheriff’s Office handler Stuart “Buck” Garner, and the help of their bloodhounds, Sheridan was instrumental in catching and convicting Adam Pelletier in the rape and murder of Aimee Marie Meadows. Their work, and subsequent testimony, set the precedent that allowed bloodhound identification to be used as expert testimony in Virginia courts. Garner was again in the news in 2016, when he testified in the case of Hannah Graham—his dog was able to track the murdered University of Virginia student’s scent to the car and apartment of Jesse Matthew, more than 24 hours after she’d gone missing. Matthew was eventually convicted of her murder.
In addition to Sheridan’s duties as bloodhound handler for the department, he also manages half of the patrol division, all of the school resource officers, and event security for school events throughout the county. He’s run hundreds of calls in central Virginia as a K9 handler, and found “dozens” of people, both criminals on the lam and civilians, lost or injured in the endless woods of the Piedmont.
Officer Nash and Blue tracked the “runner” about 300 yards west on Baker Street toward Main Street in Gordonsville. Blue was a frenetic bundle of affection and slobber three minutes ago, but after Nash put on his harness and gave the order, Blue became a different dog. He was all business now.
Blue got sidetracked, and headed to a local resident’s chicken coup. “Nope,” Nash said. Theirs was a balance of communication and natural ability. Blue has the superpower, a million more olfactory receptors than a human, but he needs information and feedback in order to use it.
“When you see that head go down and that tail start wagging,” Sheridan says, “that’s when you should be ready.”
Next to Sheridan was Deputy Christian Amos of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, who will get his first dog in the coming months. He was along the trail with Nash, Blue, and the rest of the group as an observer. “That means you’re close?” Amos asks. Sheridan nods.
Blue’s head was down now, and his tail was wagging. He rounded the corner, and looked at the porch of a local dentist’s office. He scanned the area with his nose, and darted into the apparently empty bushes. Buried inside is Terry Davis, president of the Virginia Bloodhound Search and Rescue Association. Also known as “the runner.” Immediately, Blue reverted back into the chaotic, lovable slobber machine he’d been roughly 15 minutes before. His reward: Vienna sausages and more slobbery kisses.
Humans have been using hounds to hunt since the Middle Ages. It’s believed they’re the modern descendants of the extinct Norman Hound breed. In France, they’re called “le chien de Saint-Hubert” or St. Hubert’s Hounds. In the U.K., they’re known as “sleuth hounds,” and have been employed, along with beagles and other types of hounds, in their traditional fox hunts. Tradition also holds that they were used to track the famous Scottish rebels William Wallace and Robert the Bruce during their flight from English capture in the late-13th and early-14th centuries.
Their ability to track a scent hours, even days, after the trail has been set, is well recorded. A famous story in bloodhound lore is that of the unnamed record-breaking dog in Oregon in 1954. In a newspaper article, it mentions a “local bloodhound” finding the trail of a missing family over 330 hours after they’d gone missing. Unfortunately, the family had died of exposure in the Oregon wilderness.
“They call them bloodhounds for a reason,” says Franklin County Sheriff’s Office Deputy John Lavinder, another handler and trainer from Virginia Bloodhound Search and Rescue Association. “They can use your blood, sweat, urine, or any other bodily fluid as a scent article to track you.”
Lavinder also clears up the famous Hollywood myth about running in bodies of water to get bloodhounds off your trail.
“Actually, that water takes those cells off your skin and spreads them out over a larger area, meaning the dog will be able to tell where you went and hold on to that scent easier,” he says. “You’ll just go to jail wet.”
As Nash returns from his successful hunt, the other members of Group A are standing in a circle, making small talk. The other bloodhounds bark their congratulatory remarks at Blue, as he darts toward his second home: the custom, back-seat doghouse of Nash’s cruiser, complete with its own dog bowls built into the floorboards.
The next team to take on the hunt is Officer Emma Orr, from Rock Hill, South Carolina, and her 7-year-old black and tan bloodhound, Lucy. Sheridan has known Lucy since she was a puppy, and she runs right up to him the minute she gets out of her cruiser.
Despite being from out-of-state, the handlers and trainers at the training seminar seem like they’ve known each other all their lives. Most of them have trained together before. They’ve got nicknames for one another, know each other’s dog’s names, and tease each other incessantly. Orr’s nickname is “Teeter,” which the group refuses to explain. No more evident is this camaraderie than in the way Lucy reacts to Sheridan when she sees him, jumping up for a full, standing hug, and a big slobbery kiss.
