Senate leaders released a stopgap that would push most of the federal hemp deadline to December 11. Cannabinoids the plant cannot make still die on schedule, both chambers have to agree and the states writing their own rules are not waiting.

The federal ban on hemp-derived THC products was supposed to arrive November 12. Most of the industry could now be one congressional agreement away from getting 29 more days.

Senate leaders released a stopgap funding bill on Sunday that would keep federal agencies running through December 11 and, tucked inside, delay the planned prohibition on most hemp products until that same date.

“Until December 11, 2026, the amendments made by section 781 of division B of Public Law 119–37 shall only apply with respect to products described in paragraphs (1)(C)(ii)(I) and (1)(C)(iv)(I) of section 297A of the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946.”

Section 2019, Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2027

The hemp language appears in Section 2019 of the bill’s separate extensions division. Rather than repeating the definition, it cross-references two clauses in the hemp law Congress enacted last year. Those clauses cover intermediate and final products containing cannabinoids “that are not capable of being naturally produced by a Cannabis sativa L. plant.” Until December 11, those would be the only new exclusions taking effect. The restrictions on cannabinoids that occur naturally but are synthesized outside the plant, along with the 0.4-milligram cap, would be delayed for 29 days.

That’s the proposal. Four extra weeks, for most products, with one category left behind.

What Would Actually Move

The 0.4-milligram ceiling is low enough to push most hemp beverages, intoxicating edibles and full-spectrum tinctures currently sold in the United States outside the law. That cap, not the word “ban,” is the mechanism that kills the market.

Why December 11, of all dates? The extension was written to expire the same day as the funding bill that carries it, which hands Congress another decision point the next time government money runs out. Hemp’s legal status would be pegged to the same clock as federal government funding. Nobody who has watched Congress lately should find that comforting.

The House is not a formality. It passed a different funding bill last month, one that runs to December 4 and carries no hemp extension at all. The Senate still has to pass its own version, the two chambers would then need to approve identical language and only then does anything reach the president’s desk.

“As Mark Twain might have said, ‘The reports of hemp’s death have been greatly exaggerated.’”

Jonathan Miller, general counsel, US Hemp Roundtable

Four weeks is also not the unit of time this industry runs on. Co-packers book production lines out months. Distributors need to know what they can legally warehouse before they take delivery. A processor ordering inputs in August is ordering against a federal rule that may not exist by the time the pallets show up. An extension pegged to the next funding fight buys the lobbyists another round. It does not buy anyone a purchase order.

Washington Wants a Fix

Supporters say the delay is meant to buy time for an actual fix, and for once the pressure runs from the top down. President Donald Trump has publicly pushed Congress to redefine hemp and protect full-spectrum CBD products, writing on Truth Social: “We must get this done RIGHT and FAST, especially for those who saw that CBD helps them.” His budget office sent House Speaker Mike Johnson a letter asking lawmakers to “ensure the fair treatment of hemp products.”

The leading vehicle is the Lawful Hemp Protection Act, introduced in July by Reps. Andy Barr, R-Ky., and Angie Craig, D-Minn. It would repeal the ban language outright and replace it with a federal framework: it directs regulators to set potency limits, with fallback caps of 5 milligrams of THC per serving for ingestible products and 50 for inhalables if the agency fails to act within a year, plus a 21-and-over sales floor, testing and labeling rules, domestic sourcing requirements and restrictions on synthetic and artificially modified cannabinoids. Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., is circulating a competing delay-and-regulate bill, and a Senate companion to Barr-Craig is expected from Sens. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., as Marijuana Moment reported.

“While not a lot of time, this one-month extension gives lawmakers the opportunity to address this critical issue after Election Day,” said Jim Higdon, co-founder and chief communications officer of Kentucky’s Cornbread Hemp, in a statement. The Barr-Craig bill, he added, “sets a national potency standard and closes loopholes that allowed foreign-made synthetic THC to proliferate in an unregulated market.”

The States Aren’t Waiting

Here’s the part the celebration skips. Illinois enacted its own hemp restrictions effective November 12, limiting products sold outside the licensed cannabis system to less than 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container. Anything above that threshold gets treated as cannabis and can move only through licensed dispensaries. That date sits in state statute, and no federal stopgap moves it. North Carolina lawmakers are considering legislation that would write the incoming federal standard into state law. A company whose real exposure sits in Springfield or Raleigh gets little from four extra federal weeks.

The hemp industry spent the summer asking Congress for time. If Congress says yes, it gets a countdown stapled to another countdown.

<p>The post The Hemp Ban Could Slip a Month. Read the Fine Print Before You Celebrate. first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post The Hemp Ban Could Slip a Month. Read the Fine Print Before You Celebrate. appeared first on Paradise Found.

This article originally appeared in High Times’ 50th Anniversary print issue. Get yours here.

In the 1970s, Colombia’s Sierra Nevada became the source of the world’s most famous cannabis. Then Washington’s War on Drugs destroyed the trade and helped create the cocaine cartels that replaced it.

Back in the 70s, before cannabis prohibition and the U.S. crackdown turned Latin America’s jungle-green leaves red, there was a time defined by vibrance, transformative power and cultural surge, fueled by tons of weed money flowing from North American pockets into Colombia’s Sierra Nevada. That period, which saw the Santa Marta region rise as an empire built on cannabis, is known as La Bonanza Marimbera. It is the subject of an upcoming documentary by producer Lucas Nosiglia and director Guido Mignogna. Nosiglia is also working with cannabis legend Sergio Puerta on multiple initiatives to revitalize cannabis culture and production in the region.

El Corazón del Mundo, to be presented in 2026, tells the story of those crazy, vibrant years, showcasing how that ever-changing agricultural landscape became the theater of operations for one of the most violent and cruel chapters in the history of drug prohibition, and how those years echo in today’s revival of cannabis production in Colombia.

The Real OGs Are Actually Campesinos

In the late 60s and 70s, the lush slopes of Sierra Nevada became the unlikely epicenter of a new transnational economy. What had been a relatively isolated agricultural frontier of maize, plantain and coffee, turned into the source of Colombia’s first great “green rush” through what can only be described as a convergence of multiple unpredictable circumstances, perhaps a twist of fortune. Weed was an unpredictable revolution. Dense, resinous, and sun-kissed by the Caribbean, it flowed northward in staggering volumes, fueling the anti–Vietnam War counterculture in the U.S., lining the pockets of hippie smugglers, small farmers, and of the newly converted middle classes of the region.

