This article originally appeared in High Times’ Spring/Summer 2026 print edition. Get yours here.

Activists, investors, lawyers, growers and a plant scientist on what American cannabis legalization built, what it broke and where it goes from here.

The Megaphoner

Voices at the crossroads speak.

One minute this plant is a scraggly weed growing in the ditch by the side of a road or on the bank of a creek, the next it’s being sold to us as the new agricultural juggernaut—bigger than wheat, sexier than corn, the sixth largest cash crop in the U.S. and more dangerous than heroin (or so they say in Washington).

We know better. We know it’s truly a healing herb that has become a 30-plus-billion-dollar civic religion of smoke and mirrors, with happy shopkeepers peddling their version of joy to the masses.

Well, Americans can’t just love something. We have to mangle it, throttle it, slap warning labels all over it, treat it like toxic nuclear waste, and then regulate the shit out of it. We outlaw it and then beg for more. We can’t even agree on what to call it—cannabis, marijuana, weed, ganja, hemp—it’s the same plant but every name carries a different kind of baggage, a different flavor of paranoia, depending on who’s preaching the sermon and who’s twisting the logic.

We are now trapped in this what-the-fuck moment—reset, rearrange, reinvent, bolt something on here, trim something off there—trying to square the image of the mystical herb that binds communities and inspires art with the federal nightmare that says you’ll lose your house, your job, your kids, and maybe your mind if you light up a joint somewhere in Kansas or Indiana or Kentucky or Iowa.

And yet—of course yet—we keep building shaky empires out of it, throwing up a peace sign as is our nature, flipping it into a middle-digit salute aimed at the naysaying corporate bureaucrats who back us up even while backing out of getting too involved.

Because they know, and we know, there’s plenty of demand out there. There’s plenty of money to be made. If we could just get out of our own way.

The plant itself is half sacred Madonna, half cheap whore, seducing all with that unmistakable scent that smells like money in the making but still scares the straights who sniff out 100-year-old images of immoral acts being undertaken. We are still dealing with the left-behind hubris of greedy hustlers and their half-assed business plans that were the first wave of profiteers who ran in like hyenas converging on a zebra kill, made their money, wrecked the system, and left the true believers wandering around in the desert of broken dreams, mumbling to bankers and investors that all the carnage being created is just “growing pains.”

Sure. Tell that to the dispensary owner drowning in another quarter of red ink while Congress tries to figure out what to do next—reschedule? deschedule? arrest? release?—then leave the issue scorching on their back burner.

Still—still—the truth keeps clawing back through the haze. There is real value in this complicated leaf, something pure that no law, no regulator, no hypocritical preacher or doomsday predictor can destroy. Cannabis is a gift, a botanical sledgehammer designed to crack open the skull of consumers and let the light in.

But here we sit, nearly 30 years into the so-called legalization revolution, still stumbling, still second-guessing, still drawing lines in the sand while muttering shoulda, woulda, coulda.

For many, the brass ring of success in this still-emerging industry is out there, still glinting in the distance, shiny from the greased palms that grabbed it for a microsecond then let it slip away.

There are voices of reason. There are veterans in the fight who still have faith that the reliable machinery of the agriculture industry is moving this plant forward, grinding through gears, pumping brakes like crazy then accelerating at the same time, declaring that it’s just a matter of time before the bumpy road full of our self-created obstacles gets smoothed out.

What follows here is a collection of fact-finding, truth-telling voices of the industry. The front-liners are fighting the good fight. Advocates, thought leaders, industry watchers, investment managers, a grower, and a renowned plant scientist. All are fellow crunchy water ballooners with stretchy brains wrangling a new understanding.

And really… isn’t the goal of all this profound business and societal jostling about trying to make this existence a better trip for everybody?

The Never-Done Advocates

“The reality is, in large measure, we’ve won the hearts and minds of the American public.” — Keith Stroup, founder of the National Organization for the Reform of the Marijuana Laws (NORML)

“We misunderstood when we legalized state by state. We misunderstood that legalizing was not going to immediately replace the illicit market.” — Adam Smith, executive director of Marijuana Policy Project

Keith Stroup has been fighting the good fight against prohibition for over 50 years, facing incarceration and FBI investigations along the way. “When we started NORML in 1970, Gallup had just done their first poll asking the American public how they felt about marijuana legalization,” he said. “Before that, they didn’t even think it was an important enough question to include in their surveys. Only 12% of the American public supported what we were trying to do. Today, there are five or six national surveys that show roughly 70% support full legalization, and 88% support medical use. We’ve convinced the majority of them that prohibition is more harmful than marijuana. We’ve had to demonstrate firsthand that marijuana did not make you crazy, because back in the 70s, that’s what the majority of Americans thought.”

Stroup said that he doesn’t fear the industry backlash that seems to be floating around today, mostly centered around questions about hemp products and new health and wellness studies from legitimate medical sources such as the New England Journal of Medicine.

Then there is the back and forth in Congress about rescheduling or descheduling or whatever is next on their agenda to reduce or end prohibition. All it has done is slow down legalization efforts. But they go on. “There’s only so far the politicians could go,” Stroup said. “You’re always going to have some hot-head anti-marijuana zealot who is going to spew forth hateful stuff, and say we ought to lock these people up. But they don’t represent many people now. Not a single state today has reversed their legalization or even their medical use legalization. Not a single one. We thought it might take 10 or 20 years to get our project (reforming marijuana laws) completed. Now it’s been 55 or 56 years, and we’ve still got a good bit of work to do.”

According to Adam Smith, legalization and the path of industry growth for cannabis has been a long and complicated story. “From the very beginning we have set up legalization in states in reaction to the disconnect between state and federal law,” he said. “That led us down a path of inefficient industries, of industries that can’t survive. Start with California in 1996 when they passed Proposition 215 (the Compassionate Use Act of 1996). Okay, they legalized medical and the state decided they didn’t want to get involved, right? So they left it all to the locals. California then legalizes adult use. But 60% of the state wasn’t allowing medical and so most of those counties didn’t allow adult use. So you have an industry like California, where in 60% of the state you can’t buy legally. The cost to be in the industry is so high and the regulations have been so onerous in many states that it becomes almost impossible to operate.”

The legalization movement got itself bogged down. “To me, the responsibility of the movement changed,” Smith said. “That was a noble cause and vitally important. But once we started doing that, a lot of things started picking up, and the industry kind of swallowed the movement. The industry had a bunch of money come in, and they had all these ideas on how this needs to work. Everybody in the state legislatures were setting up an industry. But the truth is that what we didn’t set up is a rational cannabis policy that is based on public health, public safety and public access. So the industry rose, and then the industry crashed.”

The movement couldn’t raise any money, billionaire donors moved on to psychedelics and other emerging industries, creating a new moment for the cannabis industry, Smith said. “We’re in sort of a quasi post-prohibition world, and there are issues that are not legal versus illegal now.

“The incentives on testing and the incentives on following the regs are really misaligned. The mess that it creates opens the door for pushback. And the pushback is against cannabis as it is, rather than a pushback against what the legal industry should be.”

The Money Movement Watchers

“The industry got ahead of itself. There was irrational exuberance about the future of cannabis, which couldn’t meet any of the predictions.” — Steve Schain, lawyer with Smart Counsel working on financial services, consumer finance litigation, banking law, and cannabis.

“People get excited. They love to see pretty plants. That often leads to an overbuild of capacity. In almost every single market we see just inevitably too much capacity relative to the demand, which leads to price compression, which leads to companies that have high cost structures going out of business. Every state is watching this happen over and over again on repeat. It’s kind of like an exercise of insanity.” — Morgan Paxhia, co-founder and managing partner at Poseidon Investment Management, one of the largest funds in the cannabis industry.

“I think the right point in time to begin discussing the state of cannabis is the end of the first quarter of 2021,” Steve Schain said. “That’s where, technically, everything was at its best, because the pandemic gave an artificial boost to cannabis. That’s when stocks traded the highest.”

There’s been as much of a 97% fall since then, he said, in something like exchange traded funds “and stuff like that.” What caused the drop? “I would say number one, we went from being one industry to several industries,” he said. “We used to call ourselves the industry, even though there’s a difference between startup, between standalones and multi-state operators. Now we’ve seen the entry of hemp-derived intoxicants, like delta 8, delta 6, delta 10, THCV, and that’s splintered because that’s caused internal fighting with each other.”

Take a look at any company right now, Schain prompted. “Look at all this stuff that’s going down the tubes because they borrowed, borrowed, borrowed without a thought about being able to repay the money or having a reserve. People said to me, essentially, when we were doing well, that they wanted to get all their money out in 18 months. And I was like, ‘You’re insane. There’s no way that’s going to happen.’ ‘Yeah, but I know a guy.’ ‘No, you don’t know a guy. You know a liar.’”

Look at New York to get an idea of how the industry is trying to structure itself. “The people running the programs are trying to do all kinds of things that are just ludicrous. It’s a bad idea. When you’re a bank, when you loan money, the bank has underwriting criteria, and the interest rate you’re charged and the decision on where to get money is based on your net worth. It may not be nice, but the bank is concerned about getting its money back and its interest, and that’s the way these things are run.”

In the end, there was the notion that cannabis was going to be this miracle investment because it was going to get people off opioids, Schain explained. “And that just wasn’t true. A lot of unfounded claims were made about CBD and about cannabis, health and wellness stuff, and people wanted to believe it. But it didn’t work. Most people I know who use cannabis as a medication got no benefit from it.”

What have we learned, and what can be fixed? “I believe in Adam Smith’s invisible hand of capitalism, supply meets demand,” he said. This was an economic concept promoted by Smith, suggesting that individuals pursuing their own profit will, through market forces like supply and demand, allocate resources efficiently and promote general welfare without the need for central planning or government intervention. “That’s not what happens here. You have 39 divergent state programs. You had irrational exuberance. You have a failure of any kind of regulatory oversight, coordinating the thing, and you have massive underfunding. So all that stuff coalesced to prevent forward progress.”

“The words ‘serial entrepreneur’ have a very different meaning to me than it did 10 years ago. It means you’re going to try and get in, put in as little money as possible, then get the fuck out. And that’s why the industry isn’t more successful. No one said I’m building this for my grandkids.”

