How Montana built a legal cannabis market from a thin medical marijuana law, federal raids, ballot fights, and two decades of stubborn local pressure. 

“There’s marijuana stores in Montana?”

When it comes to Famous Last Words, those were mine.

It was October of 2009. I was sitting on my usual stool at the coffee counter at the Merc, a coffee shop on Last Chance Gulch in Helena, Montana. My stool was the first one on the short end where the counter jack-knifed. I eavesdropped on a conversation going on kitty-corner from me.

That morning in 2009, I had been a lobbyist for 18 years. I was also a nerd.

The Appointment That Opened The Door

Nonfiction is my go-to genre when I read. After graduate school and two liberal arts master’s degrees, I took to reading cellular biology, evolution, books on politics and culture, and, importantly, systems theory and how to build systems.

This is why when I jumped into that conversation at the coffee counter and learned about the relatively simple process of getting approved to use medical marijuana in Montana, questions started taking form in the interdisciplinary mists of my mind.

Is it real? I wondered. “Medical” marijuana? How does it work biochemically? Who’s involved? What does the law say? What words on a page made a marijuana store not a crime? What state agency oversees it?

“Text me his number,” I said to my coffee counter compadre as some unseen cosmic page turned. “The doctor.”

I left the coffee shop the Tarot’s Fool.

I was Eve. Pot was the apple.

Legal marijuana, huh? Sure. I’ll bite.

My appointment for a medical marijuana card was a flirtatious little chat in a strip mall clinic in Missoula with a doctor I’ll call Dr. Fleck. Flirtatious on the doc’s end because flirting was Dr. Fleck’s M.O. On my end, I wanted to lure him into interest. Not interest in me. Interest in a conversation.

Dr. Fleck held up to the glow of a high window the x-ray of my broken foot from two years earlier that I had brought along, my evidence and justification for the marijuana that might grace me with therapeutic solace.

“That’s not going to do it,” Fleck said.

He laughed, amused with my discomfort and with himself.

Awkward.

Fleck started in, then, talking about herbal remedies for pain, such as turmeric and willow bark.

“Have you ever seen Finding Nemo?” he said, interrupting his own spiel.

He sat in a cloth swivel chair with his back to the desk. Just a small lamp behind him lit the room. Our knees were close enough that he could lean over if he wanted to and examine something he thought he should shine a light on.

“Yeah.”

I’d seen it.

“I’ve watched it a million times with my son,” he said, a New York accent. “Remember the seagulls?” he said. “‘Mine, mine, mine.’”

He imitated the high-pitched shrieks from the gulls in the cartoon as they scuffled over Cheetos.

“That’s what I always think is going on in people’s heads when I tell them about this stuff,” he said, referring to the natural remedies. “Sign, sign, sign,” he said, again with the high-pitched gull shriek.

He signed. I became the 5,005th medical marijuana patient in Montana.

Fleck walked me out from the dimly lit room to the beige-faded waiting area where two people sat waiting to audition for their get-out-of-pot-jail-free card. I asked Fleck for his business card. He wrote his cell on it.

Two weeks later, I rang him up, and we set up a lunch meet at the Bozeman Food Co-op, a lunch that stretched into hours.

A Crash Course In Cannabinoids

In the cafeteria-style upstairs, electricity zipped and zapped between us. Fleck didn’t ask before pulling my notebook in front of him and taking my pen from my hand. He drew pictures of cells, molecules, and receptors. He spoke of biochemical cascades.

Sitting by windows looking out at the Ashley Furniture across the street against the backdrop of the Gallatin range, Fleck told me about his Ph.D. chemist who ran Fleck’s marijuana testing lab, a lab that answered quantitatively which weed was the best, if potency were the name of the game.

Lunch was three hours of the gratifying sizzle of intellectual heat. Fleck recommended two books, The Science of Marijuana and Understanding Marijuana, both of which I read in the weeks to come. But I got my Cannabinoid System 101 that afternoon at the Bozeman Food Co-op.

I love a story told in molecules because I love the truth.

Cannabinoids. I understood the basics of how they worked before I could reliably pronounce the word. I learned our bodies make cannabinoids. I learned that laboratories manufacture cannabinoids to use in pharmaceuticals, such as Marinol. A plant contained cannabinoids, too. Cannabis, otherwise known as marijuana.

These cannabinoids could plug into receptors that float on the surface of some cells. Cannabinoid receptors were found in neural pathways that transmit pain information to the central nervous system. The female reproductive system: jammed with them. They are found on white blood cells.

Together, the cannabinoids our bodies make and their receptors make up the human cannabinoid system.

In the following weeks, I looked deeper into the subject and learned that all mammals have cannabinoid systems. All creatures do, except insects. Sea squirts appear to have evolved a cannabinoid system first, approximately 600 million years ago. Evolution selected for cannabinoid systems. We know that because almost everything has one.

A cannabinoid system must make living here, on this planet, easier, or even possible. That’s why life cultivates certain mutations, such as fins, eyes, or bigger brains. They’re useful, or at least once were. Why would the cannabinoid system be different?

It was real, I thought. Marijuana was, or could be, medical.

The rim of the rabbit hole was not a circle, but a spiral, and down I rode into the biochemical soup of medical marijuana science. I rode it down. I rode it east, rode it east to New Hampshire.

Rock ’N’ Roll In A Lab Coat

Six months later, in April 2010, I’m one of four people in a Caddy. I’m in the back seat behind the driver. I’ll call him North Carolina.

Cruising across a New Hampshire toll bridge heading for a restaurant whose name I don’t remember, North Carolina is telling a story about the first time he got high in a carload of teenagers and their struggle to navigate a fast-food drive-thru.

The Caddy approached the exact-change-only toll booth. He fired his coins through his open car window. They hit the back wall of the metal mouth and bank-shotted down into its gullet.

“You’ve come a long way with drive-thrus, kid,” I said.

I catch North Carolina’s baby blues in the rearview.

We met in a loud and crowded hotel lobby only hours earlier. He touched my arm and introduced himself.

We were both attending a medical marijuana science conference sponsored by Americans for Safe Access. He said he had come to “see about the future.” We strolled the hotel halls of the venue, and he told me his mother was from a clan outside of Asheville that had serviced the marijuana market there for generations.

Fleck rode on the passenger side up front. He passed a Ziploc over the seat to the woman sitting behind him and next to me, a Filipino woman with round, brown eyes and a smart, straight-forward manner who was from Humboldt County, California. She was interested in testing labs, like Fleck’s. She takes the Ziploc from Fleck and examines the contents. North Carolina’s weed was uncured.

Other than Fleck, we are not a representative subset of the attendees, all the white-coated doctors and Ph.D.s. However, like them, we were nerd-giddy and mesmerized by the potential of the medical application of pot and the political and economic implications of that.

The scene was rock ’n’ roll in a lab coat. Grateful Dead neckties.

For hours that day, I sat at my table round with its white tablecloth and pitchers of ice water while scientists and physicians took turns behind a podium at the front of the hotel conference room talking about research, about cancer, PTSD, seizures, cannabinoids, and the body’s ability to change.

Healing entails the ability to change.

“Drive,” Melissa Ferrick’s pole-dancing, strip-beat song, pumped through the Caddy’s speakers. I felt a path forming beneath me, an arrow sharpening to a point.

I’ll use the cliché: I felt alive.

That night, I could see.

Change.

From Medical Program To Market

After I learned the basic science, it’s real, I dove into the Montana industry structure that was self-organizing in the state. I looked at it in relation to what the law said in black and white.

The law was thin, a citizens’ initiative aimed at providing a modest allowance for those sick and suffering who could benefit from cannabis, and an allowance, too, for the Good Samaritans who would grow it for them.

It wasn’t a regulatory system. There were no regulators. But the language allowed for legal demand and legal supply. It was called the Medical Marijuana “Program.” But it was a market.

In October of 2009, five years after the citizens’ initiative allowing for medical marijuana in Montana passed, I became the 5,005th registered cardholder. One year later, there were more than 20,000. There were more than 4,000 “caregivers” registered with the state to provide marijuana to these cardholders.

The expectation was that in the 2011 legislature, law would get laid down to regulate the market. I was in the game now, something I hadn’t intended when I uttered those famous last words. But I am a lobbyist, and creating a regulatory system from near scratch sounded like an intellectually exciting and challenging endeavor.