Colombian campesino families, long trapped in cycles of poverty and exploitation at the hands of the United Fruit Company, became master growers. A curious mix of foreign Peace Corps volunteers, adventurers, and young Americans fleeing Vietnam while searching for alternative ways of life, shared cultivation tricks, exchanged seeds and opened new channels of distribution. In towns like Santa Marta and Barranquilla, the bridge was built by marijuana as cargo, stuffed into boats, trucks, and even airplanes and on its way to Miami and New York.

By 1975, an estimated 80% of the campesinos in the Sierra and La Guajira were dependent on cannabis cultivation. But this new Latin American rural economy, tied to the appetite of distant cities and foreign governments, was condemned to face reactionary policies.

Along Those Roads of Gold and Silver Snow

Traditionally, marimba refers to the Afro-Colombian xylophone, central to music and festivity on the Pacific coast. But the very word took on a new life during these years. “There’s, of course, the sound similarity between marihuana and marimba,” explains author, anthropologist and historian Lina Britto. “But there’s also another history, linking African culture to the term.” During the bonanza (Spanish word for “economic boom”), it became a cultural slang, shorthand for bundles of pressed weed ready for shipment. Out of this, the figure of the marimbero was born: men and women who grew, transported, and traded the plant in what quickly became a regional craft.

Small farmers finally earned the money that the United Fruit Company no longer provided after abandoning banana operations in the area. There was also political turmoil, as talk of agrarian reform spread and campesino unions advanced over territories left behind. Money started flowing from hippie movements, smugglers, and urban consumers from developed countries straight into the pockets of Colombia’s middle and lower classes. Towns around Santa Marta and Sierra Nevada experienced growth and prosperity as never before. Being a marimbero became an identity, a way of life and a source of pride, as marimbero families thrived in the early years of the bonanza.

And the child prodigy of this new identity was called Santa Marta Gold, both a strain and a cultural icon. This resinous, golden strain is still known around the world, although most of it is not produced in Santa Marta. These distinctively aromatic buds became the most coveted product of the Bonanza Marimbera and arguably the first global cannabis brand, its reputation in U.S. countercultural markets elevating it to mythic status, where “Colombian weed” became synonymous with Santa Marta Gold. The strain represented the perfect convergence of local ingenuity and global demand.

Cultivated in the microclimates of the Sierra Nevada, Santa Marta Gold was both a commercial label and a symbol of quality, commanding premium prices abroad. Hippie networks of the late 60s and 70s celebrated it in underground guides, song lyrics and travel stories, cementing Colombia’s place in the global weed culture’s imagination.

This moment also illustrates how local farmers transformed their knowledge into an international brand without corporate intermediaries, unlike coffee or bananas. Santa Marta Gold was not marketed by a state export board, but by smugglers, travelers and word-of-mouth in New York, Miami, and California. In Britto’s words, it was a “vernacular globalization,” where campesino labor and U.S. counterculture co-produced a commodity that became legendary.

The Empire Strikes Back

So how did something that generated such economic dynamism, such a burst of cannabis culture and local circuits, become a cradle for revenge and armed violence?

By the late 1970s, in the context of the Cold War, Washington decided to tighten its control over Latin America. The “War on Drugs” had already been tested as a tool of political repression, and the U.S. government applied it to a new scenario, launching an international anti-narcotics campaign aimed at seizing control in Central America under the pretext of eradicating marijuana crops in Sierra Nevada and along the Colombia–Venezuela border.

In 1979, Operation Fulminante seized 3,500 tons of cannabis and destroyed almost 25,000 acres of crops. By 1982, fumigations with paraquat and glyphosate, both chemical warfare tools honed during the Vietnam War, were unleashed on campesino fields. These aerial sprays devastated not only cannabis but also subsistence crops like plantain and yucca, and anyone who stood in the way of the planes.

The impact was paradoxical and tragic, notes Britto, author of Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia’s First Drug Paradise. State violence, she argues, “disrupted and rendered useless the mechanisms that more or less functioned to contain violence. Large wars never broke out within the business. But once the state began its attacks, you started to see cinematic shootouts, because now they had the money, the trucks, the arsenals, the big guns, the bodyguards…” What had been a tense, but relatively contained, system of exchange was thrown into chaos.

Scholar Freddy González Subiría explains that every illegal economy inevitably generates a sector of predators, actors for whom violence is the preferred tool. This was a new layer added to the already tense smuggling theater of operations before the U.S. decided on a military crackdown in the region. By the end of the 70s, under increased pressure from the U.S., said predators found fertile ground and became beasts. Inside the business of growing, trading and exporting cannabis, violence was not indispensable. But as the risk of operating increased, predators found an environment perfectly suited to thrive.

Marijuana, once a plant of cultural exchange and subsistence, was now framed as a symbol of criminality, imperial confrontation and national shame.

There Could Have Been Another Way

The scale of the cannabis economy was undeniable. In 1979, Colombia’s own National Association of Financial Institutions (ANIF) estimated that as many as 150,000 Colombians were directly or indirectly linked to the cannabis complex: farmers, transporters, processors, dock workers and traders. That same year, in an extraordinary moment, proposals for legalization were publicly discussed at a symposium, even attended by the U.S. ambassador, Britto reminds us. For a brief instant, legalization was on the table, an alternative path before repression and criminalization locked in.

As a result, minor farmers who wanted to stay in business were forced toward the cocaine markets. By the mid-80s, much of the infrastructure that had once carried weed was now trafficking coca paste and cocaine hydrochloride. The transition gave rise to the infamous cartels of Medellín and Cali, and with them, an escalation of violence far beyond anything the marimberos had imagined.

Summoning Spirits from Ancestors

The Bonanza Marimbera is long gone, but in some ways it still defines how Colombians talk about marijuana, development and sovereignty.

When I asked Britto, who grew up near these regions, what kinds of memories local people from Sierra Nevada have of those years, she admitted that violence overshadowed the bonanza and transformed its memory into one of conflict and struggle. She believes the mechanisms locals once used to resolve disputes—rituals, duels or negotiations, which seldom escalated into serious bloodshed—were disrupted by the huge sums of money flowing from the smuggling complex, compounded once producing cannabis became a dangerous business under Nixon’s “War on Drugs.”