Morgan Paxhia said that investors have been gun-shy since the pandemic. “That really hasn’t changed since then. So it’s been, what, five and a half years of just really little interest in cannabis from an investment perspective.”

There’s been too much debt. “It might look good initially from an underwriting perspective, but they were based on growth and profitability, and a lot of companies have not seen growth and profitability. They’ve seen a degradation and a decline of growth and that’s hurt their profitability. The operating leverage is wonderful when it’s working in your favor, and it’s horrible when it’s working in reverse. It’s really hard for these kind of fixed asset operations to curtail their cost structure.”

He said that it’s one thing to clean up your balance sheet if you have a business worth saving. “But the retail investor doesn’t care about fundamentals. They don’t care about operational efficiency. They don’t care about management, execution, or governance, or things that we care about. They just don’t. They are thinking they’re smart enough to get out before things go against them.

“Our whole discussion with our portfolio companies is to just build patiently, build profitably, and at some point, you will be paid for that,” Paxhia said. “But for now, we advise to just keep doing good work, and the rest will sort itself out.”

The Plant Pathfinders

“What I am seeing is that the state of the market in cannabis is actually becoming more normalized than it ever has been. We’re seeing the proliferation of hemp-derived products now, and we can have the conversation about regulation and testing and things, and the needs for those types of quality control measures that I think are critically important to the industry. But it’s the same plant, right? So I think that what that’s doing is it’s normalizing cannabis as an agricultural crop.” — Scott Vasterling, founder of Humboldt Family Farms

“There was a big rush in the early days to investigate plant diseases. There was a big increase in research. But I would say it’s stabilizing now.” — Zamir Punja, professor of plant biotechnology at Simon Fraser University.

Research by the Journal of the American Heart Association says that there are real health risks with cannabis, such as cardiac issues, etc. And that has caused backlash for some cannabis business owners because that research has been appearing in the mainstream media. “I honestly don’t see that there’s a backlash happening,” Scott Vasterling said. “I know that cannabis isn’t for everybody, the same way that some people might be allergic to certain fruits and vegetables, or to gluten. So I don’t think that there’s a huge health risk with cannabis. I think there are a lot of different ways that people can consume cannabis, but it’s the same way that anything consumed in excess could be challenging.”

He said that, as a result of Proposition 64 of 2016 (the Adult Use of Marijuana Act), a lot of people started growing large outdoor farms specifically for extract. “The public’s mindset in that time frame was, oh, well, if you’re growing outside, it must be for extracts. It’s a low-quality extraction. But no. We’ve been supplying up to 70% of the product across the United States for generations as high-quality craft, sun-grown product. So I think people are becoming more educated and more aware as time goes on about the effects and the energy that this plant has, and what the sun can do to this plant. It just can’t be replicated indoors. Innovation is getting better for indoor but it’s not the same.”

The cannabis industry has followed some of the other traditional emerging industry dynamics—boom, bust, then a sort of settling down. “What we’re seeing is a level of collaboration between good operators and good business people starting to work together to move the industry forward,” Vasterling said. “There’s no longer this hustling mindset and history of hustling one another, because people need to build good, positive relationships in order to move the industry forward. We’re seeing farmers work together, sharing genetics. We’re starting to see businesses that aren’t being competitive with one another. There’s less of that in-fighting we saw with the green rush. We are starting to get some breathing room, in my opinion, and I think we’re really seeing some nice collaborative projects come out of it.”

Plant scientist Zamir Punja said that they are still “going at it full swing” in terms of the hop latent viroid, first recorded in 2019–2020, which has caused significant concern among growers. A study authored by Punja reported that the commonly used practice of the vegetative propagation of cannabis plants from cuttings derived from stock (mother) plants is known to spread a number of pathogens. “Other [cannabis plant pathogens] have sort of plateaued. Viruses have been the biggest ones. But we haven’t seen any new viruses, surprisingly. So maybe we’re in this lull phase, hopefully in terms of diseases, because how many more diseases can you find?”

A lot of the big growers are doing their own plant science now, he said, using in-house facilities. “I’ve helped them do that, because in the long run, it’s way cheaper, and they can get immediate results. The smaller ones are still shopping around as always.”

The Thought Leaders

“I don’t know that I see a backlash. I see the inevitable maturation of a complex, federally illegal industry that finally has years under its belt so we can actually learn what this really looks like.” — Ricardo Baca, two-time TEDx speaker, founder and CEO of Grasslands, a cannabis journalism and public relations company

“I think we’re in an environment where, because of our past successes, many people among the public are no longer as engaged in this issue as they once were. They think that legalization at this point is just sort of a fait accompli, that it’s just going to kind of happen on its own, not understanding that social and political changes really only happen when there’s advocates who are consistently and diligently advocating for those changes.” — Paul Armentano, deputy director of NORML

The industry didn’t have real data on much of anything back when Ricardo Baca first started reporting on the industry in 2013 as the first cannabis columnist for any mainstream publication—in this case, the Denver Post. “In fact, it was painful,” he said. “That was my main call. I said to please get us data.”

Organizations such as the annual “Monitoring the Future” study—conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in partnership with the University of Michigan—finally gave him reliable data on teen use of all substances, including cannabis, supported by additional insights from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the cannabis analytics firm BDSA.

“They were the first to get real, concrete data that was rooted in the industry, that gave us an idea of, okay, what does this first-of-its-kind marketplace actually look like?” What we’re ultimately seeing, he said, is more and more data being collected, which is helping the industry ultimately learn the good and the bad. “We are also seeing some very incomplete early-stage research that’s being taken too seriously right now,” he said. “You have really valuable medical research coming out about the efficacy of cannabis, but also about the risks, which are real, because this plant is not without its risks. But then on the flip side, we have the time and lived experience inside these regulated markets, within a hell of a tumultuous 12 years in Colorado, and nine years in California. We can now say, ‘Okay, how is legalization working?’”

That lived experience, and that data, and “that hardship of this federally illegal industry that’s still being forced into a state-by-state infrastructure” means the industry is struggling. “It is hard, it is not straightforward, and the hits keep on coming, given that the Farm Bill is now pushing cannabis against itself with what Politico called a civil war between cannabis and hemp.”

The backlash that some media outlets perceive as new has already been there, he said, in the form of early-stage research with small sample sizes. “We really need deeper studies. We need larger sample sizes to understand if what is being claimed real or not?”

There are many other conflicts demonstrating an abject failure of the regulatory apparatus, Baca said. “In some situations, it’s not really their fault, because they’ve literally never even thought about regulating this before. Because that is a federal job, and the federal agencies have completely shirked their responsibilities because of federal illegality,” he said. “So we have ended up with a lot of these cluster fucks and quagmires.”

Paul Armentano said that now is the time industry leaders and advocates need to actually double down on activism because the industry is facing pushback. “There’s a vacuum and there are not as many people any longer working as advocates or diligently making that push for advocacy,” he said. “You see a push back. You see our political opponents regroup, they pivot, they are strategizing, and they get a foot in the door.”

That’s happening now for a number of reasons. “There is typically this sense among mainstream federal politicians that even if this is an issue that is of interest to them, it’s not a priority. So you’re always going to hear how can we prioritize cannabis policy reform when we have to deal with inflation, when we have to deal with, well, fill in the blank. There’s always something else that is going to be higher up in the pecking order than marijuana policy reform, and I think that’s been the case when it comes to administrations, and it’s certainly the case when it comes to Congress.”

Mainstream media “seems to now be skewing more toward alarmist headlines”, he said when it comes to cannabis, due in part to the changing dynamics of reporting. “More sensational reporting, and clickbait is more of an issue. So I think there are fewer reporters out there, certainly fewer senior reporters out there. And no one covers cannabis as a beat.”

The Retailer Interpreters

“You look at the land grabs that transpired earlier, from all the big MSOs and these debt loads and things like that. To get basically fiscally sound I think it’s going to be a very transitional period for our industry going forward.” — John Mueller, co-founder and CEO of Greenlight Dispensary, a vertically-integrated, multi-state retail operation, and co-founder and CEO of Acres Cannabis

“You show me a cannabis market that wasn’t bumpy and all fucked up, and I’ll tell you either you weren’t involved, or your knowledge is from looking at it from the outside and from social media, or you’re delusional, or you are out of business. It’s just challenge after challenge.” — Suehiko Ono, partner at Cogent Law firm and founding member of Sun Grown Cannabis Alliance, an alliance of Massachusetts adult use cultivators.

John Mueller is on a roll. He said that by sales volume, Greenlight Dispensary is the largest retail cannabis operation in the country. “In three to five years, a franchise network across the country is one of my main goals,” he said. “We’re out acquiring a lot of troubled assets right now. So we see expanding our footprint to go further across the country, and in limited license states, and then let that play out.”

In Nebraska, Mueller funded a campaign that garnered 71% approval by voters for recreational cannabis. “Everybody believes in medical cannabis,” he said. “But the question is, in the state statutes, are you allowed to put rules and regulations around the attorney general, who now doesn’t want that cannabis in the state. He’s mad at the 71% of the voters that basically approved of it. So the state could come in and basically gut all the work that’s been done there, and then lawsuits go back and forth and all the other stuff.”

In Missouri, Mueller was able to put strict guidelines for cannabis business development into the state’s constitution. “You need a two-thirds majority in the legislature, which is never going to transpire, to basically gut the whole program. The only thing that a bunch of legislators who are anti-cannabis have presented are bills. If you can control it at a constitutional level, and keep the legislators out of it because everybody’s got different agendas, and focus on the will of the people and all the polling, everything else is pretty simple. That’s the key,” he said. “But each state is so different about how they’ve structured their programs, that the process we used in Missouri is hard to duplicate.”

What about the mission for cannabis in Washington? “Everybody would have lost a bet 10 years ago or 20 years ago thinking about where we are today,” he said. “We’ve had some regressions, and depending on what happens in DC, one announcement from Trump could make everybody’s stock double. But it could be another head fake. I think everybody’s a little jaded.”