But there were other agendas at play in 2011, including one of the biggest federal cannabis enforcement actions Montana had seen.

That March, mid-legislative session, the DEA executed 26 warrants in a choreographed blitz hitting cannabis business locations throughout the state. The legislature pointed to this as evidence of a problem out of control and passed legislation that was a de facto repeal and the undoing of the burgeoning market.

The Raids, The Lawsuit, And The Long Game

This is when the Montana Cannabis Industry Association stepped up. Shortly after the legislature adjourned, they filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction of key provisions of the new law. The case went to the Montana Supreme Court twice over five years and cost more than $800,000, every penny coming from inside the state. There was no national group stepping up to help Montana.

Key provisions were held at bay, such as not being able to get paid for providing medical marijuana. But many other provisions did go into effect during those five years, such as mandated vertical integration.

For five years, the MTCIA shoveled money into a constitutional lawyer’s pocket and kept the doors open. But in 2016, the Court was slated to rule against the state’s cannabis industry. A new citizens’ initiative would be necessary to keep the doors open.

There had been businesses operating in the state for a decade now, through the lawless era, through the federal raids, under the burden of the 2011 legislation, burdensome even with provisions enjoined by the Court. Montana wasn’t starting from scratch. It had to build out from the onerous, problematic law in a way that created change without screwing the businesses that had been toughing it out.

This is where I came back in.

Over the next 10 years, from the 2016 new medical marijuana citizens’ initiative to an adult-use citizens’ initiative in 2020, and seven pieces of regulatory legislation along the way, a robust cannabis market was strategically built amid the dozens of battles with prohibitionists, bad actors, and the carpetbaggers that are part and parcel of the marijuana politics game.

The MTCIA’s aim was a stable and dynamic system, the capacity to support competition and business growth with guardrails, laws, and rules that gave those who built the road the opportunity to drive on it.

The MTCIA had then, and has always had, a membership makeup that included the small to the very largest, which meant their mission was to create a market of business model options, as opposed to using political muscle to cream one kind of business and give advantage to others based in political gamesmanship and against the interests of the customer.

Large always has advantages over small. Location, location, location is still gospel. Timing is often destiny. These things cannot be avoided. But what can be purposefully crafted is whether shifts in an evolving law occur incrementally or dramatically, whether businesses have the time to adapt to and meet more complex demands, and whether changes in the law reward those who have been following it or those who violate it.

Montana’s Industry Incubator

State cannabis laws, generally speaking, have been launched in one of two ways. Some states implement a complete regulatory regime before a single license application is received or a single gram is sold. Other state industry structures hatch from loose Good Samaritan models that never anticipated full-fledged markets.

This second model tended to occur more often in the early-adopting states, such as Montana. These states fathomed medical marijuana “programs,” not marijuana markets.

In the early days of legal cannabis in Montana, there were paltry barriers to entry into the cannabis game. No giant sack of dough required. No lawyers, accountants, or insurance guys in suits needed to get the ball rolling.

Can you grow weed? Can you stick it in a baggie? No different than being a college campus weed slinger except that you’re registered with the state and told you can have a given number of plants per person with medical marijuana cards who sign up for your service, your service, which is a product.

Buying and selling. Demand and supply.

Over 20 years, businesses in Montana have grown from baggies sold from living rooms to a complex, regulated, traced, tracked, and tested system, a steep learning curve, but doable.

In 2026, MTCIA membership includes the two largest cannabis businesses by dispensary numbers in the state. Membership also includes small-craft operators who are still holding their own in a highly saturated market. Mid-size family-owned businesses with one to five dispensaries are the strong center of membership and are businesses being passed down to the next generation.

The regulatory march led by the MTCIA has been one of providing structure to chaos without fixing the game or undermining the dynamism that drives a robust market. The structure of the Montana market has been designed to drive quality. Even large businesses in Montana grew from craft growers.

The ability of craft growers to persevere still creates pressure on large companies to pay mind to quality. Big companies pressure small businesses to keep prices as low as they can manage.

Customers win.

The MTCIA tagline is “growing good in Montana,” and that is precisely what the MTCIA has done as an organization.

Growing relief for critically ill people. Growing public health and safety guardrails. Growing jobs. Growing businesses. Growing state revenue. Growing good weed.

The MTCIA tried to make the American story of industry real, where a regular person can take a risk, take a chance, work hard, and create prosperity. The competition in Montana is fierce. Quality is top-notch because the market has been designed to optimize for quality and price.

It wasn’t chance. It wasn’t an accident. It was a consciously constructed industry incubator. It’s been a long game.

Regulated Yet Untamed

The principle of dynamic equilibrium has quietly shaped the Montana cannabis law. Enough structure to hold together. Enough free energy to allow for real competition and to evolve.

Some state markets launched with rigid parameters and high financial barriers to entry. Businesses need stability, but Montana knows that in the world of cannabis, one must also stay nimble.

In 2010, there were 4,000 people registered with the state as selling marijuana. In 2026, there are around 230 license holders with between 1,100 and 1,200 location licenses, about half of which are dispensaries.

Like the West itself, Montana’s legal cannabis market was built by outlaws, entrepreneurs, and adventurers. Montana aims to be known for its vibrant, high-quality market that meets the needs of the great variety of people who reside here and the millions who pass through to take in the beauty of a state that wants to grow within its boundaries while remaining untamed.

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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Shannon Cloud’s daughter has been having seizures her whole life. She’s twenty years old, registered in Georgia’s medical cannabis program, and according to her mother, Senate Bill 220 — the “Putting Georgia’s Patients First Act” — represents the kind of flexibility that could finally let her doctors find a THC:CBD combination that actually works.

It’s been years in the making. And on May 12, 2026, Governor Brian Kemp signed it into law anyway — despite a group of physicians sending him a letter asking him to kill it. The claims in that letter deserve a much closer look than they’ve gotten. 

“It allows more flexibility for patients and doctors to access what’s really going to work for them,” Cloud told WABE, “taking away the really tight restrictions.”

Before Kemp signed SB220, a group of physicians had sent him a letter asking him to kill it — and the claims in that letter deserve a much closer look than they’ve gotten.

The Letter, and What It Actually Says

The letter, authored by psychiatrist Dr. Karen Drexler and signed by fellow physician Dr. Elizabeth McCord, among others, makes some incredibly bold claims.

It states that SB 220 would “authorize high-risk cannabis products, such as vapes and concentrates, that have no demonstrated safety or benefit for any medical condition” and warns of increased risks of “psychosis, addiction, seizures, heart attacks, cognitive impairment, and other serious health harms.”

It also frames the bill’s possession limit—12,000 milligrams of THC—as “the equivalent of more than 1,700 marijuana joints,” a number designed to strike worry and/or fear into anyone who is on the fence about medical marijuana.

But let’s take a look at these one at a time.

“No Demonstrated Safety or Benefit” — Says Who?

The claim that vaporized cannabis has no demonstrated safety or benefit for any medical condition is not supported by peer-reviewed literature, despite being stated in a letter to a sitting governor. 

A 2024 peer-reviewed paper published in Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research—a clinical review developed by physicians at the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto—specifically examined cannabis vaporization as a medical delivery method. 

Their study found that it is appropriate for patients requiring fast-acting administration, with dried cannabis vaporizers and metered-dose inhalers presenting the lowest safety risk profile. 

Nobody writing this paper was side-eyeing vaporization as a delivery method. It treats it as a clinical tool that requires proper patient guidance, which is exactly what a functioning medical program with licensed dispensaries and physician oversight is designed to provide.

A meta-analysis of 15 randomized controlled trials found that patients using cannabinoids were significantly more likely to achieve meaningful pain reduction than those who didn’t. 

The American College of Physicians has published best practice guidance for clinicians on cannabis use for chronic pain management. Plus, the FDA has approved inhaled medications as a delivery method for decades.

The letter’s claim that cannabis poses a heart attack risk is also worth examining directly. 

A University of Colorado study analyzing nearly 1.3 million hospital records found that cannabis consumers were less likely to go into shock after a cardiac event and less likely to die from complications. 

That contrasts with the risks described in the letter. . The research is far from settled, but ‘increased risk of heart attacks’ is not what the existing literature consistently shows.

News coverage of the letter did not reference any data, studies, or citations to support its claims. 