Today, as cannabis legalization sweeps across the Americas, Colombia once again faces a crossroads. The same soil that produced the legendary Santa Marta Gold could now be the foundation for a legal, regulated industry. The work of historian Lina Britto, alongside filmmakers and entrepreneurs like Nosiglia and growers like Sergio Puerta, is crucial for allowing this story the depth and dignity it deserves, and to reclaim a glorious history now displaced by violence. Puerta appeared on High Times magazine many times, but notably once 30 years ago. That year, he’d produced around 120 different weed strains. All while narcotic and state-backed networks prohibited master growers like Sergio from cultivating cannabis in their own regions and homelands. Now, Sergio is back in Santa Marta, leading multiple initiatives. The Marimbera generation, and those who grew under its shadow, are ready to rewrite history and set the record straight.

<p>The post How Washington Killed the Colombian Cannabis Boom And Created the Cocaine Cartels by Accident first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post How Washington Killed the Colombian Cannabis Boom And Created the Cocaine Cartels by Accident appeared first on Paradise Found.

Every nongovernment participant selected for the DEA’s rescheduling hearing opposed reform. By the time the record closed, one marquee witness had undercut a central part of his side’s case, another had reportedly acknowledged that cannabis meets the Schedule III criteria, and the opposition’s strongest agency scientist had exposed the legal question likely to shape what comes next. Briefs and transcript corrections are due August 17, while a parallel court fight is already underway.

This is the third installment in High Times’ coverage of the DEA’s rescheduling hearing. Read Part I, “The DEA Blocked the Cameras at This Cannabis Hearing. Here’s What They Didn’t Want You to See,” and Part II, “Prohibitionists Just Argued Themselves Into a Corner: To Stop Weed Reform, They Told a Court How Much Money They’d Lose”

The states of Nebraska, Idaho and Indiana called Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal to make a straightforward argument: that legal cannabis fuels crime, and that federal rescheduling would make it worse. Honsal runs law enforcement in the heart of California’s Emerald Triangle, the most storied weed-growing region in the country. If anyone could tell a federal tribunal that legalization bred lawlessness, it was supposed to be him.

Then the Justice Department got him on cross-examination, and he complicated his own side’s theory. Regulated cannabis can help law enforcement, Honsal told the tribunal, and most of the California product diverted to other states comes from unlicensed operators, not the legal market. That is according to attorneys from Vicente LLP who were in the room. It did not erase every concern in the states’ filing. But it undercut a central implication of their crime argument, that the regulated market itself was the engine of the crime they described.

The states’ own pre-hearing statement had blamed the growth of the illicit market directly on changes in cannabis law, complete with a warning about organized criminal groups buying up California property to mass-produce weed for interstate sale. Under oath, their witness complicated that account. And it wasn’t a slip. Honsal has said versions of this for years. Back in 2019, he told the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors that the number of illegal grows in the county was falling, “and that is what we call a win,” and that large-scale trafficking operations were on the wane. His point then, as on the stand, was not that legalization had erased every harm. It was that the illicit market had shrunk after legalization, even as the operators who remained outside the law changed tactics.

The Problem the Opposition Carried Through the Hearing

Honsal was the clearest example of a problem that ran through the whole proceeding. When the opposition’s witnesses engaged the government’s actual legal criteria, some handed the government useful admissions. And when its strongest scientist went after the rule, she made the fight about which legal standard applies.

The most consequential reported admission came from Smart Approaches to Marijuana’s marquee expert, Harvard’s Dr. Bertha Madras, among the most credentialed cannabis skeptics in the country. The Marijuana Herald reported, citing a source familiar with the exchange, that Madras answered “yes” when asked under cross-examination whether cannabis meets Schedule III’s statutory criteria. The account was corroborated by The Dales Report’s correspondent inside the hearing. Until that transcript is public, the precise scope of the admission remains uncertain.

The Opposition’s Strongest Witness Made the Fight About the Test

Not every opposition witness helped the government. The opposition’s strongest moment came from a witness who works for the agency defending the rule.

SAM subpoenaed Dr. Luli Akinfiresoye, a pharmacologist in the DEA’s own Drug and Chemical Evaluation Section and an author of the agency’s 2024 scientific review. She testified that under the DEA’s traditional five-part test, cannabis lacks a currently accepted medical use, is not consistently reproducible, and is diverted through state medical systems. The government declined to cross-examine her, leaving that testimony untested on cross even as its own affirmative case rested on a different medical-use framework.

That silence has been read as confidence. Business of Cannabis interpreted it as the government signaling that Akinfiresoye’s five-part standard had been superseded and that her testimony was aimed at the court record rather than at this judge. That is a plausible reading, but it is an interpretation, not something the government proved by declining to ask her a question. Her testimony gave SAM the factual foundation for its strongest legal argument: not merely that cannabis fails the DEA’s traditional five-part test, but that the government could not replace that framework with the two-part inquiry it used to reach its conclusion. That is the same dispute the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel addressed in 2024, when it found exclusive reliance on the five-part test impermissibly narrow and concluded that HHS’s two-part inquiry was sufficient to establish a currently accepted medical use.

That is the real shape of what the opposition built. Its most effective play was not to prove that cannabis fails the standard the government applied. It was to contest which standard governs in the first place.

One Hearing, Two Audiences

That helps explain the rest of the opposition’s case. Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek Julius set the scope narrowly on day one: whether cannabis beyond FDA-approved products and state-licensed medical cannabis, both moved to Schedule III in April, meets the criteria for accepted medical use, comparative abuse potential and dependence. Much of the opposition’s testimony concentrated elsewhere, on youth exposure, potency, mental-health risk and diversion. Those issues can bear on abuse potential and on the controls placed around cannabis. They did less to rebut the government’s threshold claim that cannabis has at least one currently accepted medical use and a risk profile consistent with Schedule III.

The gap between that testimony and the question in front of Julius suggests that the judge was only one audience. The other was the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where three challenges to the April rescheduling order have already been consolidated and a motion to stay the order is pending. This does not prove the opposition expected to lose before Julius; parties preserve issues for judicial review regardless of how confident they are. But it fits what observers in the room described. MJBizDaily reported that much of the opposition testimony appeared aimed at building a record for later litigation, and quoted NORML’s Paul Armentano saying opponents were likely establishing a record for appeal rather than primarily trying to influence the ALJ.