Suehiko Ono talked about the retail store proximity issue in New York—where regulators misinterpreted the distance requirements of a school from the perimeter of a dispensary, thus voiding a number of dispensary licenses—which was a classic example of regulators not understanding the details of the job. “But you know, that’s like a Tuesday. Something new happens,” Ono said. “That’s what this industry is. There’s 462 stores open in New York right now. There are $6-8 billion worth of retail sales transactions that happen in New York every year. The market is there, and theoretically you have the state helping to wrangle it in and put it within this license framework. But you got so many interests, and so many consultants and experts, and everybody has an opinion,” he said.

What the state requires of retailers is certain licensing requirements created to protect the consumer, Ono said, which is not what’s happening right now. “What they’re doing ultimately is adding on all of these costs that basically no other business in the world has to contend with. When you’re a startup, and you’re trying to model these things, and out of either disbelief or lack of experience or whatever, or you don’t even model it, you don’t put in the financial burdens of such things as 280e and compliance, and things like track and trace systems that some state regulators don’t understand. But even worse, they want to over-regulate. What that does is harm the operators and the consumers because there’s a huge cost.”

There is no common ground or baseline for parties to come together and understand based on some external test, or something that everyone can agree on, about what reality looks like. “Like ‘Here’s some models that help us to really kind of start to get a handle on this. But don’t get too arrogant because we really don’t know what the fuck is going on.’

“It’s just a debacle of state agencies,” he said. “And its differences between the agencies, and who knows what other politics that happen between the agencies, and disagreement on particular interpretation of some pedantic nuance of how they’re going to interpret the law. Because, I guess, they’re still afraid, they’re still about protecting the children. Like the weed is going to jump out and murder them.”

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After five years, two applications, six figures in expenses, and a maze of shifting rules, one New York cannabis entrepreneur finally secured a retail license—and learned how legalization can still punish the people it was supposed to help.

The process to get to this point has been, in a word, farcical. From shifting goalposts to inexplicable delays, New York’s recreational cannabis license rollout has come with significant teething pains.

Despite my best efforts to do everything by the book—and most of the time there was no book to follow—roadblock followed roadblock with little way to push back. Now that my license is approved, I finally feel comfortable lifting the lid on what this bureaucratic nightmare has been like from the inside.

This Felt Like an Opportunity Made for Us

New York approved recreational cannabis in 2021 and announced its legal sales framework the following year. Kudos to lawmakers for this policy, but unfortunately, legalization and regulation didn’t move in lockstep.

The plan was to first launch retail dispensaries under Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary (CAURD) licenses—special permits that prioritize those convicted of a state marijuana-related offense. The intention here was good: prioritize people most harmed by prohibition, get them into the legal market first, and then open regular licensing to everyone else.

But there was a catch. At the time, the state planned to source and sublease a space to you under CAURD. For an entrepreneur, that sounded less like owning a business and more like being handed the keys to someone else’s. In any case, it was our best shot and we took it.

My business partner spent three years in prison on state and federal cannabis charges, which meant we were, on paper, exactly who the program was designed for. We hired an attorney, got our ducks in a row, and applied in 2022. For us, it felt like the state was finally righting past wrongs, and this was our opportunity for the taking. Then the lawsuits started.

Roadblock After Roadblock

The first delay came in 2023 after a federal judge blocked five regions in New York (including ours, of course) from opening dispensaries. An out-of-state applicant alleged they were unconstitutionally disadvantaged by cannabis regulations that “favor” state residents. The courts soon lifted that CAURD block, but others followed, leading to a cat-and-mouse game of injunctions that froze everything.

After six months of stalemate, we started to perceive changes at the Office of Cannabis Management (OCM). My attorney’s reading, and he wasn’t alone, was that the conditional program was effectively being wound down in favor of processing everyone in the normal round. The OCM rushed to open that window and we rushed with it, resulting in another application and another round of legal fees.

The regular license requirements—released with barely two months’ notice—introduced new hoops to jump through. This application round required site control, meaning we needed to prove ownership or an active lease for our proposed cannabis business. This left us scrambling to sign a lease that not only made commercial sense in Buffalo but also complied with distance requirements from schools, churches, and parks. We applied just before the end of the year only to find our luck was going from bad to worse.

Unlike CAURD, which seemed to operate on a first-come, first-served basis, the regular round was a lottery. Out of 2,200 hopeful applicants in New York, we were around position 2,100. There was nothing to do but wait and pay for an empty storefront in the meantime, 2500 dollars a month and counting.

Congratulations, Now Give It Back

Then, in the fall of 2024, there was a breakthrough. Without word or warning, the original conditional license was approved at random. But it was too good to be true: OCM wouldn’t allow us to use the conditional license at our leased location. Their position, communicated to my attorney in writing, was that a CAURD license couldn’t be used to open at a storefront already attached to a pending regular application. Both applications were identical in every other detail, but it didn’t matter.

Our options: Keep the conditional and withdraw our regular application, which would have meant losing our proximity protection at that location. Proximity protection is a board-granted status that places your storefront on an official map and prevents any future licensee from opening within 1,000 feet. Losing it would mean reapplying from scratch, going to the back of the line, and hoping it would be granted again. Or, we wait to open our preferred location with the regular license. So, we handed back our hard-fought conditional license and spent another year-and-a-half in limbo.

Last summer marked the final, painful stretch. An analyst from OCM picked through our application and flagged minor deficiencies one at a time, with two weeks between responses. Then, after three more months of radio silence, there was one last problem in October: a single wrong digit in the address on our municipality notification letter—a required filing that gave the local government 30 days to raise objections to the proposed dispensary. Sure, it was a different unit but still in the same plaza, and yet it triggered a mandatory month-long response window anyway. 

That timeframe expired in December, which in turn was too close to the next board meeting to make the agenda. January’s meeting was canceled without explanation. We finally won our regular recreational cannabis license in February of this year.

All of This Just To Sell Some Weed

It’s a mix of emotions to be on the other side of this process. Honestly, the most overwhelming feeling is anger because it really didn’t need to be so hard or expensive. Two rounds of legal consultation and two years of rent aren’t chump change. And that’s without factoring in taxes, utilities, administrative costs, and the sheer time investment. Applicants shouldn’t be expected to front up that kind of money just to have a shot, particularly when the whole point was to give people like my partner their chance in the legal market. The kicker when approval finally came? The congratulations email arrived alongside a $7,000 fee to issue the certificate for in-store display.

There’s also a feeling of disappointment that we’ve lost a lot of opportunity in the interim. We were on track to be a first adopter for New York recreational cannabis. Now competitors have years of online reviews, customer loyalty, and brand recognition. The headstart the CAURD program was supposed to give us has been completely inverted.

Meanwhile, amid the countless stops and starts in trying to follow the letter of the law, the gray market grew exponentially. Sticker shops popped up on seemingly every other corner across New York, letting customers purchase stickers or other small goods and receive cannabis as a “gift”. Enforcement is slowly ramping up, but a $10,000 fine isn’t much of a deterrent to $100,000 in illicit sales, especially when customers who go the legal route face added taxes and higher prices. We were drowning in paperwork while the unlicensed market went on comparatively freely, and that same market still threatens to eat into our customer base before we’ve sold a single gram.

But despite everything, surprisingly, I remain hopeful. I know the ins and outs of this industry—founding Vitality CBD in a largely unregulated hemp market, advocating for clearer rules, and always believing that the barriers would eventually come down. Now, having seen the iterations of cannabis over the years, legalization has arrived in my state and I’m licensed to legally sell the same plant that my business partner was locked up for. Even though it was painful, and even though there are many kinks to iron out, that fact alone makes it worth it. Perhaps the hope is misplaced but it’s still there all the same.

This article was written by an external contributor based on their firsthand experience navigating New York’s cannabis licensing process. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of High Times. Regulatory details were accurate to the best of the author’s knowledge at the time of publication.

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The legal weed business taught customers to chase the next deal, and independent dispensaries are paying the price.

Twenty percent off flower. Buy two vapes, get the third for a penny. Thirty percent off the entire store until noon. Double loyalty points on Wednesday, unless Thursday’s sale turns out to be better. 

Cannabis retail has become a relentless hunt for the next markdown. In mature markets, falling cannabis prices have made legal weed dramatically more affordable for consumers. They have also left retailers fighting over shoppers who may have no reason to return once the coupon expires. 

Cortney Brown, Marketing Chair at the Cannabis Chamber of Commerce and CMO at cannabis advertising and analytics company MediaJel, believes retailers helped create the problem themselves. 

“I think we’ve trained them,” Brown told High Times. “Consumers love finding value, but they don’t wake up hoping to wait until Friday to buy cannabis. The industry created that behavior by teaching customers that if they wait another day, someone will inevitably offer a better deal.”

The Cannabis Price Wars Were Trained Into Existence

Price compression is not necessarily bad news for the person standing at the register. Lower prices can make legal cannabis accessible to people who were previously priced out, particularly in states where taxes and regulatory costs pushed dispensary weed far above traditional-market prices. 

The problem starts when lower base prices collide with a retail culture built around constant promotions. 

According to Headset’s analysis of cannabis retail margins, average U.S. gross margins fell from 52.6% in 2021 to approximately 42.7% during 2025. That decline has consequences beyond the sales floor. Less gross profit can mean tighter payroll, smaller purchasing budgets, late vendor payments, and less money available for expansion or product development. 

Brown traces the discount spiral to a familiar pattern. Supply increased, markets matured, and competition got nastier. Retailers pulled the fastest lever available. 

“Price compression is really the result of an industry-wide race to solve a long-term problem with short-term tactics,” she said. “Markets matured, supply increased, competition intensified, and retailers understandably reached for the fastest lever they had: discounting.” 

Promotions worked, at least initially. They moved inventory, boosted traffic, and gave customers a reason to choose one shop over another. Then every shop started speaking the same language. 

“The problem is that when every retailer follows the same playbook, discounting stops being a differentiator and becomes the expectation,” Brown said. “Eventually, the conversation shifted from ‘Why should I shop here?’ to ‘Who’s offering 30% off today?’” 

Once that happens, the store is no longer selling selection, knowledge, trust, or identity. It is testing how much margin it can surrender before the customer walks across the street. 