1,700 Joints: A Number That Tells You More About the Argument Than the Bill

The “1,700 joints” figure is where the framing of the letter becomes clearer. 

Twelve thousand milligrams sounds alarming until you understand what it represents: a possession limit, not a dose. It’s the maximum amount a registered patient can have on hand at one time, not what they’re expected to consume in a sitting, a day, or even a week or month. 

The math behind “1,700 joints” assumes an average joint contains roughly seven milligrams of THC, and then presents the total as if patients are expected to smoke all of it immediately.

By that logic, a standard Costco bottle of extra-strength acetaminophen (roughly 400 tablets at 500mg each) could be framed as containing “enough Tylenol for 200,000 milligrams of acetaminophen.” 

The number is technically derived from real math. It’s also incompletely measured as a safety argument.

Georgia’s program requires physician authorization. Patients are registered. Dispensaries are licensed and regulated. 

The possession limit exists so patients with serious chronic conditions like multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, PTSD, and intractable pain can maintain an adequate supply without making repeated trips to a dispensary. 

That’s not a loophole. That’s how medical programs work.

The Playbook Is Familiar

Dr. Drexler’s primary evidence, as shared with WSB-TV, is personal: her husband’s uncle was a long-term cannabis user who developed delusions in his fifties, eventually attempting to set his house on fire. She says she’s “convinced, as a psychiatrist, that schizophrenia doesn’t start in one’s 50s, that this was cannabis-induced.”

That’s a tragedy. It’s also an anecdote being used to support broader claims about medical cannabis policy. 

There is legitimate scientific literature on cannabis and psychosis risk, particularly around high-potency use in adolescents and individuals with genetic predispositions to psychotic disorders. 

That research is real and worth discussing, but it’s not being ignored by any means. And the picture is considerably more nuanced than the letter suggests. 

Research out of Germany suggests CBD may have therapeutic potential for schizophrenia, with some studies comparing its effects to antipsychotic medications with fewer side effects, which is relevant context, considering the letter conflates THC and CBD under a single “cannabis causes psychosis” umbrella. 

The distinction matters in a clinical setting, and a well-regulated medical program is precisely where it is made.

What the letter offers instead of this nuance is sweeping declarative language— “no demonstrated safety or benefit,” “high-risk,” “serious health harms” —again, with no citations and no acknowledgment of the extensive literature pointing in the other direction.

This is not a new playbook. It’s the same one that the opposition has been using to block cannabis access for decades: alarming language, a focus on worst-case scenarios without broader context, and the rhetorical cover of “patient safety.” 

Invoke psychosis. Deploy a large scary number. Avoid the peer-reviewed literature that complicates the picture. Repeat. 

What Patients Are Actually Living With

Yolanda Bennett, a registered Georgia medical cannabis patient and member of the Georgia Medical Cannabis Society, testified before the Georgia House Judiciary Committee earlier this year with words that cut through all of it: “We are already sick and we’re tired.” 

She was speaking to the daily reality of navigating a program so restrictive that patients routinely get stopped and questioned by law enforcement. 

It’s not their fault that their legal medicine is indistinguishable by smell from illegal marijuana. Just existing as a patient in Georgia — legally, doing everything right — creates a burden that medical marijuana patients in the other 40 states with functioning medical programs never have to think about.

The Georgia Medical Cannabis Commission’s own 2026 annual report documented what patients told them about the current program: they didn’t even understand what they were being offered. 

Patients said that when they heard “low THC oil” they assumed it was a lower-quality product, a hemp product, or something that wouldn’t actually help them — and they went without. 

Not because the medicine didn’t exist. Because the program was built in a way that made it invisible and inaccessible to the people it was supposed to serve.

Mississippi and Louisiana — both smaller, both with their own complicated histories on cannabis — each serve approximately 50,000 registered medical patients. Georgia, with a population of 11.3 million, has 34,500. 

That’s the lowest adoption rate of any medical cannabis program in the country, in a state where two-thirds of residents support legalization.

Senate sponsor Matt Brass — who is also a physician — said it plainly: “For the patients that this program is designed to serve, it’s not always worked well enough.” 

That’s not an activist talking — that’s the doctor who wrote the bill. 

When Kemp signed the bill, he seemed to agree — stating in his signing remarks, “I also recognize that for some patients, medical cannabis provides significant relief to symptoms that would otherwise go untreated or would be treated with even more harmful opioids.” 

Protecting patients — in a state where families have faced criminal charges for treating a child’s seizures with the only thing that worked, a registered patient can’t carry her medicine without bracing for a police stop, and the state’s own commission reports patients walking away from the program because they didn’t know “low THC oil” was the real thing — that doesn’t look like a veto. 

It looks like finally giving this program the tools to function like one for the first time in the almost 10 years it’s been around.

One small but important note for patients eager to access new high-potency products: the Georgia Access to Medical Cannabis Commission has until January 1, 2027, to finalize testing and labeling regulations for the new formats.

Kemp signed SB 220 quietly on May 12th — no fanfare, no press conference, just a signature and a statement. Exactly how anyone paying attention might have predicted it would end. 

The doctors’ letter didn’t stop it. The “1,700 joints” math didn’t stop it. The anecdotes dressed up as evidence didn’t stop it. 

Georgia’s patients finally have a medical cannabis program that functions like one — and the clock the opposition was counting on ran out. 

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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Lukas Gilkey spent his early twenties intercepting drug shipments for the U.S. Coast Guard. He watched the war on drugs fail in real time. So he came home to Texas and built HomeTown Hero, a hemp company employing 150 people in a state where marijuana is still largely illegal. Now Washington is moving to ban what he built.

Lukas Gilkey’s path into cannabis began in the Caribbean Sea, in the early 2000s, as part of a U.S. Coast Guard counter-narcotics unit operating across international waters. He was about twenty years old at the time, assigned to intercept vessels suspected of transporting drugs moving north through Central America and Mexico.

Those operations placed him inside one of the most active corridors of the global drug trade. Boats were stopped, searched and dismantled to find cargo that would justify the political narratives built around enforcement, along with the public funding that continued to flow through them.

The work exposed him to trafficking and anti-narcotics logistics, and also to the broader illogical structure of enforcement.

“The things that I saw and just everything that came from the war on drugs was just completely idiotic.”

Lukas Gilkey, founder, HomeTown Hero

The conclusion came from repeated observation: interdictions did not appear to reduce the underlying flow of drugs. They were simply absorbed into it.

“Every time we busted it, they would just — they could theoretically just raise the price on the street and make the money back. It wasn’t a big deal.”

Lukas Gilkey, founder, HomeTown Hero

One episode remained particularly clear. Gilkey’s unit stopped a fishing vessel off the Mexican coast. While his team was searching it, another armed group arrived — locked and loaded, heavily equipped, organized and not part of their operation. A colleague reached for his 9mm. “Put that away, man.” They were largely overpowered, somewhere in the open sea. Then the low-level narcos on the fishing boat, who had been calm, began reacting. They went from wary to crying and begging for the U.S. Coast Guard to detain them.

The intercepting boat was operated by the Mexican naval forces. Gilkey recalls that the Coast Guard unit handed the vessel over and left.

After that episode, Gilkey decided it was enough. Enforcement, as it was structured, was not addressing the conditions that sustained the drug trade. It was causing more harm than it reduced.

It’s not a loop but a lifeline

After leaving the military, Gilkey moved into marketing, working in Los Angeles before returning to Texas. In 2015, he launched a headshop distribution company supplying retail stores in a state where marijuana remained illegal.

The turning point came with the 2018 Farm Bill. Hemp, defined as cannabis containing no more than 0.3% delta-9 THC by dry weight, became federally legal. That definition created a new category of cannabis operating under a different regulatory structure than marijuana. Gilkey moved into that space quickly. By 2019, his company was producing hemp-derived products, eventually becoming HomeTown Hero, the Texas-based company he now runs, with operations across manufacturing, distribution and retail. Today it employs roughly 150 people.

The model depends on how THC is measured. A detail — percentage by weight — allowed for products that remained technically compliant while still producing psychoactive effects. From there, a broader system emerged where hemp products could be sold online, shipped across state lines and processed through standard financial infrastructure. Many of the regulatory barriers that apply to marijuana — federal prohibition, DEA oversight, state licensing systems — do not apply in the same way to hemp.