The government, for its part, chose not to fight every point. As journalist Natalie Fertig reported from inside the hearing for Cultivated News, the DEA cross-examined sparingly, sometimes only a handful of questions. Its theory was comparatively narrow: establish at least one accepted medical use, a lower abuse potential than Schedule I and II substances, and a dependence profile consistent with Schedule III. On safety, the government’s point was specific: that cannabis does not produce the fatal respiratory-depression pattern associated with opioids. That strategy makes sense if the government believed the governing framework had already done most of the work. But it also left Akinfiresoye’s contrary testimony largely untested on cross.

What Happens Next, and When

The day after the record closed, Julius issued an order for transcript corrections and post-hearing briefs that set the next real marker. Designated parties have until August 17 to file optional post-hearing briefs, up to 50 pages, one per party, with no adverse inference for declining to file. The same date is the deadline to propose corrections to the hearing transcript, and those corrections are limited to genuine transcription errors, misspellings and misattributed lines. They cannot be used to revise testimony or to walk back something a witness said. Whatever the witnesses said on the stand is locked in. Only transcription errors get fixed.

After the briefs, Julius drafts a recommended decision, which is not binding. Once it lands, parties get 20 days to file exceptions, and then the full record is certified to DEA Administrator Terrance C. “Terry” Cole, who makes the agency’s final determination. No timetable has been set for either Julius’s recommendation or Cole’s final call. Meanwhile, the parallel D.C. Circuit litigation continues.

The record in front of Julius is less favorable to the opposition than its hold on every nongovernment participant slot might suggest. Honsal undercut a central implication of the states’ crime argument. Madras reportedly acknowledged that cannabis satisfies the Schedule III criteria, though the transcript will determine the scope of that admission. Akinfiresoye gave the opposition its strongest answer, and in doing so clarified the decisive fork in the case: if Julius accepts the government’s two-part framework for currently accepted medical use, the path to Schedule III is relatively straightforward. If he concludes that the DEA’s traditional five-part test still governs, it is not.

That leaves the opposition’s strongest argument in this hearing resting on a legal claim: that the government used the wrong test for accepted medical use. The D.C. Circuit is already considering a separate challenge to April’s partial rescheduling order, and any final rule extending Schedule III to cannabis more broadly would likely trigger another round of judicial review, potentially before the same court.

<p>The post Prohibitionists Packed the DEA Hearing to Keep Marijuana in Schedule I. Their Own Witnesses Made the Case for Schedule III. first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post Prohibitionists Packed the DEA Hearing to Keep Marijuana in Schedule I. Their Own Witnesses Made the Case for Schedule III. appeared first on Paradise Found.

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.”

<p>The post We Legalized Weed… So Why Does It Still Feel Broken? first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post We Legalized Weed… So Why Does It Still Feel Broken? appeared first on Paradise Found.

The DEA invited only opponents to its rescheduling hearing, turned reform supporters away and refused to livestream it. Then the government’s own witnesses stood up and made the case that cannabis has real medical value and is safer than substances sold at every gas station. Here is what has been happening inside a room the public is not allowed to see.

The most consequential federal cannabis hearing in more than fifty years began on June 29 in a courtroom in Arlington, Virginia, with roughly 25 public seats and no cameras. The DEA denied a request from Marijuana Moment, a congressman and other news outlets to livestream the proceedings. So what the country gets is secondhand, filtered through the handful of reporters and attorneys allowed in the room, and through the daily social media broadcasts of the people who want the reform dead.

Strip away the noise and the picture inside is clear. The government is arguing, with its own scientists, that cannabis belongs out of Schedule I. The case against it has so far amounted to attacking the test rather than the plant.

A Hearing Built for One Side

The setup matters because it shapes everything that follows. The DEA is the proponent of the rule, a strange posture for an agency that spent half a century defending prohibition. Under the process Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche set in motion, only “interested persons” could participate, and DEA Administrator Terrance Cole decided reform supporters did not qualify because they were not “adversely affected or aggrieved” by the reform. The result is an official participant list, published on the DEA’s own website, made up entirely of opponents: the National Drug and Alcohol Screening Association, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, the states of Nebraska, Idaho, Indiana and Louisiana, DUID Victim Voices, Kenneth Finn MD, and Phillip A. Drum PharmD.

Reform advocates gathered outside DEA headquarters before the first gavel to say they had been shut out. The Marijuana Policy Project put the irony plainly, noting the DEA would be arguing for the first time in its history that cannabis meets the requirements for removal from Schedule I. The agency built the hearing, chose the guests and then had to make the case its own guests came to tear down.

What the Government’s Witnesses Actually Said

The heart of the hearing is a single legal question. To leave Schedule I, cannabis needs just one currently accepted medical use. The government says it has at least three: pain, anorexia tied to a medical condition and chemotherapy-related nausea.

Cannabis Business Times, whose reporter was in the room for the FDA witness’s testimony, reported that FDA scientist Dominic Chiapperino walked the court through the agency’s ten-month evaluation. His team compared cannabis against heroin, fentanyl, oxycodone, cocaine, benzodiazepines, alcohol and tobacco. Asked directly whether marijuana has fewer overdose deaths than those comparators, he answered, “Yes, that’s what we observed.” He said cannabis withdrawal looks like tobacco withdrawal, and that the data supports Schedule III. Of 39 clinical trials his team reviewed, the strongest evidence was for neuropathic pain.

The government’s second witness, New Hampshire physician Corey Burchman, testified on day two about treating pain patients. According to sources in the room who spoke with Marijuana Moment and Cultivated, Burchman said that once medical cannabis became available he and his colleagues would “avidly use that ability to limit opioids,” and that some patients transitioned off prescription painkillers entirely. His line on relative safety was the sharpest of the hearing. “Withdrawal from opioids is like a dumpster fire,” he said. “Withdrawal from marijuana is more like a dying glowing ember of a campfire.”

None of this makes cannabis harmless. Heavy use is linked to cannabis use disorder, a real risk the science does not dispute. The government did not pretend otherwise. Its own lawyer, James Schwartz, told the court the hearing was “not about legalization” and that the government was “not putting forth any evidence to suggest marijuana is not dangerous,” only that a drug must be weighed by its risks against its medical benefit. That is a scientific argument. What came back at it mostly was not.

The Opponents Are Fighting the Test, Not the Plant

Unable to dispute that cannabis is used medically across more than 40 states, opponents spent day two attacking the yardstick. For years, the FDA used a five-part test to judge accepted medical use, one that demanded known, reproducible chemistry and large controlled trials. In 2023, the government switched to a two-part test that asks whether licensed providers widely use the substance under state law, and whether credible science supports at least one condition. Opponents call the switch proof that politics corrupted the process.