Brown helped develop the Cannabis Price Wars initiative through a partnership between MediaJel and the Cannabis Chamber of Commerce after seeing retailers across the country face the same challenge: shrinking margins, increasing promotional pressure, and declining customer loyalty.

Rather than simply pointing out the problem, the Cannabis Chamber of Commerce has made it a priority to help operators navigate it. Through the Price Wars Campaign, the Chamber is providing free educational webinars, practical playbooks, industry discussions, and a 90-Day Discount Escape Plan designed to help retailers build healthier, more sustainable businesses. The initiative encourages operators to compete on customer experience, retention, and long-term value, not just deeper discounts.

The campaign does not argue that every sale is a mistake. Instead, the Price Wars Campaign encourages retailers to shift their focus from short-term discounts to long-term customer value by measuring profitability instead of revenue alone, personalizing offers instead of blanket promotions, strengthening loyalty through better customer experiences, and building brands customers choose for trust, education, and community, not simply because they’re the cheapest.

Promotions can clear aging inventory, introduce a new product, attract first-time shoppers, or turn a cannabis holiday into an actual event. Trouble arrives when the sale calendar becomes the entire marketing department. 

“Discounting becomes a problem the moment it starts replacing strategy,” Brown said. 

A Discount Can Rent a Customer, but It Cannot Buy Loyalty

Cannabis businesses tend to measure the immediate result of a promotion: traffic rose, units moved, and the daily sales total looked healthy. Those numbers do not necessarily show whether the shop made money or created a customer who will ever return. 

In a report examining millions of customers across more than 1,000 retailers in nine states, Headset found that two in three cannabis customers never return after their first visit. That retention gap suggests acquisition alone cannot carry a dispensary, no matter how packed the store looks on 4/20. 

“The biggest mistake is assuming discounts create loyalty,” Brown said. “Most discounts simply rent customers.” 

The distinction matters. A loyal customer chooses a store because it consistently delivers something they trust. A rented customer appears when the price drops and disappears when another dispensary offers an extra 5% off. 

Brown argues that retailers need to look past daily revenue and examine gross margin after discounts, repeat purchase rates, average order value, customer acquisition costs, and customer lifetime value. Those measurements show whether a promotion produced a worthwhile relationship or attracted a wave of bargain hunters. 

Retailers also burn money by offering the same deal to everybody. A regular customer who already visits twice a month may not need 30% off. Someone who has not returned in six months may need a thoughtful reminder. A first-time customer may respond better to patient service and credible product guidance than another automated text shouting about gummies. 

“Not every customer needs an incentive to buy,” Brown said. “Loyal customers may simply want recognition. Dormant customers need a reason to come back. First-time shoppers need trust.” 

Constant markdowns can also ripple back through the supply chain. When retailers sacrifice margin, brands face pressure to lower wholesale prices, fund promotions, or accept unfavorable payment terms. Cultivators, manufacturers, and small vendors absorb the squeeze. 

“Margins fund innovation,” Brown said. “When retailers and brands are constantly sacrificing margin, they have less to invest in, product development, staff education, merchandising, technology, marketing, and customer experience.” 

That is where the price war stops being a clever promotion and starts reshaping what reaches the shelf. 

Independent Dispensaries Cannot Outspend the Chains 

Large multistate operators can use scale, purchasing power, and vertical integration to survive prolonged price battles. An independent dispensary rarely has the same cushion.

Trying to beat a national operator by offering cheaper weed is therefore a fairly efficient way for a neighborhood shop to bleed out. As recent High Times reporting on small cannabis operators documented, lower prices and increasingly mature markets can produce a brutal environment for businesses without deep reserves. 

“Independent retailers shouldn’t try to out-discount national operators,” Brown said. “They should out-experience them.” 

Experience can sound like empty retail jargon until it becomes concrete. It is the budtender who remembers that a customer hated the last disposable they bought. It is a menu curated by people who have actually tried the products. It is a local vendor pop-up, a patient education session, or a store that does not make a first-time shopper feel silly for asking a basic question. 

The broader point is not that every independent dispensary needs couches, events, or an aggressively quirky identity. It needs a reason to exist beyond proximity and price. 

The Cheapest Store Will Not Always Win 

Cannabis spent decades building communities outside conventional retail. People passed down genetics, shared cultivation knowledge, warned friends away from bad flower, and remembered the person who always came through with something special. 

Legalization brought testing, bright menus, rewards programs, and online ordering. Somewhere along the way, parts of the industry started treating the customer relationship like a coupon-delivery system. 

“Cannabis has always been about community,” Brown said. “Long before legalization, it was built around shared experiences, education, and connection. I think we’ve lost some of that in the race to compete on price.”

None of this means consumers should feel guilty for shopping within their budgets. Cheap weed is sometimes exactly what a person needs, and falling prices have created genuine benefits. The responsibility belongs to retailers that trained shoppers to believe full price is a sucker’s game and then acted surprised when loyalty vanished. 

A healthier market would leave room for fair prices without forcing every operator into permanent clearance mode. Promotions would serve a defined purpose. Staff knowledge, product curation, community relationships, and consistency would carry the rest of the weight. 

Brown hopes initiatives like the Price Wars Campaign encourage retailers to see that they don’t have to solve these challenges alone. Through the Cannabis Chamber of Commerce, the goal is to give operators practical resources, real-world education, and opportunities to learn from one another so they can build stronger businesses without relying on perpetual discounts. The campaign reflects the Chamber’s broader mission of strengthening the cannabis industry by supporting operators with actionable tools, not just commentary. 

“The cannabis industry doesn’t have a discount problem, it has a differentiation problem,” Brown said. “When every dispensary looks the same, price becomes the only thing left to compete on. The retailers that thrive over the next decade won’t be the cheapest. They’ll be the ones that create so much value that customers stop asking, ‘What’s on sale?’ and start asking, ‘When can I come back?’” 

The stores that survive may not be the ones sending the loudest 30%-off text every Friday morning. They will be the ones customers remember after the sale ends.

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A drug company spent nearly eight years fighting the DEA to make cannabis medicine the hard way. Now that everyone else is getting an easier path, it’s in court trying to undo the whole thing, a move that could send cannabis back to Schedule I for the entire industry.

MMJ International Holdings spent nearly eight years and millions of dollars fighting the DEA for the right to grow cannabis. It sued the agency. Its CEO called the delays “obstruction in uniform.” Now that the federal government has created a new, easier path for state-licensed cannabis businesses, MMJ is in court challenging the rescheduling.

For nearly a decade, it was the kind of company cannabis reformers could point to as a victim of the DEA. It did everything the federal government said to do. It filed drug applications with the FDA, won an Orphan Drug Designation, stood up a DEA-licensed lab, and asked the agency for permission to grow cannabis for clinical trials. Then it waited. And waited. Its application has been pending since December 2018.

The company was furious about it, loudly and for years. Its CEO, Duane Boise, did not mince words about the agency’s conduct. Now that same company is in federal court trying to reverse the rescheduling of marijuana, the first major federal marijuana reform in half a century. If it wins, cannabis could revert to Schedule I, the punishing 280E tax bill could return, and every state operator that just applied for federal relief could be left holding a voided application.

The company that spent the better part of a decade trying to get through the front door is now asking a court to decide whether everyone else should have to use it, too.

The Hard Road

To be fair to MMJ, and the story does not work unless you are, its grievance is real. The company, through its subsidiaries MMJ BioPharma Cultivation and MMJ BioPharma Labs, has chased FDA approval for cannabinoid medicines aimed at Huntington’s disease and multiple sclerosis since 2015. It holds FDA Investigational New Drug (IND) applications and FDA Orphan Drug Designation, and its lab carries a DEA Schedule I analytical registration. This is the expensive, slow, by-the-book pharmaceutical route the federal government has long told cannabis companies was the only legitimate one.

And the DEA stonewalled it. MMJ BioPharma Cultivation applied in December 2018 to become a federally authorized bulk manufacturer of cannabis for those trials. The DEA opened its pre-registration investigation in 2021 and inspected the facility that October. Then nothing. As Cannabis Business Times reported, MMJ sued the agency in 2024 over the delays, accusing it of obstructing legitimate research and running what the company called a “kangaroo court.” MMJ even challenged the constitutionality of the DEA’s in-house judges, and the Justice Department later conceded that the removal protections shielding those judges violate the separation of powers, though that concession did not resolve MMJ’s own stalled application.

On that record, MMJ had a point. A company that did everything right sat in limbo for years while the agency that demanded the rigor refused to act on it.

The Turn

Then the ground shifted. In April 2026, the Trump administration rescheduled state-licensed medical cannabis to Schedule III and opened an expedited DEA registration path for state operators. While MMJ kept pursuing FDA-approved cannabinoid medicines, state-licensed cannabis businesses were suddenly getting federal relief through a faster route, no INDs required.

So, MMJ joined the other side. It is now one of the petitioners in the consolidated challenge to the rescheduling order before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. As Business of Cannabis reported, MMJ filed alongside an addiction recovery clinic, a victims’ group and two doctors, naming President Trump, the Justice Department, the DEA, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and DEA Administrator Terrance Cole as defendants. The petitioners are not asking for a tweak. They want the court to stay the order and vacate it entirely.

Read what that means in plain terms. A stay freezes the reform. Vacatur erases it. Cannabis would revert to Schedule I, the 280E tax penalty that costs operators an effective rate far above ordinary businesses would come roaring back, and the DEA applications state companies are racing to file would rest on a legal foundation the court had just voided. A win for MMJ could become a major setback for the state-licensed industry.

The Argument, And the Witnesses

MMJ frames this as principle, not spite. Asked directly whether a company that fought to enter the federal system is now trying to block reform for everyone else, Boise rejected the premise. “That question assumes rescheduling is about helping an industry. It isn’t,” he told High Times. “We don’t oppose legitimate medicine, we oppose lowering the scientific standard for what gets called medicine.” The broader industry, he argued, “has spent years bastardizing the word ‘medicine’” by marketing state products as medical without the reproducible formulations, stability testing and clinical trials the FDA pathway demands. “MMJ chose the harder path because patients deserve medicines backed by science, not marketing.”