“In the hemp industry you can take credit cards, ship products to your house legally. And as a user, you don’t have to be on a list.”

Lukas Gilkey, founder, HomeTown Hero

Two parallel cannabis markets now exist in the United States. One federally legal, scalable and relatively accessible. The other, state-legal marijuana, fragmented by nature, debt-dependent and still federally prohibited.

The Texas madness

The divergence between hemp and marijuana becomes particularly visible in Texas. The state’s Compassionate Use Program remains one of the most tightly constrained medical cannabis systems in the country, even after recent expansions. Access is limited to a defined list of qualifying conditions established in statute. Products are capped at low THC levels, with no legal access to smokable flower. Distribution is highly concentrated, with a small number of licensed organizations serving a large and geographically dispersed patient base.

Hemp, by contrast, has enabled a much broader market to emerge. According to the Whitney Economics report, the hemp-derived cannabinoid industry in Texas generates approximately $5.5 billion in revenue, with retail alone accounting for over $4.3 billion.

The broader footprint includes more than 53,000 jobs, around $2.1 billion in wages annually and roughly $267 million in tax revenue to the state. These figures help explain why hemp has become a central part of the cannabis economy in Texas, filling demand that the existing medical system does not meet while reaching an adult-use market that remains largely forbidden in the state.

That explosive growth has triggered a policy response — though not the one you might expect. Several states have moved to restrict or ban intoxicating hemp-derived cannabinoids, particularly delta-8 and hemp-derived delta-9 products. These efforts are often framed around safety and regulatory consistency, but they also align with the interests of licensed marijuana operators facing competition from a less regulated sector.

“You can’t exist in the California market without investors. It’s not profitable. But you can actually run a good business based on hemp products — you don’t need investors, and thousands of people have done it.”

Lukas Gilkey, founder, HomeTown Hero

Now, with the clock ticking, a federal ban set to take effect in November 2026 threatens an industry that, in Texas alone, supports more than 53,000 jobs and billions in economic activity. As every drug economist knows, restrictions on legal supply do not eliminate demand.

One direction or two

The bizarre logic Gilkey encountered at sea — enforcement reshaping markets in ways that make them barely recognizable — reappears in his view of current cannabis policy. Hemp and marijuana now operate as parallel systems with overlapping products and competing regulatory frameworks. The expansion of hemp has introduced a structural conflict the industry has not resolved.

“They’ve now turned into those people.”

Lukas Gilkey, founder, HomeTown Hero

The reference is to segments of the marijuana industry that now support restrictions on hemp-derived products — the same industry that spent decades arguing against prohibition. The disagreement reflects conflicting views on who can participate in the cannabis market, under what conditions and at what cost. As Gilkey sees it, hemp lowers entry barriers and expands access. Marijuana, as currently structured, concentrates participation among licensed operators with sufficient capital to navigate the system.

At the same time, the boundary between the two is beginning to shift. Some large marijuana companies have been incorporating hemp-derived products into their portfolios for years, using federal legality to reach consumers beyond state-regulated systems.

“If all the marijuana companies start doing hemp with us, that completely shifts the paradigm.”

Lukas Gilkey, founder, HomeTown Hero

Regulatory decisions at both the state and federal level will determine whether hemp remains a broad entry point into cannabis or becomes a narrowed category under tighter control. Gilkey is directly engaged in that process, spending significantly on lobbyists and lawyers alongside other hemp operators. But large cannabis companies, despite operating under tight margins or heavy debt loads, also have deep pockets and significant political influence.

Meanwhile, the business continues to operate, thriving in uncertainty.

“I think Jack Herer was right. Hemp is the future of cannabis in the U.S., and it’s the path forward.”

Lukas Gilkey, founder, HomeTown Hero

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You can fly with medical cannabis now. Sort of. The TSA’s “What Can I Bring?” tool added medical marijuana as a permitted item the day before Schedule III took effect. The catch is the page that’s supposed to tell you the rules. It’s blank.

Search “marijuana” in the TSA’s What Can I Bring tool today and you get one result: Medical Marijuana. Carry-on bags: Yes (Special Instructions). Checked bags: Yes (Special Instructions). The page was last updated on April 27, the day before Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s narrow rescheduling order took effect.

For the first time since Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, federal law treats some cannabis as something other than Schedule I contraband at a TSA checkpoint. That is news. The catch is in the parentheses. TSA labels it “Special Instructions” without writing any.

The change was first flagged by Black Cannabis Magazine.

What’s actually different

Two specific things. The page used to open with a paragraph explaining that marijuana is illegal under federal law. That paragraph is gone. And the agency’s standing search-disclaimer language, which for years told travelers that TSA officers do not search for “marijuana or other illegal drugs,” now just says “illegal drugs.” One word removed. The page no longer names cannabis as something officers aren’t looking for, because under the new federal posture, some of it isn’t illegal.

Everything else on the page is boilerplate. The screening procedures language. The standing warning that any illegal substance discovered during screening gets referred to law enforcement. The disclaimer that the final decision rests with the officer. None of that is new. None of it tells you what the Special Instructions are.

Who actually qualifies

This is where the news gets narrower than the headlines suggest. The April 28 order didn’t reschedule marijuana. It rescheduled two specific categories: FDA-approved drugs containing cannabis derivatives (Epidiolex, Marinol, Syndros, Cesamet), and marijuana products regulated under a qualifying state-issued medical license.

Translation: a state-licensed Florida medical product is now Schedule III. A recreational eighth from California is still Schedule I. A prescription bottle of Marinol from a CVS is now Schedule III. An eighth from a medical dispensary in a state without a functioning medical program is still Schedule I, no matter what the dispensary’s label says. The legal status of the cannabis in your bag now depends on its paperwork.

‘Special Instructions’ usually means something

TSA uses the “Special Instructions” designation for items permitted under certain rules. Firearms are Special Instructions: checked bags only, unloaded, locked container, declared at the counter. Lithium batteries are Special Instructions: carry-on only, under a defined watt-hour limit, terminals protected. Oversized medical liquids are Special Instructions: declared at screening, additional inspection, documentation may be requested.

For each of those, there’s a page. Or a linked PDF. Or a sentence somewhere that tells the traveler what the rules are. For medical marijuana, that page doesn’t exist yet. The category is labeled. The rules are not.

The checkpoint hasn’t changed

The standing referral language is still on the page. A TSA officer who finds cannabis during screening can still kick it to local law enforcement. Local law enforcement still operates under state law. And state law in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina and Texas (the states that handle most of the Southeast’s heavy passenger volume) still treats unauthorized possession the way it always has.

A patient with a California medical card and Florida-licensed product, with documentation, is technically Schedule III under federal law as of April 28. What that means for the officer at the Atlanta checkpoint who decides to call APD is something the TSA hasn’t written down. Black Cannabis Magazine noted in its reporting that the enforcement gap falls hardest on the patients least equipped to absorb it. That part hasn’t changed at all.

What about everyone else

Recreational consumers, who are most people reading this, are exactly where they were on April 26. Federal law still treats recreational cannabis as Schedule I. The old advice still applies. Don’t pack it. If you do, the page acknowledging the federal posture changed will not save you from the cop the TSA officer is allowed to call.

The June 29 DEA administrative hearing on broader marijuana rescheduling is the one that could shift the picture for the rest of us. That’s a separate process. It hasn’t happened yet.

TSA was first. No one else has moved.

One federal agency edited one page within 24 hours of the rule taking effect. That’s it. The Department of Veterans Affairs still prohibits VA physicians from recommending cannabis. The Department of Housing and Urban Development still allows federal cannabis status as grounds to evict tenants from subsidized housing. The IRS hasn’t moved on Section 280E, the provision that keeps state-licensed cannabis operators paying tax rates north of 70%. The FAA still prohibits cannabis in aircraft cabins, full stop.

Every one of those agencies could write new guidance tomorrow. None has.

For now, the most accurate way to read the TSA page is this. Federal law says you can fly with medical cannabis. The agency in charge of the checkpoint agrees. Neither of them will tell you how.

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Over the past decade, cannabis has shifted from taboo to a regulated global industry, with expanding legalization, medical adoption, and economic impact. Yet in 2026, early “Green Rush” expectations have given way to a more complex reality shaped by bureaucracy, uneven policies, and ongoing cultural and political debate.