The problem is that the switch was neither secret nor cannabis-specific. In 2024, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel ruled the old five-part test “impermissibly narrow,” and the DEA has since used the two-part standard for other substances. Schwartz told the court the legality of the test was already settled and off the table for the hearing. When NDASA attorney David Evans pressed Chiapperino on why the agency abandoned the old test anyway, DEA lawyers objected and he withdrew the question.

There is a reason the old test failed cannabis, and it is not safety. As Vanderbilt law professor Robert Mikos has written, the five-part test amounted to a kind of tyranny: it demanded large-scale clinical trials to justify removing a drug from Schedule I, while Schedule I status blocked exactly those trials from happening. It is a test botanical cannabis, with many active compounds rather than a single molecule, could never pass. One attorney in the room described the opponents’ whole line of attack to Cultivated News as “ships passing in the night,” an argument about a test that is not material to the case actually before the judge.

Where the Prohibitionist Case Falls Apart

Outside the courtroom, the loudest voice has been Kevin Sabet of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, who has posted a video nearly every day. The videos are confident and aggrieved, and they keep colliding with the record.

He described a hearing packed with “the suits, all the industry folks.” There were industry executives and lawyers in the public gallery, but not one is a designated participant with the power to question witnesses or enter evidence. That role belongs entirely to the opponents. He said the government was arguing “the opposite of what the science says,” yet SAM’s own outlet, The Drug Report, reported that the FDA witness testified cannabis has accepted medical use for three conditions, the exact opposite of Sabet’s claim that there is none. He called Chiapperino’s acknowledgment that cannabis would fail the old five-part test “truly extraordinary,” without mentioning the Justice Department had already ruled that test unlawfully narrow.

Then there is the money. Sabet’s strongest-sounding argument is that the government moved “solely because” of donations, and the donations are real. Trulieve CEO Kim Rivers, whom Forbes called “the Trump whisperer,” was in the Oval Office when Trump signed the rescheduling order, and cannabis companies gave millions to a PAC that funded his. But “solely” has to erase a ten-month scientific review, an eight-factor analysis and years of majority public support to hold up, and MJBizDaily noted it is doubtful the political argument carries any weight in a hearing about medicine. It is also an odd charge from a group funded by donors it will not name, whose action arm reported $8.6 million in contributions in 2024. On day three, Sabet suggested the government’s pain doctor was “maybe even paid,” then added “who knows,” while calling his own side “the real scientists.”

The pattern is consistent, and it is not new. In a 2025 letter to Trump, SAM claimed drug cartels were running marijuana farms “many licensed at the state level,” and cited a Wall Street Journal article that said the opposite, that the sites were unlicensed. SAM could not produce evidence that any cartel had been licensed. For years, the group has pushed the claim that cannabis lowers IQ, leaning on a single decade-old study challenged in the very journal that published it and that the original author’s own follow-up work could not confirm. NORML’s Paul Armentano, who has tracked SAM for years, calls the continued use of that talking point “unethical” and “dishonest.” On day three, Sabet claimed the FDA witness had blown up the idea of cannabis as a PTSD treatment, a straw man given that no serious advocate claims cannabis cures PTSD and that PTSD is not among the three conditions the government’s case rests on.

Why the Noise, If They’re Winning the Room

So here is the question worth sitting with. If the prohibitionists secured a hearing where every invited participant is on their side, where supporters were excluded and the public cannot even watch, why the frantic daily messaging? Why tell people the room is full of an industry that has no vote, that the science says something it does not, that a settled legal question is a fresh scandal?

Because the room was never the hard part. Public opinion is. Most Americans support reform, the medical evidence keeps accumulating, and a government agency that fought legalization for fifty years just stood up and said, through its own FDA witness, that cannabis carries less overdose risk than the substances sold at any gas station. You can stack a hearing. You cannot stack a country. The hearing was the easy win. Moving the public is the fight SAM is actually losing, and it shows in how loudly they argue about a room they already control.

The hearing runs through July 15. The opponents present their own witnesses next, among them Harvard’s Bertha Madras and Yale’s Deepak Cyril D’Souza, and their attorneys will cross-examine Burchman. Sources told Cultivated to expect their knives sharpened. They will get their turn on the record. The record so far belongs to the other side.

This article is a reported analysis. It is based on public records, federal filings, and on-the-record reporting from Cannabis Business Times, Marijuana Moment, Cultivated and MJBizDaily, as well as statements made publicly by the people named. The views and interpretations are the author’s own. Claims about what was said inside the hearing are attributed to participants and to outlets that spoke with people in the room, as the proceedings were not livestreamed and official transcripts are not yet available.

<p>The post The DEA Blocked the Cameras at This Cannabis Hearing. Here’s What They Didn’t Want You to See. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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With Britain weeks away from a new Prime Minister, former UK parliamentary adviser James Matthewson argues that the incoming leader, widely expected to be Labour’s Andy Burnham, has a rare chance to be bold: end the war on weed and pour the proceeds into teen mental health.

The grass isn’t always greener on the other side, but when it comes to the options available to Britain’s next Prime Minister, there could be a real pot of gold hiding in plain sight.

For American readers, a bit of context. Britain is on the verge of a change at the top, with Labour’s Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, widely tipped as the frontrunner to be the next Prime Minister. He has built a reputation as a plain-talking figure who likes to position himself to the left of his party’s establishment. And far too few voices in mainstream British politics have made the argument I’m about to make, so I think it’s high time a Labour government finally hashed it out.

For a long time, the idea of drug policy reform has belonged to the fringes of our politics, with parties like the Greens or the Liberal Democrats leading the calls and shaping the conversation. But times have changed, and one of the biggest issues facing any prospective leader of our country right now is that many apathetic voters have simply lost faith in the ability of their politicians to change things. Changes do not always need to be drastic or highly visible. Some areas of policy require governments to wield their power like a scalpel, shaping the edges of laws and reforms with fine precision. But when facing a country that has seen few progressive shakeups at the heart of government, signalling your desire to shape the world we live in, and to catch up with the shifting tides of time, is crucial.

Born in 1994, I came up when drug education was a big deal in schools, and anyone around my age will tell you the same thing. Whether it was the theatre-in-education actors who came into school or the uninterested teacher handed extra responsibilities, what we were taught about cannabis was largely laughed out of the classroom before we even started high school. The reality stood in such blatant contrast to even the most progressive version of the message, the notion that weed was a gateway drug that would have you taking Class A’s by the time you were 17.