That distinction sits at the heart of the dispute, and so does the word itself. MMJ uses “medicine” in its pharmaceutical sense, in reference to products that have completed the FDA approval process. Much of the state-licensed cannabis industry, by contrast, has never argued that dispensary flower is equivalent to an FDA-approved pharmaceutical. It argues the two serve different purposes under different regulatory systems. So, the fight is less about whether pharmaceutical standards matter than whether state medical cannabis should have to become a pharmaceutical product before federal law can acknowledge it at all.

The company’s core claim is a regulatory double standard: it argues the government cannot extend Schedule III benefits to state operators who skipped the FDA pathway while companies that spent years and millions following it remain stuck in limbo. Its filings raise constitutional, statutory and treaty objections, including the argument that the rescheduling order creates a “hybrid schedule” Congress never authorized. On the consequences, a stay that would freeze the relief the whole industry is counting on, Boise was unmoved. If the court finds the order unlawful, he said, “any consequences for tax treatment, registrations, or existing business models would be the legal result of correcting an invalid agency action, not the objective of MMJ’s lawsuit. Our case is about restoring the rule of law, not restoring Schedule I for its own sake.”

To carry the message, MMJ has put forward people with federal pedigrees. In a June 17 announcement, it pointed to Jorge Jimenez, a retired DEA supervisory diversion investigator who once served as a section chief at DEA headquarters overseeing registrations, and Dr. Elio Mariani, a pharmaceutical scientist with decades in drug development. Their pitch is that opposition to rescheduling is not all ideology, that some of it comes from people who built the federal drug approval system. Also cited in the broader opposition is Dr. Bertha Madras, the Harvard Medical School professor and longtime cannabis skeptic who served on President Trump’s 2017 opioid commission, a figure with her own decades-long record on drug policy, not a witness MMJ brought forward.

The Ladder Problem

Here is the tension the company cannot fully escape. For years, MMJ argued that the DEA was the villain, that it ignored science, defied the rule of law and kept medicine from sick patients. Now it is asking a federal court whether anyone else should be allowed to enter through a different door. MMJ says it is a matter of scientific standards and equal treatment. Critics see a company trying to keep everyone else out of a system it spent years trying to enter.

You can read MMJ’s move two ways, and the company would insist on the first. One, it is a consistent demand that the government hold everyone to the same scientific standard, even if that means slowing the whole thing down. Two, it is a company that did the hard work, got beaten by the bureaucracy, and now wants to make sure nobody else gets the prize it was denied. The filings are about standards. The effect, if they succeed, is to pull the ladder up behind it.

Boise rejects the second reading outright. “This isn’t about denying anyone relief. It’s about ensuring that everyone who wants to market products as medicine plays by the same scientific rules,” he said. “Equal treatment doesn’t mean lowering the standard, it means applying the same standard to everyone.”

He also pushed back on the idea that simply granting MMJ its long-stalled DEA license would make the lawsuit go away. The application, filed in 2018, is still pending, and resolving it “would certainly address one part of the harm MMJ has experienced,” he said, but “even if MMJ received its DEA registration tomorrow, the legal questions before the Court would remain.”

That distinction matters. By MMJ’s own account, simply receiving its long-delayed registration would not end the dispute. The company is not only asking to enter the federal system itself. It is asking the court to throw out the easier path the rest of the industry just started using.

The stakes are not abstract, and they are close. The petitioners asked the D.C. Circuit to freeze the rescheduling order while the case plays out. That fight runs parallel to a separate DEA hearing on rescheduling that begins June 29, and there is no fixed deadline for either to resolve. If the court grants a stay, the relief the industry has been counting on, the tax break, the registration path, the first real federal thaw in half a century, stalls while the lawyers argue. There is an irony in that. The company that spent years condemning the DEA for making it wait is now asking a court to make everyone else wait, too.

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There’s a moment most cannabis operators hit where hustle stops being enough.

At first, production is manageable. A few employees can hand-fill pre-rolls, package flower, label jars, and keep orders moving out the door. But once demand starts climbing, the cracks show up fast. Labor costs spike. Consistency slips. Packaging becomes a bottleneck. Teams start solving problems with overtime instead of systems.

That’s usually when automation enters the conversation. The problem is, most operators approach it backward.

In cannabis, automation is often sold like an all-or-nothing leap: buy the biggest machine possible and hope it solves every operational problem overnight. In reality, scaling production successfully is less about one machine and more about timing, workflow, and building infrastructure in stages.

That’s the thinking behind PreRoll-Er’s “Road to Success,” a five-level framework designed to help cannabis operators scale production step-by-step instead of overbuilding too early or bottlenecking growth too late.

Why Most Scaling Plans Break Down

One of the biggest misconceptions in cannabis manufacturing is that scaling simply means increasing output.

It doesn’t.

Real scaling means maintaining consistency while output increases. That’s where many operators run into trouble. What worked when producing a few thousand units per week often collapses under larger production demands.

Hand-finishing becomes inconsistent. Packaging slows down throughput. Compliance requirements become harder to manage across multiple SKUs and markets. Teams spend more time correcting mistakes than improving systems.

Throwing expensive equipment at those problems without a roadmap usually creates new ones. PreRoll-Er’s framework is built around a different idea: solve the right problem at the right stage. Instead of treating automation like a one-time purchase, the company approaches it as operational progression. Each level is designed to match where an operator actually is, not where they think they should be.

Level 1: Establishing Consistency

Every operation starts somewhere, and for many producers, the first real challenge isn’t speed. It’s repeatability. At smaller production volumes, manual processes can work reasonably well, but inconsistency becomes obvious quickly. Uneven fills, poor pack density, wasted flower, and labor-heavy workflows all start eating into margins.

This is where entry-level automation starts making sense.

Systems like the STR Starter Kit are designed to help operators standardize their workflow without overcomplicating production. By combining filling and finishing tools into a more streamlined process, operators can improve consistency while reducing some of the manual strain that slows teams down.

The point at this stage isn’t maximum throughput. It’s building a stable foundation. Operators who skip this step often end up scaling inconsistent processes instead of fixing them first.

Level 2: Increasing Throughput Without Losing Control

Once consistency is dialed in, the next pressure point is volume. This is where many operators start feeling trapped between demand and staffing. Production targets rise, but adding labor alone becomes expensive and increasingly difficult to manage.

At this stage, automation shifts from convenience to necessity. Mid-level production systems allow teams to increase throughput while maintaining tighter control over fill quality, pack density, and workflow efficiency. More importantly, they help operations become less dependent on constant manual intervention.

For cannabis producers, operational stability matters just as much as speed.

The goal isn’t to remove people from production entirely. It’s to eliminate repetitive bottlenecks that drain labor resources and create inconsistency at scale.

Level 3: Building a Connected Production Ecosystem

This is the point where many cannabis businesses realize production itself was never the only bottleneck.

Once pre-roll filling improves, surrounding processes start becoming the problem. Packaging slows things down. Labeling creates delays. Compliance requirements multiply. Suddenly, the operation is spending more time managing workflow gaps than actually producing the product.

That’s why scalable operations eventually stop thinking in terms of individual machines. They start thinking in systems.

PreRoll-Er has expanded beyond pre-roll production into packaging, labeling, and coating systems specifically because mature operators need workflows that connect together cleanly. Equipment that works independently but creates friction across departments only pushes inefficiencies downstream.

The recently launched Semi-Auto Flower Packaging Line reflects that shift. Designed for one-person operation, the system focuses on improving weighing accuracy and packaging consistency without forcing operators into full-scale automation before they’re ready.

That flexibility matters in cannabis because no two operations scale the same way.

Level 4: High-Volume Production

At larger production volumes, the conversation changes completely. Operators at this stage aren’t just trying to increase output. They’re managing labor efficiency, multi-market compliance, SKU complexity, downtime prevention, and production forecasting all at once.

Mistakes become expensive quickly. This is where higher-output systems like the PreRoll-Er 200 enter the picture. Built for continuous production environments, these systems are designed around long-term operational efficiency rather than short bursts of capacity.

It’s also where reliability starts separating equipment manufacturers from actual production partners.

Cannabis operators don’t just need machines that run fast. They need machines that can run consistently under pressure, day after day, without turning maintenance into a full-time job.

That operational durability is part of what drove PreRoll-Er to iterate continuously on its flagship systems, with the PreRoll-Er 200 now in its sixth version, informed by operator feedback and production realities.

Level 5: Scaling Sustainably

The final stage isn’t really about machinery anymore. It’s about operational maturity. By this point, successful cannabis operators understand that scaling sustainably requires more than production capacity. It requires connected workflows, adaptable systems, reliable support, and infrastructure that can evolve alongside changing markets.

That’s especially important in cannabis, where regulations, consumer demand, and product categories shift constantly.

The operators who survive long-term are usually the ones who avoid two major mistakes:

• overinvesting too early
• underbuilding for too long

The “Road to Success” framework is ultimately built around helping operators avoid both.

Instead of forcing businesses into oversized systems before they’re operationally ready, the model allows production to scale in stages—adding automation where it creates the most impact, while leaving room for future growth.

In an industry that still moves as unpredictably as cannabis, that kind of flexibility can matter more than raw production speed.

The Bigger Shift Happening in Cannabis

Cannabis automation is maturing. A few years ago, the industry conversation was mostly about output: faster machines, bigger numbers, higher capacity. Now the focus is shifting toward operational efficiency, repeatability, labor optimization, and workflow design.

That’s a sign the industry itself is evolving. The businesses positioned to last aren’t necessarily the ones producing the most product today. They’re the ones building systems capable of adapting tomorrow.

Companies like PreRoll-Er are leaning into that transition by treating automation less like a sales pitch and more like infrastructure planning.

Because at a certain point, scaling cannabis production stops being about how much product you can push through a facility. It becomes about whether your operation was actually built to grow.

Photos courtesy of PreRoll-Er

Sponsored Content Disclaimer: This article is sponsored content produced in partnership with PreRoll-Er. While it follows High Times editorial standards for clarity and structure, it is part of a paid collaboration. Information about products, services, and operational approaches is provided by the sponsor and has not been independently verified by High Times.