Riding the wave of social media trends these past few months—that nostalgic look back at pictures and anecdotes from 2016 to 2026—a question arises: what’s happened in the cannabis world over the last 10 years? Have there been significant changes? Has the needle shifted? Do prejudices still persist? Has any country taken a leap backward or forward? Does society continue to demand change? Does the health sector still require solutions? Does leisure continue to exert pressure from its entrenched position?

Broadly speaking, thanks to the growing democratization of the conversation, the cannabis landscape is undergoing a profound transformation and gaining momentum: little by little, it is ceasing to be a taboo subject. There’s still a long way to go, but the ground has been shifting. Likewise, cannabis gradually shed its largely criminalized image to become—joint by joint, plant by plant, medicine by medicine—a regulated global industry, and even a—somewhat—standardized medical resource.

Where things stood in 2016

Barely three years had passed since Uruguay legalized recreational weed in December 2013, becoming the first country in the world to do so. That law allowed home cultivation in August 2014. And by 2016, the world was already watching the Uruguayan experiment with some curiosity.

Around that time, some US states like Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska had legalized adult use. And at the end of 2016, California, Massachusetts, Maine, and Nevada voted in favor of recreational legalization, which ultimately changed the game given California’s economic weight.

The Green Rush that wasn’t — and what came after

In 2016, there was widespread talk of a “Green Rush,” with investors expecting quick profits and few restrictions, primarily in the United States and much of Europe. That “Green Rush” fizzled out: those expectations never fully materialized. Or not entirely. Or not in that way.

Today, the market is much more professional and, it must be said, more rigorous. This makes sense: the ecosystem has been shaken up, some bubbles have burst, and the industry has become more professional. Today, the industry is estimated to contribute approximately US$149 billion to the global economy.

To put this into perspective: that $149 billion figure is the entire GDP of countries like Ecuador, Panama, or Uruguay, and it’s almost the same as the hotel and tourist accommodation sector in the United States, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In this context, countries like Thailand and Canada have consolidated their position as exporting powerhouses, sending hundreds of tons annually to European markets.

The regulatory landscape in 2026

Ideas about “legalizing or prohibiting” continue to circulate in society, politics, the media, and social networks. The debate remains open and without conclusive arguments. Various regulatory models are now active simultaneously: US states with retail sales and substantial tax collection; Germany and Spain with non-profit collective cultivation—despite their notable drawbacks; the Czech Republic and Luxembourg allowing self-cultivation and possession, focusing on personal freedom and decriminalization; and France’s strictly medicinal model, with exclusive dispensing in pharmacies and hospitals.

And although cannabis acceptance is growing, the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) continues to express its “concern” about the increase in use and the decline in risk perception. This situation ultimately led many countries to favor stricter medicalization and pharmaceutical traceability instead of seeking openness (total or partial).

A more orderly garden — with questions still open

Thus, 2026 finds us with a—somewhat—more orderly garden. Without the naiveté of those early times, users, patients, and businesses continue to navigate a labyrinth of labels, genetics, and legislation. Looking ahead, is a victory for individual freedoms on the horizon, or are we simply witnessing the domestication of the plant? Does state bureaucracy stifle or collaborate? Does the mystique fade without resistance? Can health be confined to a court case file? In 2027, the next trend will offer different answers to these questions that today, right now, at this very moment, still linger in wisps of smoke.

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In Indiana, the drugs that nearly destroyed my life were perfectly legal. Doctors administered them through IV lines while I lay in hospital beds: morphine, fentanyl, Dilaudid. I wasn’t chasing a high. I was a patient, and I trusted the system.

Between 2014 and 2019, my life became a revolving door of hospital admissions. I would arrive sick and in pain, get stabilized with powerful opioids, begin to feel normal again, and eventually be discharged. For a while, things would seem fine. Then something would go wrong, and I’d end up right back where I started—another ambulance ride, another hospital bed, another IV line delivering the same medications.

At the time, I didn’t question any of it. I believed the hospital was helping me. No one ever explained how dependency could develop quietly underneath the surface. I thought I was just dealing with an illness that kept returning.

Looking back now, the pattern seems obvious. At the time, it didn’t.

When the Pattern Became Clear

The opioid cycle doesn’t always announce itself. It builds slowly until one day you realize your life revolves around it.

During those years, I watched the opioid epidemic claim people around me—friends, family members, a brother-in-law, cousins, my best friend’s son. Some overdosed. Others disappeared from the lives they once had. I didn’t think my story belonged in the same category. I wasn’t buying drugs on the street. I wasn’t trying to get high. I was a patient.

But by 2019, I was exhausted in a way that sleep couldn’t fix. That’s when I finally started to question the pattern—not just the illness, but the cycle itself. By then, the physical and emotional toll had caught up with me. There were nights when the weight of it all felt unbearable.

One afternoon, I was sitting at home, overwhelmed and crying harder than I can remember. My granddaughter Melody was about two-and-a-half years old. She didn’t understand addiction or hospitals or fear. She just saw her grandpa crying.

She walked over, climbed into my lap, and sat there quietly until she fell asleep. In that moment, a thought hit me that stopped everything: how could I leave this child behind?

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. That moment forced me to face what I had been avoiding. If nothing changed, the cycle I was trapped in was eventually going to kill me.

The Illegal Alternative

Not long after that, cannabis entered my life. In Indiana, cannabis was still illegal. Possession alone could bring legal consequences. At the same time, I had spent years legally receiving some of the most powerful opioids available inside hospitals.

That contradiction didn’t make sense to me.

Still, I approached cannabis carefully. I wasn’t trying to make a statement or chase a high. I was looking for a way to stabilize my life and step away from a cycle that had defined six years of it. Slowly, things began to change.

My sleep improved. My anxiety eased. My body and mind began to settle in ways they hadn’t in years. Most importantly, the revolving door of hospital admissions slowed—and then stopped. Cannabis didn’t erase the past, and it wasn’t a miracle cure. But it gave me something I hadn’t had in years: a way forward.

The drugs I trusted were legal. The plant that helped me was not. The first time I tried cannabis wasn’t dramatic. There was no party, no sense of rebellion. It was quiet. By that point, I had spent years being treated with medications that carried serious risks, all administered under medical supervision. Yet the plant in front of me was the one considered dangerous.

I approached it the only way I knew how—carefully. Not to get high. Not to prove a point. Just to see if it could help me steady myself long enough to step off the cycle I had been stuck in. Looking back, that moment didn’t change everything overnight. But it changed the direction of my life.

The Conversation We Still Avoid

Today, Indiana remains surrounded by states that have moved toward cannabis legalization or medical programs—Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, even Kentucky—while it continues to treat the plant as if the national conversation hasn’t changed.

Meanwhile, the opioid crisis hasn’t gone anywhere. There is no single solution to addiction. Recovery is complicated and deeply personal. But ignoring tools that may help people reduce harm doesn’t solve anything either. I’m not claiming cannabis is the answer for everyone. What I know is simpler than that.

For years, I trusted a system that kept pulling me back into the same cycle. The thing that finally helped me step away from it was something my state still considers illegal. Today, I’m still here. Many people I knew during those years are not.

I still get to hold my granddaughter. That’s reason enough to start having a more honest conversation.

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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An investigation into the infrastructure, incentives, and revenue streams behind prohibition advocacy — using professional writer Alex Berenson’s career as a case study in how misinformation survives evidence.

It seems to me that the pattern that emerges when examining contemporary anti-cannabis discourse, which I have been doing for a while now, is not primarily ideological but economic. Modern media ecosystems reward narrative consistency over factual accuracy; revenue streams generate rational incentives to ignore contrary evidence; and professional misinformation infrastructures can survive, sometimes even thrive, after empirical refutation.

Alex Berenson’s trajectory since 2019 provides a useful case study. Not because he is exceptional, but because his career as a successful novelist and professional writer exposes the mechanics of how prohibition advocacy adapts when its predictions fail.

In January 2019, Berenson — a former New York Times reporter and bestselling novelist — predicted that cannabis legalization would trigger epidemics of psychosis and violent crime. He even called his book Tell Your Children, as a way to evoke the most profound fear real parents have: that our children will suffer from a damning mental illness… in this particular case as a consequence of poor advice.

Six years later, recreational cannabis is legal in 24 states, serving more than 150 million Americans, and medical cannabis is allowed in 40 states.