The real issue that many my age found out in due course was that the people in charge of that messaging did not truly understand what they were talking about. I may have spent years of my wayward youth as a stoner, but in truth the bong-hitting, Dorito-munching teenager in my past is not the person I am advocating for when it comes to reforming Britain’s drug policy.

Cannabis has changed. The older generations who smoked recreationally, or even very recreationally, had been consuming an entirely different substance from the one we were beginning to. Skunk and high-potency strains were just becoming popular as I was in my era of smoking every day, and in my experience the difference was stark. After several experiences with it, I became more selective, and eventually I quit altogether. I haven’t smoked in years, but I smell on the street what we all do, something closer to cat urine than the earthy, tempting plant I had enjoyed in my youth.

I watched what I believe that stuff did to friends of mine, and by the time the messaging and information began to slowly change, it felt too late. This nasty, almost synthetic-seeming weed was everywhere in the UK. That was very different from the situation in North America, where, as the decriminalization and then legalisation movement spread across the hyper-capitalist United States and into Canada, the quality of the cannabis increased and the revenue generated skyrocketed. Comments from American friends visiting the UK always remind me of this difference. They don’t even recognise the smell the rest of us have to tolerate at bus stops, out of car windows and on our high streets.

A good friend of mine, the social media creator and trade union organiser Craig Stewart, known as @thatguycraig on Instagram, was in Chicago earlier this month for the international trade union conference known as Labor Notes. While there he texted me, “this is incredible, they’ve even got weed unions,” along with a photo of a union rep from California wearing a t-shirt from his local branch of the cannabis growers’ union. Imagine what such an industry, grown from scratch here in the UK, could look like, especially if developed under a progressive government. Trade unions could be central to the vision of such a new sector, and the economic benefit alone has already turned the heads of even Conservative Members of Parliament and British business leaders.

The 2025 report from the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, titled “High Returns,” found that legalising and regulating cannabis for non-medical adult use could generate over 15,000 new jobs and up to £1.5 billion in annual net benefits to the Treasury through tax revenue and savings across the criminal justice system. Specifically: projected tax revenues of £1.1 billion, the creation of 15,525 new jobs, and criminal justice savings of £284 million. The context of the illegal market is just as compelling. The estimated value of the UK’s recreational cannabis trade is around £2 billion annually, all of which currently flows to unregulated producers, suppliers and organised crime groups. The social impact is felt in every corner of our country, because where there is demand, there is supply.

The economic case is, of course, tempting to avowed capitalists, which should make it no surprise that Americans have led the way on legalisation in the West. But for left-wingers in Britain, there is even more to be done to make cannabis legalisation a policy that can kill two problem birds with one stone.

In 2025, a record 850,000 children accessed NHS mental health support. Yet around 385,000 children are still waiting. Children with mental health difficulties are three times more likely to miss significant amounts of school. At the end of July 2025, over half a million referrals to children’s mental health services were still waiting to start treatment, with half of those young people having waited over a year. In March 2026, only 1 in 9 under-18s with a suspected diagnosis had had a first appointment within the recommended 13 weeks, according to research from the University of Manchester.

Getting ahead of young people’s mental health challenges requires ambitious policy-making, the same sort that would create a brand new stream of tax revenue from a legalised and regulated cannabis industry. Ring-fencing that income for young people’s mental health services could let a Burnham government do something truly radical: commit to providing UK teenagers with a guaranteed amount of counselling and therapy contact hours before they leave high school. It’s that kind of combined policy power that I believe could let Burnham signal clearly what his vision for the country’s future is, while tackling multiple issues in one action.

Obviously this is without any of the in-depth fiscal analysis that must come before any further policy development, but the ideas alone should be recognised for their merits. Burnham needs to show he is serious about change. The inevitable attacks from right-wingers in the media and the political sphere will call him “Pot Head Andy,” but if he were to approach this with confidence and secure the buy-in of the labour and trade union movement, his government could finally take pride in progressive change-making.

Pre-empting concerns about anti-social behaviour, and tackling the existing irritant of public weed-smoking, the government could simultaneously introduce a fine on smoking any cannabis products in public spaces. That fine could feed the same ring-fenced budget, either symbolically or literally.

Bringing the UK up to date with the rest of the world, and using the power of public office to refocus efforts on future generations’ mental health, is a net positive that I believe would benefit both the country and a brand new Burnham-led government. Polling suggests the public is closer to this than Westminster assumes; YouGov’s 2026 survey lays out where British opinion actually sits.

Andy Burnham has a once-in-a-generation chance to do something truly high-minded. I just hope he has the confidence to roll with it.

James Matthewson is a UK broadcaster, writer and former political adviser in the UK Parliament.

This is a guest opinion piece from an external, unpaid contributor. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent the reporting or editorial positions of High Times.

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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.

<p>The post This Cannabis Company Had It Hard for Years. Now It’s in Court to Undo the Reform That Made It Easier for Others. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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The hearing that could decide weed’s federal future starts June 29. The DEA invited seven participants, and every one of them is against reform. It won’t be livestreamed. And loading the room this hard might be the thing that gets the whole rule thrown out in court.

On June 29, the federal government will hold a hearing that will help decide whether all marijuana (not just medical cannabis and FDA-approved products) moves to Schedule III. Seven outside parties got a seat in the room. All seven oppose rescheduling. Not one supporter of reform made the list.

That is not an exaggeration. The DEA released its roster of “interested persons” on June 18: the National Drug & Alcohol Screening Association, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the prohibitionist group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, the states of Nebraska, Idaho, Indiana and Louisiana, the group DUID Victim Voices, and two individual doctors. Every name on it has lined up against loosening federal cannabis law, and some have sued to block the reform outright. As Cannabis Business Times put it, this appears to be the first known ALJ hearing on a rule of major public interest in which one entire side is shut out.

You Can Only Get In If You’re Against It

The reason no reform supporter got in is a piece of logic worthy of a Kafka novel. To qualify as an “interested person,” the DEA decided you have to be “adversely affected or aggrieved” by the proposed rule. Since reform groups support moving cannabis off Schedule I, the agency reasoned, they cannot be harmed by it, so they have no standing to show up.

That logic swept out everyone. NORML, which has represented cannabis consumers for more than 50 years, was rejected, as the group itself reported. So were the Drug Policy Alliance, the American Trade Association for Cannabis & Hemp, and Nabis, the country’s largest licensed cannabis wholesale distributor. In a rejection letter to the Drug Policy Alliance, first reported by Marijuana Moment, DEA Administrator Terrance Cole wrote that the group had not shown it was “adversely affected or aggrieved” because it supports the reform in the first place.