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Legal cannabis promised legitimacy. Instead, many of the people who carried the culture through prohibition are being priced, regulated, and pushed out of the industry they helped build.

I am beyond angry. A lot of us are. People who have lived this industry are not slightly disappointed. Many of us are livid because cannabis is becoming exactly what we feared in America: legal enough for the government to collect from, expensive enough to push small businesses out, and controlled enough to reward the people who showed up after the danger passed.

America made room for cannabis before it made room for the people who built it. That is the part that still pisses me off. The biggest slap in the face is not just the law. It is the cultural disconnect itself.

There is a real divide in cannabis now. On one side are the people who risked their lives and freedom for the plant. They understood what cannabis meant before clean packaging and investor decks showed up. On the other side is a new generation of legal cannabis users and companies that only know the plant after the door opened.

I do not blame people for coming through the legal door. That is the door now. But let’s be honest about what happened.

All this “weed for the people” and “weed for the culture” talk starts to sound insulting when it comes from people who stayed away from cannabis until there was a safe way to make money from it. They stayed away when the cost of cannabis could be your freedom, your children, or your life during a robbery or turf dispute. Then they showed up when the danger dropped, befriended innovators, extracted the knowledge, and pushed some of those same people out once the value was clear.

And what were those people supposed to do, sue from the shadows? Meanwhile, many of the people who carried the real risk are still being treated like guests in a house they helped build. In real life, the line between legal and traditional cannabis is getting harder to see. Consumers know it. Operators know it. The culture knows it. But the government still talks about cannabis like it causes normal people to turn into murderers, criminals, and addicts.

In reality, I would argue cannabis turns more people into pacifists than criminals.

For people like me, cannabis was not a political talking point. It was life. It was how we found each other, trusted each other, and fed our families around a plant the government kept lying about. The first time I understood that was not in a boardroom. It was on the streets of Los Angeles, where people like me were not called operators.

We got called drug dealers.

I was naïve enough to think that President Obama admitting he inhaled meant the lying was almost over.

I was wrong.

Cannabis in California was still illegal enough to ruin your life, but I was young and dumb enough to believe being faster and smarter than the law could get me out of almost anything. Cannabis was not some idea people like me debated from a safe distance. It was rent, daily pressure, and survival.

We sold it before “legacy operator” became a respectable label. Police pressure was not something people discussed on panels. Getting caught could ruin your life before you had a chance to build one.

The Market Was Already There

The government did not create the cannabis market. It found one already alive and put a toll booth in front of it. That is the story people are starting to forget. The demand, culture, and people who knew the plant were already here. Legalization did not create value. It created a legal price of entry. A lot of us paid the entrance fee because a license felt like proof we were finally legitimate. Instead of watching for police lights, we became business owners watching fine print, hoping the next rule did not turn yesterday’s plan into tomorrow’s problem.

Legalization did not remove the pressure. It made the pressure more expensive. The old market was never as simple as people make it sound. Some people moved with discipline and respect. Some people cut corners and made life harder for everybody trying to do it right.

Both things are true. But the legal market still likes a clean villain. It acts like everyone without a license was the problem, when the truth is more uncomfortable.

I saw that same thing in prerolls. I built Puro during the shift from Prop 215 to Prop 64 because I saw a category that needed innovation if cannabis was ever going to become a respectable industry. Prerolls were everywhere, but most were packed with trim, mold, and flower nobody wanted to show in a jar.

That bothered me because I respected the plant in its purest form. People act like the legal industry invented innovation. It did not. A lot of that knowledge came from real risks, blowing up homes, trying to perfect BHO, or scorching concentrates with the first rosin presses made from hair straighteners.

Corporate America did not discover cannabis. It discovered value that other people had already created under pressure.

The Price Of Legitimacy

The country already lives with cannabis. The government is still acting confused. That is why federal progress can feel strange from the ground. When Washington moves an inch, people outside the industry expect operators to clap. But operators do not run businesses inside press releases. They wake up facing the same banks, landlords, and insurers that shaped their decisions yesterday.

Schedule III may finally admit what the culture already knew: cannabis has medical value. But the industry does not become free because Washington changed the category. Adult-use operators are still stuck in the same federal gray area. Interstate commerce does not open overnight. A state license still does not erase the federal shadow.

Progress with a leash on it is still a leash.

And the leash is not the same size for everybody.

Large operators can be in the room while the conversation is happening. Small operators usually hear about it when the bill shows up. Cannabis has entered the influence machine.

The New Pressure Looks Cleaner

The old pressure was easier to recognize: police lights, raids, court dates, shootouts. The new pressure comes dressed like business. The system does not have to raid you anymore. One labeling change can turn tens of thousands of dollars of paid packaging into trash overnight.

That is how bureaucracy picks winners. It rewards whoever can survive the mistake. I saw the same thing with capital in 2025. The money did not disappear because cannabis lost value. It pulled back because nobody wanted to guess how long uncertainty would last.

In investor rooms, nobody wanted the dream version anymore. They wanted to know if the business could survive the rules as they existed that morning. That is how federal uncertainty does its damage. It lets everybody sound responsible while the operator loses time, cash, and leverage. A lender asks for one more answer. An investor waits one more quarter. By the time everyone is done being careful, the operator is weak enough to become somebody else’s opportunity.

That is the part people leave out when they sell legalization like a clean win. The system does not have to tell small operators to leave. It can just make staying too expensive.

Survival Is Not Legalization

The most insulting part is still the character judgment. People talk about cannabis consumers and businesses like we do not have families, employees, payrolls, and communities watching us.

Alcohol gets the benefit of the doubt in America. Cannabis does not. Alcohol can sit at dinner tables, business events, and family parties without having to explain itself. Cannabis can be licensed, tested, tracked, taxed, and still get treated like it is one mistake away from proving the critics right.

Serious operators are not asking for cannabis to live without rules. Anything people consume should have standards. The issue is that cannabis can follow the rules and still pay a penalty for old suspicion. That suspicion is expensive. It shows up in rent, insurance, banking, contracts, and the constant need to prove you belong before you even get a chance to build momentum.

Cannabis does not need another speech. Operators need stable ground. The thing that wipes you out is not always a disaster. Sometimes it is one sentence in a lease or a tax bill that shows up before the cash does.

That is survival mode. Not legalization. Legalization was supposed to open the industry. Instead, it permitted too many operators to enter and then made staying too expensive. An industry built on arrests should not become an industry where only the protected survive.

Call it what it is: the same old punishment, dressed better. If the people who carried the risk are still fighting to stay in the industry they helped create, who is legalization actually serving?

This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.

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Trulieve becomes the first U.S. cannabis company to trade on the NYSE on June 10. To get through the door, it carved the recreational weed out of the company entirely.

Wall Street is letting in a U.S. weed company for the first time. Just not the recreational side of it.

Florida-based Trulieve said on June 5 that it will become the first U.S. plant-touching cannabis operator to list on a major American exchange. Canadian producers have traded on the Nasdaq and NYSE for years, as long as they keep their weed out of the U.S. No American operator that actually sells the plant here had cracked a senior U.S. exchange until now. Trulieve’s shares begin trading on the NYSE on June 10 under the ticker TRLV. The over-the-counter shares most investors have been stuck with, TCNNF, jumped about 20% on the news and are up roughly 42% this year.

Here is the part that the milestone headlines skate past. To qualify, Trulieve did not bring its whole business to the NYSE. It carved its recreational operations out into a separate entity called Harvest Enterprises and brought in an outside investor, Whitley Holding, with about $14.8 million for a 10% voting stake, enough to make the split real under accounting rules. What lists on the NYSE is the medical-only company. The adult-use weed that half the country can buy in a dispensary stays outside, in a box that converts back to Trulieve only if and when federal rules let recreational operators in.

Trulieve could pull this off because of what it owns. The company runs 206 medical dispensaries and controls as much as 40% of Florida’s medical market by some estimates, so the medical business stands on its own as an investment even with the recreational revenue stripped out.

The split is not just about exchange rules. It is also a tax play. A 1970s IRS provision known as 280E bars companies that sell Schedule I or II drugs from taking normal business deductions, which can push a cannabis operator’s effective tax rate as high as 70% against the standard 21%. The medical entity, now riding the reclassification, escapes that. The recreational side, still Schedule I, does not.

The Door Opened In April

None of this was possible a year ago. The Justice Department issued a final order in April to reclassify state-licensed medical cannabis to Schedule III, acting on an executive order Trump signed in December. That single move opened the exchange and the tax door at once, but only for the medical side. The DEA holds a hearing on June 29 to decide whether the reclassification should include recreational cannabis, too.

CEO Kim Rivers, who lobbied the administration hard for the change after Trulieve poured $150 million into a failed 2024 Florida legalization push, did not hide who she was thanking. “Common sense action by President Trump to reclassify medical marijuana to Schedule III paved the way for this historic milestone,” she said in a statement.

The rest of the industry is already sprinting. Curaleaf and Verano announced reverse stock splits this week to meet the NYSE’s minimum share price and follow Trulieve up. Robinhood added Trulieve, Green Thumb and Curaleaf to its platform. TerrAscend CEO Jason Wild called a shareholder meeting and said the uplisting question is “no longer a question of if. It’s a question of when.”

A Second Green Rush. Maybe?

If the June 29 hearing goes the industry’s way, this is the first inkling of a second green rush, with retail investors who have waited years for a real listing already pushing Trulieve to the top of WallStreetBets. Worth remembering how the first one ended, though. Canada’s Tilray, the poster child of the 2018 boom, has fallen more than 99% from its all-time high. A bell at the NYSE is a milestone, not a guarantee.

<p>The post A U.S. Weed Company Finally Cracked The NYSE. It Had To Leave The Recreational Pot Behind. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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From robot canopy scanners to algorithmic breeders to AI-powered dispensary counters, artificial intelligence is remaking cannabis at every level. The question nobody has fully answered: does this help the people who built the culture, or does it replace them?

Somewhere in Fredericton, New Brunswick, a robot is watching the weed grow.