The catastrophes Berenson forecasted never arrived. Violent crime did not surge in legalization states. Homicide epidemics did not materialize. The apocalyptic mental-health collapse he warned of failed to appear.

The catastrophes Berenson forecasted never arrived. Violent crime did not surge. Homicide epidemics did not materialize.

Yet Berenson’s media career continues to generate revenue. According to Substack’s own subscribe page, Unreported Truths has over 236,000 total subscribers. Paid tiers are currently set at $9 a month or $63 a year, with a founding-member option at $350 a year; a free tier also exists. Applying a standard industry paid-conversion estimate of 3–5% suggests a paid subscriber base in the range of 7,000 to 12,000 readers and annual gross revenue conservatively in the low-to-mid six figures, depending on the tier mix. Add speaking-circuit fees and recurring appearances on Fox News and adjacent outlets, and contrarian advocacy gives the indication of being financially sustainable.

Even after being systematically contradicted by evidence, being wrong can still pay. This might give us a hint on why updating one’s position based on evidence is often economically irrational in subscriber-driven media markets.

The Coordinated Amplification Model

Berenson’s 2019 book, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence, received extraordinary media placement. Within a single week, he published op-eds in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, appeared multiple times on Fox News, and was the subject of a glowing 4,000-word feature by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker, which praised his “reporter’s tenacity” and “outsider’s knack for asking intemperate questions.”

This simultaneous placement across competing publications — Times, Journal, New Yorker, Fox — within days suggests a level of campaign infrastructure exceeding routine book promotion. Whether coordinated formally or through happenstance, the effect was clear: rapid legitimacy across elite and mass platforms.

The immediate policy impact demonstrated the model’s short-term effectiveness. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin cited Gladwell’s piece while urging caution on legalization. The intervention failed — Illinois legalized in January 2020 — but it showed how mainstream credibility, elite endorsement, and synchronized amplification can briefly influence legislative debate.

At the same time, the scientific response was swift and public. Researchers whose work Berenson cited began disputing his interpretations almost immediately. Within weeks, multiple scholars and clinicians from Columbia, Harvard, and NYU signed an open letter describing the book as “based on a deeply inaccurate misreading of science” and an attempt to “stir up public fear.”

Dr. Ziva Cooper, a member of the National Academies committee whose report Berenson relied on, told Rolling Stone: “To say that we concluded cannabis causes schizophrenia is just wrong — and it’s meant to precipitate fear.” Undark described the book as “statistical malfeasance.”

The libertarian Reason Foundation concluded that his characterization of the literature was insufficient for policy modeling.

“To say that we concluded cannabis causes schizophrenia is just wrong — and it’s meant to precipitate fear.”

Dr. Ziva Cooper, National Academies committee member, to Rolling Stone

Six years from then, we can find Berenson still hitting the same bell.

The Six-Year Test

What makes Berenson’s case analytically valuable is time. His claims were explicit, causal, and testable. Six years of post-legalization data now allow empirical evaluation.

It is not merely that some studies find no statistically significant long-term increase in violent or property crime following legalization in early-adopting states like Colorado and Washington. It is not even that multiple analyses suggest crime trends in legalization states track national patterns rather than diverging upward. If Berenson’s causal story were correct and if legalization were triggering a psychosis-to-violence cascade at the population scale, the signal would be unmistakable. You would see sustained violent-crime surges concentrated in legalization states.

Instead, 2024 national data show violent crime decreased an estimated 4.5% from 2023 to 2024, with murder and non-negligent manslaughter falling an estimated 14.9%, according to the FBI’s most recent annual report.

You would also see homicide curves bending upward as legalization expanded to nearly half the country. They did not.

Furthermore, you would see a generalized youth mental-health collapse linked to cannabis normalization. Instead, federal surveys show adolescent substance use — including marijuana — remaining historically low relative to prior decades.

You would see psychiatric systems overwhelmed across demographics. Instead, the most credible recent healthcare studies identify narrow, conditional effects: increases in psychosis-related emergency visits concentrated among specific subgroups, primarily men aged 25–34, primarily in states with weak regulation of high-potency products. Cannabis scholars and regulators have warned that THC concentrates must be controlled and that the public must be advised against abusing them. It’s the leap critics such as Berenson take from this moderate public-health concern to concluding cannabis should remain under prohibitionist constraints that is unjustifiable.

What’s also relevant is that other analyses found that states with more medicalized or pharmaceutical-style regulatory models were associated with better mental-health outcomes.

In other words, the data do not support Berenson’s apocalyptic narrative.

They support a far more mundane conclusion: that market design and product regulation matter and that legalization itself is not the driver of societal breakdown.

Perhaps most tellingly, one outcome is unequivocal. Legalization and decriminalization dramatically reduce cannabis possession arrests — often by 40–80% — shrinking the criminal-justice footprint of marijuana enforcement even before downstream effects are debated.

The “crime wave” Berenson warned about coincided, in practice, with fewer people being criminalized for cannabis at all.

The absence of the predicted signal is itself evidence. When a theory forecasts catastrophe at national scale and six years of real-world exposure fail to produce it, the problem is not insufficient data.

Discourse Adaptation When Predictions Fail

What is instructive is how the discourse adjusted once evidence accumulated.

In a January 2025 appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show, Berenson did not revise his position. He reasserted it. “I think the book is its own best evidence,” he said.

“I think the book is its own best evidence.”

Alex Berenson, January 2025, on The Megyn Kelly Show

When comparisons between cannabis and alcohol arose, he shifted argumentative ground entirely, moving from claims about psychosis-driven violence to assertions about psychological addiction — claims that have been disputed repeatedly. Both the host and the guest agreed that alcohol was less addictive than cannabis and less dangerous, because of its lack of association with violent crimes. The argumentative ground had moved so far from the original claims that it was essentially a different argument entirely.

Once a public brand is built around a contrarian position, financial incentives favor maintaining that position regardless of evidence. Subscriber-based income depends on audience retention within specific ideological markets. Updating one’s stance based on data risks alienating the very audience that pays.

Academic researchers who disputed Berenson’s claims face the opposite incentive structure. They gain no financial reward from refutation. Their professional capital depends on methodological rigor and reputational credibility. Berenson, a novelist and professional writer, does not need to obey those masters.

The two systems reward fundamentally different behaviors.

When income depends on confirming audience fears rather than correcting them, epistemic flexibility becomes a liability.

Partisan Framing and Ideological Market Segmentation

Berenson’s own website — still foregrounding Tell Your Children as its primary calling card — symbolizes a logic according to which maintaining the original narrative is more profitable than engaging six years of contradictory data.

But the world did change, and cannabis is much more bipartisan now than it was back then.

Anti-cannabis discourse finds a limit as it relies increasingly on framing legalization as partisan warfare, despite repeated evidence that voter-driven legalization runs across both aisles. Oklahoma legalized medical cannabis while voting overwhelmingly Republican. Montana legalized recreational use under the same conditions.

Still, the partisan frame serves the different function of audience capture. By casting scientific criticism as “the left” rejecting uncomfortable truths, prohibition advocacy aligns itself with broader grievance narratives common to right-leaning media ecosystems.

Berenson’s post-2019 migration into MAGA-adjacent media followed a similar logic to his COVID-era contrarianism, which culminated in his suspension from Twitter in 2021, before his account was reinstated after Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform.

Identify an audience skeptical of institutions, deliver content validating that skepticism, and monetize attention.

Policy Impact and the Evidence Gap

Did anti-cannabis discourse shape policy? Briefly. Senator Durbin’s intervention shows short-term influence. But Illinois legalized anyway. National support for legalization continued rising, surpassing 70% by 2023. State cannabis tax revenues exceeded $15 billion. The costs of prohibition — criminal justice expenditures, racial disparities, illicit-market violence — remained visible and measurable.

Fear-based narratives ultimately collapsed under observational reality. Voters could see that legalization did not produce chaos. The evidence gap widened until the discourse lost credibility outside its core audience.

This highlights the limits of profitable misinformation in empirically testable domains. Individual messengers can sustain careers within ideological niches even as mainstream influence fades, but policy trajectories tend to realign with observable outcomes once enough time passes.

At least, that appears to be the case with cannabis.

This article is based on public reporting, FBI data, linked source materials and six years of documented post-legalization data. Where facts remain disputed or unproven, that is stated in the text. This article is a reported analysis. The commentary, views or interpretations expressed do not imply that any uncharged conduct has been proven in court unless explicitly stated. Readers are encouraged to review the underlying materials and draw their own conclusions.