The detail that gives the game away: the veterans group Hemp for Victory qualified to participate under the same definition, for the same proposed rule, during the Biden administration, when then-Administrator Anne Milgram seated both supporters and opponents. The rule did not change. The definition did not change. The administration did. Milgram’s process had 25 designated participants, some of them pro-reform. This one has seven, all against.

“More than 70 percent of public comments submitted on the proposed rule supported decriminalization, yet many of the patients, consumers, families, small businesses and individuals who have borne the consequences of prohibition have been excluded from meaningful participation in these proceedings,” Cat Packer, the Drug Policy Alliance’s director of drug markets and legal regulation, told Marijuana Moment. Researchers at Johns Hopkins and UC San Diego found that 92.4% of the roughly 43,000 public commenters backed the Schedule III move or wanted more reform. None of that view will have a voice in the room.

Now the DEA Has to Argue for the Reform It Spent Decades Fighting

Here is where it gets strange. With every outside supporter locked out, the only party left to defend rescheduling is the DEA itself. The chief administrative law judge overseeing the hearing, Derek Julius, confirmed in a preliminary order that the government is “the proponent” of the rule and carries “the burden of proof.” So the agency that spent decades as the hardest line in federal drug enforcement is now, on paper, the lone voice arguing to loosen the law.

Except it won’t quite say it wants to. The proposed rule itself notes the “DEA has not yet made a determination as to its views of the appropriate schedule for marijuana.” The agency has to carry the rule without committing to it, a posture reform supporters have watched with deep skepticism, given the DEA’s history.

That tension produced the oddest fight of the run-up. Smart Approaches to Marijuana, one of the seven invited opponents, wants to call Luli Akinfiresoye, a pharmacologist inside the DEA’s own Drug and Chemical Evaluation Section, to testify. She authored a report in the earlier Biden-era process that tied cannabis to psychosis, depression and cognitive impairment, exactly the kind of testimony an opponent would want on the record. And the DEA is resisting putting her on the stand. “The Government does not intend to identify Dr. Akinfiresoye as witness for our case in chief,” a DEA attorney wrote to SAM, per Marijuana Moment, leaving the group to try to subpoena her and run into a wall of Touhy regulations and Privacy Act claims. So the DEA stacked the room with opponents, then moved to keep its own most damaging anti-cannabis witness off the stand. Both things are true at once.

A Public Hearing You Can’t Watch

For a proceeding everyone keeps calling historic, it will be remarkably hard to see. Julius ruled that the hearing “will not be televised, livestreamed, or broadcasted in any way,” and barred recording devices from the courtroom and even the lobby. If you want to watch one of the most consequential cannabis policy hearings in a generation, you have to fly to a DEA facility at 700 Army Navy Drive in Arlington, Virginia, and hope for one of a handful of seats.

The judge wrote that the “national public interest in this issue predicates towards a policy of transparency” in the same order that banned the cameras. The Biden-era version of this hearing was livestreamed. This one will not be. Marijuana Moment’s counsel, Joseph Bondy, sent Julius a letter this week asking him to reconsider, arguing that a “public hearing is not meaningfully public if access depends on the happenstance of limited physical attendance.” The scope has been narrowed, too: because medical cannabis already moved to Schedule III in April, the judge ruled the hearing will weigh only whether the rest of the plant should follow. And there will be no closing arguments.

Stacking the Deck Might Backfire

The twist no one stacking this hearing seems to have priced in: a one-sided record is a weak record. Whatever the DEA decides, the rule will almost certainly be challenged in court, and it already is. Three separate coalitions have filed consolidated petitions in the D.C. Circuit seeking to freeze or kill the rescheduling order outright.

A reviewing court looks at the administrative record that the agency built. If that record contains only opposition, with no evidence or testimony from the supporters who make up the overwhelming majority of public comment, the government may have a hard time showing it weighed the question fairly. Cannabis Business Times flagged exactly this risk: the government “may lack a sufficient administrative record to defend a Schedule III decision in judicial review” precisely because it shut the supporters out. In trying to control the room, the DEA may have handed reform’s lawyers their opening.

Even a Win Might Not Mean Much

And here is the part that should temper anyone expecting a clean outcome either way: nothing about this hearing is binding. There is no verdict at the end. Julius will eventually issue a recommendation, but the DEA and the Justice Department are free to follow it or ignore it, and there is no deadline forcing them to act at all. “There are two parties under no deadline: the ALJ, and the DEA,” Jason Adelstone, an attorney with Harris Sliwoski, told MJBizDaily. “The ALJ can take as long as he likes to make a determination, and the DEA can take as much time as they want after they’ve received it.”

The judge’s recommendation is not even limited to a yes or no on Schedule III. He could land on Schedule II instead, a tighter classification that would tangle the existing $28 billion industry in pharmacy-style controls, or recommend leaving cannabis right where it is on Schedule I. We saw how fragile this gets last year, when the Biden-era version of these proceedings stalled and was ultimately scrapped. As Riana Durrett, who directs the Cannabis Policy Institute at UNLV, told MJBizDaily, there will be no neat resolution, and “we may not get all the way through the process in the near future.”

The hearing runs June 29 through July 15, with a recess on July 3 so everyone can celebrate 250 years of American independence, then back at it July 6. The government presents first on June 29, followed across July by NDASA, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, DUID Victim Voices, the two doctors, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the four states, each with its own assigned day. When it ends, the judge issues a recommendation, the DEA decides if and when to act, and the courts likely get the last word. The people most affected by the outcome, the millions who use the plant and the businesses built around it, will be watching from outside the building. If they can find a seat.

<p>The post Inside The Stacked, Closed-Door DEA Hearing That Will Decide Weed’s Federal Future first appeared on High Times.</p>

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This article originally appeared in High Times’ 50th Anniversary print issue. Get yours here.

In the Rif Mountains, Indigenous Berber farmers have grown cannabis for generations and gone to prison for it. Now the country wants their hash on the global medical cannabis market. A dispatch from Morocco’s kif country with veteran activist Abdellatif Adebibe.