It moves along cables strung above the canopy. Slowly, methodically scanning every leaf and bud site in an 86,000-square-foot cannabis facility owned by PURPLEFARM, one of Canada’s premier genetics enterprises. The machine is called the Spyder. It was built by Neatleaf, a Santa Cruz startup founded by Elmar Mair, a former head of perception at Google X. It never sleeps. Twenty-four hours a day, it generates millions of data points on plant height, chlorosis patterns, early signs of mildew, temperature differentials between air and leaf surface. Then it feeds everything into an artificial intelligence system that suggests actions to growers.

PURPLEFARM says yields have jumped 20 percent since the Spyder arrived.

To understand the scale of what that machine is doing, consider what it replaces. On the weekend this piece came together, the author visited some agronomic field trials for hemp varieties. A team of three or four technicians and agronomists collected fewer parameters than Spyder captures in a single square meter. That manual process took at least 30 minutes. You get the picture.

Across the American cannabis industry, from genetics labs to dispensary checkout counters, AI has moved from pitch decks into actual operations. The technology is monitoring grow rooms, predicting potency before harvest, automating compliance paperwork, and deciding when to text a customer about a sale. The question that hangs over all of it — the one that matters to growers, trimmers, budtenders and small-shop owners — is straightforward: does this help me, or does this replace me?

The answer turns out to be complicated. And far more interesting than the hype suggests.

Robots in the canopy

Cannabis cultivation has always been a data problem. Indoor grows require constant calibration of humidity, temperature, CO₂, light spectrum, irrigation and nutrients — variables that interact in nonlinear ways and shift with every strain and every room. A great grower holds all of this in their head. But even the best grower cannot be in every room, watching every plant, around the clock.

Neatleaf has deployed its Spyder in more than 30 facilities, with a waiting list that now includes berry producers. iAnthus brought the system into its New Jersey grow and reported reduced crop loss through early anomaly detection. At 22Red in Arizona, head of cultivation Stephen Hess described it as a way to escape the tyranny of manually cross-referencing dozens of environmental readings. Other players occupy different pieces of the same territory: AgEye Technologies develops spectral imaging for crop monitoring; Jushi Holdings has embedded machine learning into its entire building-management system; companies like iUNU and AEssenseGrows specialize in computer vision that detects pest infestations at stages invisible to the human eye.

Some cultivators have pushed further still, using AI-powered spectral imaging to measure cannabinoid potency directly on the plant and screen for diseases like Hop Latent Viroid. In November 2025, researchers at the University of Adelaide published a method combining hyperspectral leaf scanning with machine learning that predicted cannabinoid concentrations weeks before harvest with 94.74 percent accuracy.

Breeding by algorithm

Below the grow room, AI is beginning to reshape the genetic identity of cannabis itself. Breeding has always been slow work — pick parents, cross them, grow out thousands of seeds, phenotype the best, repeat over years. Machine learning compresses this by simulating potential crosses computationally before a single seed hits soil.

Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan and Renaissance Bioscience demonstrated that by feeding genetic markers, growth data and chemical assays into AI models, breeders can predict how combinations will influence cannabinoid content, terpene profiles and plant morphology. Companies like Phylos Bioscience and Front Range Biosciences have built their businesses around this approach.

The promise is extraordinary. The peril is equally real. Legal markets already incentivize a narrow band of traits — high THC, fast flowering, extraction-friendly architecture. AI could accelerate that genetic bottleneck, eroding the diversity that makes the plant adaptable and culturally rich. The monoculture problem that hollowed out corn and wheat genetics could arrive in cannabis on a compressed timeline, turbocharged by algorithms optimizing for quarterly earnings. California has recognized the stakes: the Department of Cannabis Control funded a study to catalog and preserve legacy cultivars. Whether the industry moves fast enough to protect those archives before the algorithms narrow the field remains an open question.

From the lab to the license

Between the harvest and the shelf, AI is making quieter but consequential inroads. On the processing floor, sensor-laden extraction equipment now monitors temperature, pressure and solvent ratios in real time. Machine learning models adjust parameters mid-run, maintaining consistent potency and terpene profiles across batches — turning what used to be one technician’s personal recipe into a continuously improving digital playbook. Robotic trimmers are getting smarter. Automated packaging lines sync with inventory systems. In the testing lab, algorithms trained on vast chemical databases help HPLC and gas chromatography systems identify cannabinoids faster and detect contaminants at levels below human perception.

Then there is compliance. Cannabis is among the most regulated industries in almost every state. Seed-to-sale tracking, testing mandates, labeling rules and sales reporting all vary by jurisdiction, change frequently and punish errors with fines or license revocation. CannabisRegulations.ai has trained a language model specifically on state cannabis statutes and enforcement actions, allowing operators to ask jurisdiction-specific questions and receive cited answers in seconds. Flowhub uses the tool when entering new markets. Prelude offers an AI-powered ERP that automates reporting and syncs with Metrc, the tracking system now running in 30 regulated markets. Solink provides AI video analytics that cross-reference POS data with camera footage to catch mis-weighing, unauthorized discounts and internal theft.

All of this — the autonomous robots, the algorithmic breeders, the compliance bots — paints a picture of an industry being remade by technology at every level. Depending on your disposition, it sounds either thrilling or terrifying. What it rarely sounds like is human.

What actually happened at the register

To get a more grounded view, the author called Rocco Del Priore. He is a computer scientist who dropped out of college with eight credits left, worked as an engineer at Apple and co-founded Sweed — a point-of-sale and retail platform that today powers hundreds of dispensaries for some of the largest cannabis companies in the United States, including Verano and Curaleaf. He has spent nearly nine years building technology for cannabis retail and is, by his own description, a pot guy. His company has an entire team dedicated to AI. He is exactly the kind of person who should be bullish on the technology’s transformative power. He kept undercutting the hype.

Sweed was among the first cannabis tech companies to pilot an AI recommendation engine at the point of sale, running a test in Arizona about two years ago. The early results caught Del Priore off guard.

“In the beginning, it wasn’t suggesting a whole lot of products that the customer wasn’t going to purchase anyway. But it was creating this really magical experience at the cash register.”

Rocco Del Priore, co-founder, Sweed

He described a returning customer walking up to the counter. The budtender pulls up their profile. Instantly, the system surfaces their usual order. The budtender says, “Welcome back. Blueberry or pear today?” Before anyone talks about upselling, something more fundamental happens: a better human interaction.

“I didn’t expect that. I thought the story was going to be about sexy sales numbers. But the budtenders were excited to have a better relationship with the customer.”

Rocco Del Priore, co-founder, Sweed

Meanwhile, the feature many in the industry had predicted would be the breakout — a guided AI tool that asks consumers how they want to feel and recommends products accordingly — fizzled. “Our lived experience did not match up with the case studies we were reading,” Del Priore said. “A small group of users engaged heavily. The vast majority didn’t interact with it at all.”

What moved the needle was something far less glamorous. Sweed built a feature called “smart sending” that uses AI to determine the optimal moment to deliver a marketing message to each individual customer, rather than blasting everyone at 2 p.m. The result: a 10 percent bump in ROI across every campaign that used it.

Del Priore had expected the opposite — the guided experience to be the headline, smart sending to be a footnote. The data reversed his assumptions.

The future is not ours to see

The tempting narrative about AI in cannabis is about consolidation — big companies deploying big technology to crush small operators. Del Priore thinks it could go the other way.

He asked for a picture of two businesses. A 150-store MSO with a four-person regional marketing team designing campaigns and building customer segmentation strategies. Then a three-store independent where one person — often the owner — handles purchasing, discounting, staffing and marketing alone. There is no way that solo operator matches the output of a dedicated enterprise team.

Unless AI does the work for them.

“If you give these people tools that will do a lot of this work, suddenly you could see a smaller chain marketing in a similar way to a larger enterprise-based chain. I think that could create a really interesting change in the ecosystem.”

Rocco Del Priore, co-founder, Sweed

He also described a near-future he called “proactive AI”: the system analyzes inventory, identifies a slow-moving SKU, cross-references it with the right customer cohort, drafts a promotional message and picks the optimal send time. The operator approves. “Instead of me going to the computer and saying, I would like you to do something,” he said, “imagine the computer coming at me and being like, ‘I think I should do something. Will you let me’?”

According to this optimistic view, AI in cannabis retail could function as a leveling mechanism — handing the analytical firepower of a Fortune 500 marketing department to a family-run dispensary in St. Paul.

425,000 workers and counting

The U.S. legal cannabis industry supports 425,002 full-time equivalent jobs, according to the 2025 Vangst Jobs Report. That figure dipped 3.4 percent from the prior year — even as retail sales grew to $30.1 billion. About 30 percent of those jobs sit in cultivation, 23 percent in retail, 17 percent in processing and packaging, and 30 percent in ancillary services. Cultivation and processing — roughly 200,000 positions — are the segments most directly in the path of automation, with entry-level roles like trimmers, harvesters and packaging-line workers first in line. By one estimate, between 60,000 and 90,000 positions face meaningful disruption over the next three to five years.

But Del Priore says the industry is already desperately short-staffed. “You go to any organization, small or large, and you ask them if they need more or less people,” he said, “and all of them are going to say more.” He attributes the shortage partly to the lack of mainstream software support caused by federal prohibition and partly to the industry’s expansion outpacing the supply of experienced talent. AI, in his view, fills gaps rather than eliminates positions.

“There’s a world in which those jobs are at risk. But the demand is so high right now that cannabis is unlikely to be impacted the way you might see software engineering.”

Rocco Del Priore, co-founder, Sweed

It is a plausible argument with a built-in expiration date. Whether it holds depends on two variables nobody can predict: the pace of legalization and the pace of AI development. If both accelerate simultaneously, his optimism stands. If the technology matures faster than the market expands, jobs will be lost. That dynamic is already visible in the year-over-year numbers.

The menu and the waiter

Near the end of the conversation, Del Priore offered an analogy worth sitting with. Imagine walking into a restaurant. You sit down, pick up the menu, read through all the dishes, narrow it to two choices. Then the waiter comes over and you ask: what do you think — the branzino or the chicken parm?

The technology is already good enough to monitor canopies, predict potency, automate compliance and sharpen marketing. It will get better. Jobs will shift. Genetic diversity will need defending. Consumers should be aware of the ever-increasing impact of algorithmic marketing on what they buy and why. And the question of what happens when algorithms start deciding which brands win deserves a serious answer.