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Cannabis is quietly emerging as a geopolitical tool in 2026, reshaping global trade, diplomacy and soft power amid energy crises and shifting alliances. From U.S. policy shifts to exports in Latin America and reconstruction efforts in Ukraine, the plant is increasingly positioned as a strategic asset in a changing world order.

Rarely, perhaps not since the world wars, has the world resembled a board game where the pieces seem sticky, wobbly and dangerously unstable. In 2026, while news reports flare up over the Strait of Hormuz and traditional energy systems crumble, a quieter form of diplomacy emerges from the sidelines, one that smells neither of gunpowder nor diesel fuel. It is a green diplomacy, a network of soft routes circumventing blockades, sanctions and the stagnation of certain commodities to propose a new world order where the plant dictates the terms.

Of course, on the horizon of this green diplomacy looms the creak of textbook geopolitics, which clashes with the price of a barrel of oil and with the pulse of conflicts that never seem to be resolved. There, at that crossroads, with Donald Trump actively playing his hand on other continents, with the irresolvable tension between Israel and Palestine, and with the violent unfolding of that impossible-to-define scenario called Iran, cannabis moves discreetly, interconnecting economies. A guerrilla diplomacy, one built on niche markets and treaties that, despite their specific weight, are usually signed hastily due to the urgency of those who know that the old world is withering away, live and in real time.

The Pax Cannabica

In April 2026, the United States finally released the handbrake and shifted gears, moving forward with the reclassification of cannabis to Schedule III. It wasn’t an act of kindness, altruism or patriotic self-indulgence. It was more of a chess move. By removing weed from the heroin shelf, the United States not only legitimized a domestic industry that was already a monster, but also allowed its banks to finance global expansion. A small nuance: reclassification doesn’t legalize cannabis federally, but it does eliminate the bureaucratic barrier to international investment.

Now, under this new scenario, U.S. capital could potentially land in any port without bureaucratic pushback. It’s a kind of pax cannabica imposed by the market, a sign that Washington prefers to export genetics rather than continue losing the war on drugs on its own soil. Furthermore, this move allows the U.S. to establish a kind of botanical soft power: those who control the seeds and patents, in a world hungry for new medicines, control the global health narrative.

Latin America steps up

While Europe grapples with how to heat its homes next winter, grapples with migration tensions and suppresses the advance of certain political trends that could threaten the cannabis status quo, Costa Rica completed its first major export of medicinal cannabis to the Old Continent in March 2026. A hefty amount.

Costa Rica isn’t just selling flowers. It’s projecting institutional stability to the world. The picture is a perfect illustration: a country that sees itself as a green oasis supplying pharmacies in a Europe crumbling under the weight of its own energy contradictions. Its underlying strategy is welfare diplomacy. On a similar note, with ARICCAME (Regulatory Agency for the Hemp and Medicinal Cannabis Industry), Argentina aims to become a player in said diplomacy, having successfully extended its existence and, despite political pressure, avoided dissolution. Unfortunately, the situation in Argentina isn’t exactly normal at the moment.

Hemp as the new soybean

Added to this is the resurgence of other established players. The clearest example: Uruguay, which seemed to have rested on its pioneering laurels and is now reactivating its logistics hub within South America. Faced with supply crises in other regions, the port of Montevideo became the emergency exit for Brazilian and Paraguayan industrial hemp. It’s low-profile diplomacy, but with high impact on foreign exchange: cannabis flowers have become the new soybeans, with all that entails for these humid pampas.

Weed for peace

Ukraine, which at this point seems almost like a science fiction dystopia, is developing its famous “Marshall Plan for cannabis.” Interestingly, this didn’t remain just a campaign promise of the decimated Volodymyr Zelensky. In 2026, with the European Parliament approving multi-billion-dollar loans for reconstruction, the plant became central to public health and economic recovery.

Ukraine is not only focusing its efforts on overcoming the post-traumatic stress of a population that witnessed horror firsthand. It is also pursuing a sovereignty strategy, aiming to resolve its issues independently, without needing handouts from NATO, the United States, Europe or anyone. Currently, Ukraine is building a production infrastructure that does not depend on Russian gas networks or heavy fertilizers.

It’s weed for peace, or at least to prevent the post-war period from becoming a wasteland of pills, booze and steep mental decline. The environmental factor emerges as a geopolitical bargaining chip: faced with the blockade of traditional building materials from the East, Ukrainian hemp, with the momentum of its historical agricultural tradition, could build new walls. Literal and metaphorical.

A diplomacy of opportunity

Traditional warfare is also reshuffling scientific leadership. Israel, which for decades was a mecca of cannabis research, now sees its export capacity weakened by internal conflict. Meanwhile, this gap is being exploited by countries like Colombia and Thailand, which entered the fray to demonstrate that they can offer cutting-edge science without the risk of being located in areas of permanent tension. This is a diplomacy of opportunity.

The elephant in the room

It’s not all lab meticulousness and math calculations. Morocco remains the elephant in the room. The world’s largest hash exporter has shifted from headlines to state policy. Since legalizing medicinal and industrial cultivation in 2021, the legal area under cultivation has doubled, exceeding 4,700 hectares in 2025. Morocco is now sending its first legal shipments to Switzerland. It’s a masterstroke: whitewashing an age-old tradition to fit it into European Union standards, transforming a dense history of smuggling into diplomacy and a seal of origin.

Europe’s green frontier

Meanwhile, other countries are still resolving their own dilemmas. The Czech Republic, which aims to be the most liberal country in the European Union, allows home cultivation and possession of up to 100 grams, becoming the lifeline of a Europe still fearful of its own shadow. The Czech government not only gave the green light to consumption but also implemented a system of social clubs that rivals the German model. In Prague, they no longer speak of substances but of civil rights and improved tax collection, which they say will go toward urban development, among other things.

Some countries are struggling with the ups and downs of green diplomacy, striving to find cracks, fissures and loopholes in a system that is too rigid to survive. Too collapsed to simply continue. With the operating system critically outdated, it can no longer keep pace with events. Amidst the bloody jaws of this filthy world, cannabis ends up acting as a lubricant for that geopolitical machine that’s running out of fuel. In times of war, when borders close, the plant still finds a path forward. It just needs someone, somewhere, to understand that the future is green.

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By Hirsh Jain via Cannabis Confidential newsletter. Subscribe here.

How Zorn’s trajectory from litigator to policymaker echoes Thurgood Marshall.

As we look back on the most consequential week in the modern history of American drug policy, much of the attention and fanfare has focused on President Trump, and for good reason.

Trump displayed a unique ability to break from the “Nixonian epistemological prison” that, though long abandoned by the American public, has constrained Presidential thinking on drug policy for more than half a century.

Despite decades of mounting evidence cannabis and psychedelics carry enormous medical potential and a dramatically lower risk profile than many of the substances America eagerly commercializes, including alcohol and pharmaceuticals, most Presidents continued to operate within the bounds of the reckless and unscientific mental architecture that President Nixon built for them more than a half-century ago.

President Trump deserves enormous credit for rescheduling medical cannabis and for issuing an Executive Order on psychedelics that directed federal agencies to accelerate research into their therapeutic potential.

But I believe a more revealing lesson about the trajectory of American social movements can be found in the figure of litigator Matt Zorn.

Zorn, often alongside his partner Shane Pennington, spent a decade bringing carefully targeted challenges to the federal government’s administration of controlled substances law, representing doctors, researchers, and patients caught in regulatory gray zones.

His work exposed the gap between the government’s formal prohibitions and its real-world enforcement, pressing courts to confront inconsistencies in how agencies justify restrictions on emerging therapies.

Zorn became a central figure in a style of drug policy advocacy that relied less on politics and more on strategic litigation to test the limits of federal power.

Last May, Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brought Zorn into the Department as Deputy General Counsel.

By most accounts, Zorn played a central role in drafting President Trump’s Executive Order on psychedelics, just a few years after having sued HHS to force public release of the 252-page scientific review recommending cannabis be rescheduled, the same document that became the foundation of last week’s rescheduling order.

The renegade litigator who spent a decade beating federal agencies in court was now drafting their policy from inside the building.

The renegade litigator who spent a decade beating federal agencies in court was now drafting their policy from inside the building.

