OPINION:
On Thursday, the Justice Department announced a federal indictment charging Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas with racketeering conspiracy, conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute marijuana, conspiracy to launder money, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud and maintaining a drug-involved premises. Prosecutors allege she led a marijuana distribution enterprise. Ms. Lucas has not been convicted.
In a post on X, she responded to the indictment, “Today, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the full weight of the federal government have been wielded against an 82-year-old great-grandmother. … I’ve seen what happens when people in power try to silence those who stand up to them. I spent my life fighting back, and I’m not stopping now.”
Quite the victim. Ms. Lucas, it seems, would have us believe she is an innocent, octogenarian great-grandmother who was simply minding her own business when the big bad feds came for her. Ms. Lucas and her allies call the case politically motivated, but the indictment cites controlled marijuana purchases at her store in October and November 2024, before President Trump returned to office.
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Little old great-grandmother is a far cry from her public persona. First of all, her response to the indictment implies that she is a powerless citizen, which is laughable. Ms. Lucas is a career politician. She joined the Portsmouth City Council in June 1984 and left for the Virginia Senate in 1992 after winning election in November 1991. She has been president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate since 2020 and has chaired the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee since 2024.
Her invoking her age and great-grandmother status is also puzzling. When people picture a grandmother or great-grandmother, if they were lucky enough to know one, they do not picture someone indicted on drug and corruption charges. They do not picture a woman spewing expletives at a U.S. senator on social media either. After Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, called Virginia’s redistricting push a “brazen abuse of power,” Ms. Lucas replied with a post on X (expletive censored here): “You all started it and we f—-ing finished it.”
She is also a great-grandmother who opened a cannabis business. In 2021, Ms. Lucas opened The Cannabis Outlet in Portsmouth, which sold hemp and CBD products. Virginia legalized possession of small amounts of marijuana that year, but recreational sales remain illegal, and a legal retail market is not scheduled to open until July 1, 2027. The indictment alleges that The Cannabis Outlet went beyond legal products and sold marijuana. “Let’s talk about pot,” Ms. Lucas posted on social media in 2022. “Yes, we legalized it and I even opened the Cannabis Outlet after we did! But the job isn’t done.”
Ms. Lucas is being duplicitous. When politically expedient, she wraps herself in the identity of an 82-year-old great-grandmother, but that is certainly not the image she projects to the public at large.
The most concerning allegation is that she used her office for personal financial gain. According to the indictment, Ms. Lucas telephoned a Virginia legislator on March 9 and explained why she needed a marijuana license, allegedly saying, “I got to get the license, and I got to get the money rolling in because I want — I want to make generation, create some generational wealth. I need to be covered under [Upton’s] um, hemp license.”
Carlton Upton Jr. is a co-defendant and was Ms. Lucas’ business partner in the company behind The Cannabis Outlet and The CBD Shoppe, prosecutors say.
Prosecutors’ theory is that Ms. Lucas, while co-sponsoring the 2026 legislation creating Virginia’s legal retail market, planned to profit from it and shaped it to benefit her associates and herself.
On Oct. 22, FBI Director Kash Patel said that Ms. Lucas and her co-conspirators “manufactured and created a criminal enterprise to illicitly enrich themselves” rather than serving the public.
Ms. Lucas’ header picture on X shows her in boxing gloves above the words “The people’s champion.” If the allegations prove true, she should consider updating it to “Using elected office to create generational wealth.”
In her own words about Mr. Trump, perhaps Ms. Lucas “just learned no one is above the law!”
• Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor to Independent Women’s Features, The Federalist and the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network.
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