Still, there might be a version of this future that serves the culture, the plant and the people who have built their lives around both.

We will be watching.

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The clinical evidence is real. The valuations are not. Compass Pathways: $560 million market cap, zero revenue. MindMed: up to $2 billion, zero revenue. Even Ozempic lost half its value with $49 billion in real sales. When this bubble pops, the casualties won’t be on Wall Street. They’ll be the patients this medicine was supposed to reach.

The clinical evidence for psychedelic-assisted therapy is real, it is growing, and it matters. In the past five years, rigorously designed trials have shown that psilocybin can produce rapid and durable reductions in depressive symptoms that conventional antidepressants often cannot match. 

A dose-response meta-analysis of randomized placebo-controlled trials published in the Journal of Affective Disorders confirmed short-term efficacy for major depressive disorder. A VA-funded pilot study found that 60% of military veterans with severe treatment-resistant depression met response criteria three weeks after a single 25 mg dose, with 40% still in remission at twelve weeks—in a population that had failed multiple prior treatments. 

A Phase 2 trial of COMP360 psilocybin for PTSD showed rapid, durable symptom improvement lasting up to 12 weeks, with no serious adverse events, offering a potential breakthrough in a field with just two FDA-approved medications and persistently high dropout rates from trauma-focused therapy.  

In Germany, the first compassionate-use psilocybin therapy program launched in 2026 for patients with treatment-resistant depression. In the Czech Republic, lawmakers approved therapeutic psilocybin use for severe depression. In New Zealand, the first authorized prescriber began administering clinical doses in 2025.

For people living with conditions that resist everything else in the pharmacological toolkit, psychedelic therapy represents a genuinely novel mechanism—one that works through neuroplasticity, through the disruption of rigid default-mode network patterns, through the creation of psychological flexibility that allows patients to process trauma and break free from depressive loops. 

The need for legal, regulated access to these therapies is not speculative. It is clinical. It is urgent. And it is precisely because these substances have so much potential that the financial ecosystem building up around them demands scrutiny—not to undermine the science, but to protect it.

The Gap Between Science and Spreadsheets

I’m curious about how big this market could actually get. I pulled market-size estimates from ten research firms as of early 2026. For the base year alone—what the psychedelic therapeutics market is supposedly worth right now—estimates ranged from $603 million (Fact.MR) to $4.51 billion (Data Bridge, for the U.S. alone). That’s a sevenfold disagreement about the present. 

The forward projections fan wider: $4.2 billion by 2030 (Grand View Research), $9.6 billion by 2032 (Coherent Market Insights), $11 billion by 2034 (Precedence Research), $12.3 billion by 2035 (Research Nester). A 2021 report from Data Bridge projected $6.86 billion by 2027. We’re in 2026. That number exists nowhere outside the PDF.

Meanwhile, the only functioning regulated psilocybin market in the United States—Oregon’s Psilocybin Services program, launched in 2023, has generated approximately $1.7 million in cumulative revenue over three years, while roughly a third of its licensed service centers have closed. The state had to tap $3.1 million from its general fund to keep the regulatory program operational. 

The Ozempic Check

I want to hold the psilocybin sector’s financial profile against a drug that worked commercially, clinically, at a global scale, and see what it teaches us about what separates market speculative behavior from real-life value.

Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide—the molecule behind Ozempic and Wegovy—is the most successful pharmaceutical story of the past decade. FDA approval for diabetes came in 2017 after extensive Phase 3 trials. Approval for obesity followed in 2021. Revenue went from $21.3 billion in 2021 to $48.6 billion in 2025. The semaglutide franchise alone generated roughly $33 billion last year. Net profits in 2024 were approximately $14.6 billion. The company is spending $9.5 billion this decade on new production capacity in a single Danish town.

This is what a pharmaceutical blockbuster looks like when the science is proven, the trials are complete, the FDA has approved the product, 38 million Americans are in the patient base, the reimbursement infrastructure exists, and the revenue is real. 

Even with all of that, Novo Nordisk’s stock dropped more than 55% from its 52-week high in the past year. Competition from Eli Lilly, pricing pressure from government negotiations, and market saturation among patients who can afford $1,000-a-month drugs deflated even this juggernaut. The company lowered its guidance four times in 2025.

If the most successful drug franchise of the 2020s can lose half its market value despite $49 billion in annual revenue, what exactly is supporting the valuations of psychedelic companies that have never generated a dollar of commercial revenue?

The Valuation Question

COMPASS Pathways: market cap of approximately $560 million. Trailing revenue: zero. Net loss: nearly $288 million. Operating expenses of approximately $157 million per year. Every analyst forecasts $0 revenue for 2026. 

MindMed (now Definium Therapeutics): market cap $1.5–2 billion. Revenue: zero. Quarterly net loss: $42.7 million. Cash runway into 2027 only if current burn rates hold. 

Atai Life Sciences merged with Beckley Psytech after a 40% single-day crash when a trial failed. Cybin, now Helus, secured $500 million in financing but has no product anywhere near market.

In October 2025, AbbVie completed its acquisition of Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals’ bretisilocin for up to $1.2 billion. Bretisilocin is a synthetic analog designed to retain psilocybin’s antidepressant mechanism while shortening and softening the psychedelic experience. It is, by design, a pill that Big Pharma can route through conventional channels—no facilitators, no service centers, no therapeutic relationship architecture.

Novo Nordisk’s success was built on a molecule backed by a decade of trials, regulatory approval, massive patient populations, and reimbursement infrastructure. AbbVie’s bet follows the same logic, but has nothing to do with psilocybin as the therapeutic community understands it. The question for the movement is whether the path to legalization and access runs through this kind of deal, or gets swallowed by it.

Compare this to cannabis at peak hype: Tilray’s 2018 market cap of $13.4 billion on $43 million in revenue was absurd. But there were revenues. A product was being sold to real people.

Too afraid of letting ancestral therapies lose, politicians, lobbyists, and regulators are making psilocybin climb the pharmaceutical Mount Everest when they should be allowing small producers to actually work with the substance in controlled humanized environments.

But what’s the point of creating the constraints necessary to form a unicorn that can bypass regulations with science if it’s only going to make millions of investors lose money? This looks like a trade for the few, losses for the many.

The cannabis movement taught us what happens when the people who write the rules are the people who profit from them: patients get priced out, small operators get crushed, communities of color absorb the costs of prohibition, and none of the benefits of legalization, and the plant’s therapeutic credibility gets buried.

In psychedelics, there’s an additional layer. Mazatec communities in Mexico have publicly rejected the commercialization of their ceremonial practices. Peru declared ayahuasca knowledge a cultural patrimony in 2008. Brazil restricted legitimate use to religious contexts. 

Meanwhile, corporate firms file patents on compounds derived from these very traditions—strategies that legal scholars have flagged as potentially covering practices in use for centuries. If legalization advances without benefit-sharing frameworks, without indigenous consent structures, and without market architectures that prevent the kind of consolidation that gutted cannabis, then the science’s promise will be captured before patients ever see it. That is not an anti-psychedelic position. It is the most pro-psychedelic position there is.

The Industry These Substances Deserve

A veteran with treatment-resistant depression who found remission after a single psilocybin session at a VA medical center: that is real. 

A PTSD patient in a COMP360 trial who engaged with traumatic material for the first time without retraumatization: that is real. 

A facilitator in Portland running a lean clinic at $900 a session and clearing $10,000 a month doing meaningful work: that is real. 

A multi-billion-dollar industry sustained by market research PDFs that disagree with each other by a factor of seven: that’s BS.

Stock valuations unmoored from any commercial activity: that’s BS. 

Lobbying infrastructure that precedes the market it claims to represent, and a $1.2 billion acquisition of a compound redesigned to bypass the very therapeutic model the movement promised: that’s BS.

Novo Nordisk built the greatest drug franchise of the decade on rigorous science and massive real-world demand, and still lost half its stock value in a year. The psychedelic sector lacks that foundation.

Science is too important to be gambled on a winner-takes-all bet. 

The patients who need these therapies are too important to be overlooked. The path forward is better legalization: evidence-governed, community-accountable, structurally resistant to capture, and honest about what we know and what we don’t. If the cannabis experience taught us anything, it’s that the worst thing that can happen to a medicine is for it to become a financial instrument before it becomes accessible to the people who need it.

This article is reported analysis based on publicly available clinical trial data, SEC filings, institutional market research and on-the-record journalism. Financial figures reflect information available at time of publication and are subject to change. High Times does not endorse or encourage illegal activity of any kind.

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The Mobb Deep co-founder and Queensbridge native opens The Bridge in Astoria this weekend, with The Alchemist, Funk Flex and Kid Capri on the bill. He calls it ownership, not an endorsement.

Havoc has repped Queens for more than three decades. This weekend, he plants a flag in it. The Mobb Deep co-founder and Queensbridge native opens The Bridge, a licensed adult-use cannabis dispensary at 25-15 Broadway in Astoria, with a grand opening weekend on June 6 and 7.

What separates it from the usual celebrity cannabis move is the structure. Plenty of artists lend a name to a strain or sign a licensing deal. Havoc is an owner, investing directly in one of the country’s fastest-growing legal markets, in the borough that raised him.

“Hip-hop gave me a platform, but ownership creates a legacy,” Havoc said in a statement. “The Bridge is about building something lasting in the community that raised me.”

The opening doubles as a New York hip-hop reunion. Producer The Alchemist and radio fixture Funk Flex headline Saturday’s reception, with The Alchemist scheduled from 4 to 5 p.m. and Funk Flex from 5 to 7. Kid Capri joins the public opening on Sunday, when doors open at 11 a.m.

The move lands where New York’s market keeps heading, with legacy culture and licensed business colliding in real time. For a borough that helped build East Coast rap, a Queensbridge legend behind the counter of a legal shop is about as full-circle as the new market gets.

Watch Our Conversation With Havoc

High Times sat down with Havoc earlier this year. Watch that conversation below.

<p>The post Mobb Deep’s Havoc Is Opening A Dispensary In Queens. The Alchemist, Funk Flex And Kid Capri Are Coming Through. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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