Three Days Before He Lost in the Nebraska Supreme Court, Mike Hilgers Subpoenaed a Dispensary in Colorado.

Sedgwick, Colorado, is a town of fewer than two hundred people in the far northeast corner of the state, where the plains run flat toward Nebraska and the grain elevators are the tallest things for miles. Peak Dispensary is at 140 Railroad Street. It posts its vendor days on Instagram, hires budtenders by asking people to drop a resume off in the store, and sits about a half-hour drive from the Nebraska line, which is the entire reason it is worth what it is worth.

On September 1, Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers served Peak's parent company, Peak North Holdings, with a civil investigative demand and a subpoena. He wanted the names of every current and former employee, along with their residential addresses. He wanted the store's advertising materials. He wanted its research and marketing materials on the effects of cannabis. He did not say what law he believed the company had broken. (S1, S2)

Three days later, on Friday, September 4, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled 7-0 against him.

The two events are not formally connected, and Hilgers's office has declined to explain the subpoena at all. But they describe the same week in the same office, and together they frame the question Nebraska has been circling for two years: what an attorney general can do about a legal industry he has no jurisdiction over, after the courts have finished telling him what he cannot do about the one inside his own state. (S1, S3)

In November 2024, more than 70 percent of Nebraska voters approved two medical cannabis ballot measures, one to legalize and one to regulate. Almost immediately, former state Senator John Kuehn of Heartwell sued to throw them out, alleging fraud in the petition drive. Secretary of State Bob Evnen and Hilgers's office, which had been defending Evnen, largely joined Kuehn's side against the campaign. The theory was notarial malfeasance: that improper notarization on some petition pages should strip the presumption of validity from every signature those notaries touched. (S3)

Chief Justice Jeffrey Funke's 49-page opinion in Kuehn v. Evnen rejected it unanimously. Circulators and notaries perform different functions, the court held, and Lancaster County District Judge Susan Strong had not erred in declining to extend a 1919 precedent, Barkley v. Pool, from one to the other. Strong had found that roughly 1,500 signatures lost their presumption of validity, and that the challenge still fell well short of the threshold. The campaign had certified 6,822 more valid signatures than it needed. (S3)

“This was never about protecting Nebraska law. It was about whether a handful of elected officials could use the court to override the will of the people.”

— Crista Eggers, Executive Director, Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana

Hilgers called it "a sad day for election integrity in Nebraska" and repeated the fraud allegations, which have now been rejected twice. "We disagree with the court's ruling but will follow the law as it stands," he said. His office had secured two criminal convictions out of the investigation: a petition circulator from Grand Island who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, and a notary public from York convicted by a jury in February on all 24 charges, who is appealing. No other charges came, against anyone. (S3)

The attorney who filed Peak's petition in Nebraska state court resisting the subpoena is John Cartier. Cartier is also the attorney general of the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska, and he has had a conversation with Mike Hilgers that he has since described publicly more than once. (S1, S4)

In July 2025, the Omaha Tribe voted to legalize adult-use cannabis on its reservation, for anyone 21 and over including non-tribal visitors. Reservation unemployment has hovered near 60 percent, cultivation and retail are labor-intensive, and methamphetamine, as Cartier has put it, is a scourge there. The tribe had also been negotiating a tobacco compact with the state since that summer, talks Cartier called very friendly. (S4)

One morning the following November, as Cartier was preparing for the first meeting of the tribe's new cannabis commission, a deputy from Hilgers's office called. She was apologetic. Because the tribe was moving ahead with regulated cannabis, there would be no tobacco compact. Cartier called Hilgers directly. Hilgers, by Cartier's account, told him that his main job was to stop the spread of cannabis in the state of Nebraska. (S4)

"That was really shocking and disappointing to hear," Cartier told MJBizDaily in April. "These officials will do whatever they can to stonewall us." He also made the point that has aged into the state's defining cannabis fact: "All these other states have since moved forward with a medical or an adult-use system. And we're still stuck, even after passing the ballot initiative." (S4)

Nearly two years after the vote, Nebraska still has no medical cannabis sales. The first cultivator was cleared to begin growing in June 2026. Governor Jim Pillen and Hilgers both signed off on the voter-created Medical Cannabis Commission's regulations, and the commission says it will carry out the will of the voters. (S3)

What makes the demand unusual is not that a state attorney general is interested in cannabis crossing a border. That is an old story in Nebraska. What is unusual is the target. Peak North Holdings is licensed in Colorado, operates in Colorado, and according to Cartier conducts no legal cannabis business anywhere else. Exactly one of its employees lives in Nebraska. (S1)

Cartier's filing lists the possibilities he has been left to guess at: an allegedly unfair or deceptive trade practice, an antitrust violation, or some other provision of Nebraska law. Without a named statute, a company on the far side of a state line is being asked to hand over the home addresses of people who once worked a retail counter, and to make its own argument for why it should not have to. (S1)

Nebraska has reached across this particular border before. Shortly after Colorado's adult-use sales began in 2014, the attorneys general of Nebraska and Oklahoma asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Colorado's legalization outright, arguing that legal retail was pushing cannabis into their states. The Court declined to hear it. The intervening decade has changed the legal terrain underneath that argument considerably, and not in Nebraska's favor.

The counter-argument deserves stating, because a civil investigative demand is an ordinary tool and attorneys general use it constantly. Nebraska consumer-protection law reaches conduct aimed at Nebraskans wherever the actor sits, and a dispensary that draws a meaningful share of its revenue from across the line is not obviously beyond a Nebraska investigator's reach. Marketing claims about what cannabis does to a person are squarely the kind of thing a consumer-protection office examines. An investigation is not an accusation, and offices routinely decline to explain open ones.

The weakness in that defense is the employee list. Consumer-protection inquiries into advertising claims do not usually begin with the residential addresses of everyone who has ever worked the register, including people who left years ago. That request reads as an interest in the individuals rather than the conduct, in a neighboring state where possession remains a crime, and it is the part Peak is fighting hardest.

Border retail has been one of the few reliably profitable niches in a brutal few years for American cannabis. Stores in Sedgwick, in New Buffalo, Michigan, in the towns that ring Oklahoma and Illinois, do volumes their populations cannot explain. The risk in that model was always assumed to sit with the customer driving home. Nebraska is testing whether it can be made to sit with the store.

1. Peak's petition to quash is pending in Nebraska state court; a ruling would be the first test of how far a Nebraska civil investigative demand reaches into Colorado.
2. Hilgers's office has not identified a statute. If one appears in briefing, it will define whether this is a consumer-protection matter or something else.
3. Nebraska's Medical Cannabis Commission continues licensing; the first cultivator was cleared in June and retail sales have still not begun.
4. The notary convicted in February is appealing, the last live piece of the petition-fraud investigation.
5. Hilgers is a candidate in a state where cannabis enforcement has become a stated priority; his office's posture is unlikely to soften before November.

Cartier has now been on both ends of the same policy from the same office: told that a sovereign tribe's cannabis vote cost it a tobacco deal, and told that a Colorado retailer must produce its payroll. He has said he expects the stonewalling to continue. It is a fair prediction from a man who was told the purpose out loud.

Meanwhile the store on Railroad Street is open until nine, and Nebraskans keep making the drive, because two years after they voted for a legal supply of their own, their state has not built one.

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