“Oh, I love this dog,” Sheridan says, grinning, “I could put people in jail with this dog.”
“I have,” Orr says, sharing his smile.
As the harness comes out, and the scent article is chosen, Sheridan again shouts the time the trail was laid, “8:25!”
Orr looks down at her partner, and gives Lucy the words she’s been waiting for: “Get to work.”
Bilal Koraz tries to keep up with his family back home in Gaza, as war rages on. To help get them out, he’s started a GoFundMe: www.gofundme.com/f/help-our-family-evacuate-from-gaza
Supplied photo
Ed. note—This story represents one area family’s perspective on the conflict in Israel and Palestine.
Bilal Koraz, a Gazan-born father living in the dense forest of rural Louisa County, says his 11 family members—mostly women, children, and the elderly—have been sheltering in the family home in Gaza.
“Every day, all the time, I’m afraid to hear [the news],” Koraz says. “Just the other day, the house next to [their’s] was completely blown up.”
He pulls up pictures on his phone, scrolling through them like a reverse timeline. There are recent photos of his daughter, and pictures from 2019, when he married his wife Jessica, a Louisa County resident. There are some from Istanbul, when the couple traveled halfway across the world to meet in person for the first time. One picture is of him in Gaza with four other well-dressed, college-age men.
“These are my good friends,” he says. It looked like they were at a wedding.
His face lit up a bit as he talked about his home, but only briefly. He wore his feelings on his brow, furrowed like he had to break bad news to himself. He sighed and went quiet, but his wife elaborated.
“They were like brothers to him,” Jessica says.
She paused, hesitant to get to the end of the story.
“Were,” she says. “They’re gone now. All of them.”
The Koraz family originally came from just outside Jerusalem.
“That was before,” he says, meaning before the partition. “They came and took [our home], with everything in it. Even the pictures. We couldn’t have the pictures of our family members.”
Afterward, his family settled in the Deir Al-Balah neighborhood in Gaza. “My father was [a] colonel with the Palestinian Authority before Hamas,” Koraz says. “He was like a policeman.”
The Palestinian Authority was the governing body established in the mid-1990s by Fatah, a major political party in Palestine. According to Al Jazeera, “its creation was supposed to pave the way to an independent Palestinian state.”
In 2006, however, the party’s power dissolved with the rise of Hamas, as did Koraz’s father’s job. For both this reason and ideological differences, the Koraz family are about as far from Hamas supporters as the Israelis, voting against them in that year’s election. Regardless, the Korazes are treated the same as any other Arab family in Palestine.
Jessica met Koraz in 2018 on social media through his work and advocacy with a local children’s center in Gaza. The two struck up a conversation and they fell in love. Despite their distance, they decided to pursue the relationship, and arranged to meet in Istanbul. He moved to Jessica’s hometown in the U.S., where the couple now live with their three children.
Through a crackling, fuzzy reception, Koraz calls his brother in Gaza. He asks him how he’s doing, and if he wants to talk for a moment. It’s not a good time to talk, and after a few exchanges in Levantine Arabic, they trade goodbyes and hang up.
“They have to cut wood to cook or heat water,” Jessica says, after the phone call. “And they have to find fresh water, because it’s been shut off. Just like the power. And the phones. And the internet.”
She shows me a photo: two men chopping wood in the middle of a sandy street, flanked on all sides by damaged buildings and signs of combat.
“That’s honestly the only way they sleep at night,” she says. “Exhaustion. Otherwise the bombs and gunfire would keep them awake.”
Following this interview, the Koraz family home in Gaza was damaged when a neighboring house was shot by a Merkava tank, and they had to flee. They went to the refugee camps, which were supposed to be safe, but as of mid-February, the Israel Defense Forces had begun attacking those as well, citing terrorist activity and potential hostages being held in the area.
“He feels guilty,” Jessica says. “Because he got out and they didn’t. If he didn’t have kids, he’d go back to be with them. So would I.”
At press time, about 30,000 have been killed in Gaza in just under five months of fighting. For comparison, the U.S. lost just over 7,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It’s like the cartoons, where they tie up people and leave them on the railroad tracks,” Jessica says. “His family is tied up on the railroad tracks, and the train is headed their way. But the train has brakes. We can stop the train. It’s not inevitable. It doesn’t have to be like this, but no one is listening.”