Zorn’s appointment carries echoes of Thurgood Marshall, the legendary civil rights lawyer who built his career in a similar posture of sustained, strategic litigation against the federal and state governments.

As chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the 1940s and 1950s, Marshall brought a series of carefully selected cases designed to expose the gap between the Constitution’s promises of equality and the realities of segregation and unequal protection under law, forcing courts to confront the inconsistencies embedded in how “separate but equal” was applied in practice.

That litigation strategy ultimately culminated in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision that dismantled legal segregation in America’s public schools.

President Lyndon Johnson appointed Marshall Solicitor General in 1965, and two years later elevated him to the Supreme Court as the first African American Justice in the nation’s history.

As Solicitor General, Marshall was in office when Loving v. Virginia was argued before the Supreme Court in 1967, and he filed an amicus brief on behalf of the federal government urging the Court to strike down state bans on interracial marriage as unconstitutional.

The lawyer who had spent his career suing the government for failing to live up to its constitutional obligations was now, from within it, demanding that the Court finally enforce civil rights guarantees more than a century after the abolition of slavery.

Zorn and Marshall both illustrate the partnership between grassroots activism and legal strategy that so often drives social change in America.

Each relied on the groundwork laid by advocates who brought forward the underlying cases, and then prevailed by showing a deeper command of the law than the institutions enforcing it.

Those victories helped bring both their causes and the legal architects of those causes, Marshall and Zorn themselves, into the political mainstream.

From there, each ultimately worked within the system itself to extend and entrench the change they had first forced from the outside.

Their careers point to a broader lesson about how social movements succeed in the United States: through the interplay of grassroots pressure, disciplined legal advocacy, and, eventually, participation within government to carry reforms forward from within.

It is also worth noting that Marshall and Zorn came to serve Presidents who, at least on paper, would not have been seen as natural allies of their movements.

A son of the segregationist South, as Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson had spent much of his career as a significant obstacle to civil rights legislation.

Yet, after decades of Presidential inaction, Johnson came to recognize the historical moment and, as President, drove the passage of landmark civil rights laws at a remarkable pace between 1964 and 1968.

The Civil Rights Act.

The Voting Rights Act.

The Fair Housing Act.

Together, they helped define the multiracial democracy that exists in the United States today.

President Trump similarly followed a long line of Presidents who failed to advance cannabis and plant medicine reform.

Like President Johnson on civil rights, President Trump is not a natural ally on drug policy. He has a law-and-order orientation and is a self-described teetotaler, abstaining from any drug or alcohol consumption.

Yet, like President Johnson, President Trump appears to have recognized a shifting historical moment and moved dramatically last week with the psychedelics Executive Order and the cannabis rescheduling effort.

President Trump now has the opportunity, again like President Johnson, to shape an enduring legacy if he continues to deliver successive policy wins on drug reform over the remaining two and a half years of his term, as Johnson did through a sustained run of civil rights legislation.

The comparison between Zorn and Marshall also points to a recurring feature of social movements, namely, their tendency to fracture at moments of political transition.

It was the fracturing of the civil rights coalition amongst competing factions late in President Johnson’s term that helped clear the political path for Richard Nixon’s rise via his infamous Southern Strategy.

Once in office, President Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act, establishing the framework that has constrained plant medicine policy for generations, at great cost to the well-being of the American public.

And so, while the cannabis and psychedelic communities are celebrating last week’s historic victories and anticipating further progress, internal division within the movement risks undermining that trajectory.

And uneven or poorly managed implementation of new cannabis and psychedelic regimes could invite a social backlash that stalls reform for decades, in the same way President Nixon’s response hardened the status quo for an entire era.

If we truly believe in the medical and spiritual value of plant medicine, we must focus on building a new, durable epistemological foundation for plant medicine in this country — and avoiding the destructive infighting that has weakened other social movements at precisely the moments of greatest opportunity.

Hirsh Jain, CEO, Ananda Strategy

Yes, participants in the plant medicine movements will, at times, have different interests. Hemp and cannabis operators generally eye each other with suspicion.

Companies competing for market share denounce their rivals.

But if we truly believe in the medical and spiritual value of plant medicine, we must focus on building a new, durable epistemological foundation for plant medicine in this country as a category of legitimate therapeutic value, and avoiding the destructive infighting that has weakened other social movements at precisely the moments of greatest opportunity.

Finally, it is worth noting that Zorn and Pennington are still in their forties.

The federal courts that will shape the next several decades of controlled substances law may yet include jurists like them who spent their early careers litigating these questions from the outside.

That trajectory, from fierce litigator to government service to the judiciary, was Thurgood Marshall’s path.

His elevation to the Supreme Court would have been unthinkable in the early years of his civil rights work.

Yet American legal history has shown that sustained advocacy in service of successful and transformative social movements can, over time, become institutional authority.

And so, if those of us in the plant medicine movement meet this historical moment with discipline and cohesion in the years ahead, it would not be surprising if one of the movement’s leading legal advocates also one day followed a similar path to the nation’s highest court.

Hirsh Jain is the CEO of Ananda Strategy, a cannabis-focused business advisory firm that works with cannabis brands, retailers, distributors, technology platforms and other businesses on matters ranging from competitive licensing, legislative strategy, regulatory intelligence, market expansion, business litigation, internal and external communication and other varied corporate initiatives.

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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Three days before the Trump administration moved medical marijuana to Schedule III, a new YouGov poll found that 59% of Americans already supported legalizing marijuana use, and 84% supported legalizing it for medical purposes. The public has been ahead of federal policy for a long time. The data makes clear how far Washington still has to go.

The poll, conducted April 14-16 among 1,105 U.S. adult citizens, found majority support for marijuana legalization across party lines, age groups and levels of personal experience with the plant. It was released April 20 — three days before Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed the order rescheduling medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III.

The numbers

Overall, 59% of Americans support legalizing marijuana use, compared to 28% who oppose it and 13% who are unsure. Support for medical marijuana specifically is overwhelming — 84% in favor, with only 9% opposed. Recreational legalization draws majority support at 55%, though with a wider political gap.

The partisan breakdown on overall legalization is notable: 75% of Democrats support it, but so do 54% of Independents and 50% of Republicans. On medical marijuana specifically, the numbers converge even further — 91% of Democrats, 81% of Independents and 81% of Republicans all support it. That is about as close to consensus as American politics gets.

The age story nobody expected

The conventional assumption is that younger Americans drive marijuana support. The data says otherwise. Americans between 45 and 64 — roughly Gen X — show the highest overall support at 63%, outpacing adults under 30 (58%), those between 30 and 44 (55%) and adults 65 and older (57%).

YouGov’s analysis points to familiarity as the likely driver. Half of Americans in the 45-64 age group know a current recreational marijuana user — the highest of any age group — and 24% have personally used it for medical purposes, compared to 12% of adults under 30. Experience with the plant, whether personal or through someone close, correlates strongly with support for legalization.

Experience drives opinion

The poll’s most striking finding may be the relationship between personal experience and policy views. Among Americans who have used marijuana recreationally, 83% support legalization and only 11% oppose it. Among those who have used it medically, support hits 90%. Even among Americans who haven’t used marijuana themselves but know someone who has, majority support holds.

The only group that tilts against legalization is the roughly 17% of Americans who say they have never used marijuana and don’t know anyone who has. Among that group, 46% oppose legalization and 32% support it.

In other words: familiarity with the plant, direct or secondhand, consistently produces support. The remaining opposition is concentrated almost entirely among people with no exposure to it at all.

What the data means for Schedule III

The rescheduling of medical marijuana to Schedule III aligns with where public opinion on medical use has been for years. The 84% medical support figure — crossing party lines and age groups — suggests the move reflects a long-standing national consensus, not a policy leap.

But the gap between what Americans support and what federal law now permits remains significant. Fifty-five percent of Americans support legalizing recreational marijuana. Recreational cannabis remains Schedule I. Full legalization or descheduling would require an act of Congress — a fight that has not yet begun in any meaningful legislative form.

The public has been ready for full legalization for a while. What it got was Schedule III.

Rescheduling is movement. It is not freedom.

High Times, December 2025

Read our full rescheduling coverage: Cannabis Has Been Rescheduled to Schedule III. Don’t Call It Legalization. | Marijuana Reclassification Explained

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