Charlottesville’s Greener Things, and other area licensed medical marijuana dispensaries, hope the legality around retail sales will be sorted out soon. Photo by Tristan Williams.
When Gov. Ralph Northam signed the 2021 Cannabis Control Act into law, retail sales of recreational marijuana were supposed to become legal this year. Yet, without establishing the framework for retail sales in the General Assembly, what was billed as a victory three years ago shifted into quasi-decriminalization. But some lawmakers are aiming to make full legalization a reality, while others are even going further, with legislation aimed at making the budding cannabis industry a fair playing field for retailers that are going up against pharmaceutical giants and billion-dollar corporations looking to be the first ones to sell legal weed in Virginia.
The bills, amended versions of one voted down in the General Assembly last year, are identical—HB 698 (sponsored by Del. Paul Krizek, D-Fairfax, in the House of Delegates), and SB 448 (co-sponsored by Aaron Rouse, D-Virginia Beach, and Adam Ebbin, D-Alexandria, in the state Senate)—and fully establish the framework under which licensed Virginia businesses entities could sell and distribute cannabis products. They also outline the means with which the state could control, regulate, and tax recreational marijuana, among other things in the voluminous, 81-page bill. These proposed bills would take effect January 1, 2025, with currently operating medical marijuana businesses allowed to begin applying and receiving licenses as early as July 1, 2024. Also included are adjustments to civil and criminal penalties of illegal possession and cultivation of hemp and marijuana, as well as illegal chemical alterations to cannabis and its derivatives.
HB 698 recently passed the House of Delegates with a 52-48 vote, mostly along party lines. The one outlier was Republican Del. Chris Obenshain, serving Montgomery and parts of Roanoke counties in southwest Virginia.
For shops like Charlottesville’s Greener Things, which has been eagerly waiting for the retail sales infrastructure to be put in place, the ever-changing legal landscape of the state’s cannabis laws makes it a precarious business to be in. Maurice Robinson, general manager of the Downtown Mall store, says it’s been a long three years.
“It has been a frustrating time,” he says. “Hemp regulations are constantly changing, making it difficult for a large [number] of small businesses to stay open in the area.” As a currently licensed and operating medical marijuana dispensary, Greener Things would be among those applying for the early business licenses available this July.
The biggest hurdle on the road to full legalization and retail sales right now appears to be the governor, as Glenn Youngkin has been quoted several times saying he’s not interested in signing legislation that would provide the framework to regulate recreational marijuana.
“What I want us to work on are areas that we can find a meeting of the mind and press forward for the betterment of Virginia,” Youngkin told Richmond’s WRIC-TV in January. The governor has refrained from threatening to veto any particular piece of legislation, however, and has expressed disinterest in repealing the Cannabis Control Act of 2021.
None of these advances in cannabis and hemp legalization should indicate that law enforcement’s watch over the substance has lapsed. In September of last year, Attorney General Jason Miyares spearheaded a multi-jurisdiction raid on several marijuana businesses in southwest Virginia that included nine counties and 29 different state and federal law enforcement organizations. The businesses involved were accused of drug and money laundering offenses, but the search warrants and court documents were sealed for six months, making further information about the investigation difficult to obtain.
It’s why Robinson says his number one priority is staying on top of the laws and remaining compliant.
“Greener Things provides a safe and trustworthy location to purchase safe, third-party tested cannabis products,” Robinson says. “All products are federally legal, and Virgina compliant.”
By the book
Marijuana legalization is still uneven in Virginia. Here’s what you can and can’t do with your greenery.
Possession: There’s no penalty for personal use at your own home. You can even share it with a friend (21 years or older). However, carrying anything in public beyond 1 ounce and up to 4 ounces could get you a fine of up to $25. Public possession beyond that is a misdemeanor, and over 1 lb. is a felony.
Cultivation: At home, you can grow up to four plants. Just make sure to attach a legible tag, keep it out of view of the public, and away from anyone under 21, or else you’ll incur a civil penalty. More than four plants is a misdemeanor after your first offense, unless you have more than 49 plants, in which case it’s a felony.
Sale/manufacture/trafficking: Anything over an ounce is a felony, with possible punishment of up to life in prison.