In the Rif Mountains of Morocco, the cultivation of kif (the word for cannabis in Arabic, which means “pleasure”) has long sustained thousands of Indigenous Berber farmers and their families, despite colonialism, state repression and ongoing structural inequalities. “We have resisted to preserve the temple of the plant,” says veteran reform activist Abdellatif Adebibe, as he smokes from a wooden pipe filled with Morocco’s endemic Beldiya strain, mixed with tobacco.

Adebibe, 70, would like to take his final breath, whenever that day may come, in the simple home where he was born in Morocco’s impoverished High Central Rif, which is, for him, the temple of kif. It’s a remote region where tall cedar trees line the hillsides some 1,600 metres above the nearby Mediterranean sea and, according to a myth popular with the locals, where Noah is said to have built his ark. But first, he wants to complete his mission to help liberate his people from the tyranny of anti-cannabis laws, which sometimes saw peasant farmers arrested as drug traffickers for producing Morocco’s vaunted hashish.

The King’s Pardon

That future came a step closer last year, when Morocco’s king Mohammed VI issued a royal pardon for almost 5,000 people convicted or wanted over illegal cannabis growing. In 2021, the country had legalized cultivation for medical purposes across three provinces, in a first for a Muslim country. At the time, Adebibe alluded to a song sung to welcome the Prophet and said the full moon had just appeared.

“We want to escape from being persecuted, but thanks to God now we will be ok, we just need to find a way to export,” says Adebibe, lamenting how countries which have legalized cannabis usually have strict controls over imports.

“We are also fighting for [permission to launch] an eco-tourism project so that people from all over the world can come here and experience our culture,” he adds. That vision includes legal coffeeshops and avenues for tourists to visit kif plantations, currently forbidden. Still, it’s not difficult to find a tucked-away cafe to smoke kif from a long terracotta and wood pipe in Chefchaouen, the home of illegal cannabis tourism in Morocco.

With some Rifian villages destitute, roads in disrepair and a general lack of basic infrastructure, Adebibe says it’s a no-brainer for Morocco to take its reforms one step further and bring cannabis tourism out of the shadows. “They need to legalize it because it’s a natural plant,” he says, “We have the knowledge to make the number one [cannabis globally].” He’s backed by his 30 years of campaigning, which has taken him to the UN in New York and Vienna, as well as South Africa and Jamaica.

When the State Was Absent

How long Rifian farmers have grown cannabis is unclear, but it has certainly been for several hundred years. Adebibe claims it is a thousands-year-old native plant, and rejects the well-documented evidence that cannabis somehow originated in India. Certainly, however, it was not until the early 70s when growers in the Rif began adopting the Asian method of collecting the resin from cannabis flowers and compressing it into hashish, a more potent product that was also easier to transport abroad.

“The drug baron is the cornerstone of the community,” a farmer said to Bloomberg in 2022, reflecting the deep mistrust of central authorities and big business. “When the state was not shouldering its responsibility towards this region, the drug baron was taking care of us by buying the crop every year.”

Moroccan hash quickly flooded Europe and fuelled countercultures as dealers like the Welshman Howard Marks, better known as Mr Nice, gained notoriety, fame and wealth. But today, in the Muslim country, even as cannabis becomes legal around the world, kif remains extremely stigmatized, says Khalid Tinasti, a research associate at the Switzerland-based Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding.

“15,000 men were sentenced over the years for farming cannabis. It caused socio-economic problems because men ran away from their homes. And so until recently you’d find families where there were just women and children,” he adds, detailing how the state criminalized entire villages. Even today, despite the reforms, “young men in the poorest parts of the country are still going to prison for smoking a joint,” Tinasti adds.

And yet, kif is everywhere. “You want happy?” hash-cake sellers in surf towns ask tourists discreetly, while holding very indiscreet platters of psychoactive baked goods. Other dealers mumble “hashish, kif?” with less poetic verve but equal sincerity. In Marrakesh, the smell of hashish sometimes wafts into your orbit, though, as in other cities, it’s not sold as openly.

What Comes Next

The prices for foreigners may start astronomically high, but they can go as low as $2 per gram. Equally, the quality can vary wildly, depending on where you are, from dried-out bunk to the most delectable hashish you are ever likely to smoke. Perhaps the dealers are right to put a premium on their product, which Adebibe refers to as the country’s “treasure”. The Rif’s farmers have reportedly been receiving about 4% of the profits from Morocco’s illegal market, but that figure could triple once all sales are legal, even while the market expands significantly, potentially reaching a staggering $15 billion.

Still, there are serious concerns that small growers could be left out of a legal market, as they have elsewhere in the world, with the Rif’s legacy of defiance co-opted rather than preserved. “Multinationals want to get their hands on it,” says Adebibe. “But it is our cultural heritage. It brings you up. [When you smoke kif] You’re very lucid, very calm, you think well, you eat well, and you make love well.”

For him, Morocco has everything in place to be a global cannabis leader: history, expertise, climate, quality and reputation. In the days following our conversation, Morocco officially entered the international medical cannabis market with its first export, of 50kg of Beldiya, to Australia, the beginning of a new chapter where the crop is no longer sped out on Zodiac boats, but shipped legally. It is the natural next step, perhaps, for a plant that has been a quiet ally in the Rif’s long battle for dignity and autonomy, representing both heritage and contraband, lifeline and liability, caught between centuries of rebellion and an uncertain future.

As the summer’s harvest ends in late August, Adebibe is positive about what the future holds, while remaining philosophical. “This is a story of man, and kif.”

<p>The post There’s a Mountain in Morocco Where Everyone Grows Hash. The Locals Call It the Temple of the Plant. The Government Called It Illegal. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Travelers flooded the comments admitting they fly with weed. A top cannabis lawyer says that is not the federal exposure people think it is. The confession that counts is the one operators are signing to go legal.

High Times posted a routine update. The TSA had quietly changed a line on its website about traveling with medical marijuana, and the comment section did something worth paying attention to. It filled with people admitting they had been doing this for years.

Comment after comment said the same thing. They had flown with cannabis for years, some for decades. Flower, vapes, edibles, concentrates. A handful copped to amounts well past anything personal. The throughline was that the TSA had never seemed to care, that the agency was looking for weapons and explosives, and waved the rest through.

Plenty of others read it differently. They called it a trap, a setup, a sting, and joked about how many feds they figured were reading the thread. Which gets at the question we had too. If you publicly admit you have been flying with weed, is that a confession the government can use against you?

We put it to Bob Hoban, a cannabis attorney who, by his own count, has drafted marijuana laws and regulations in over 35 countries and roughly a dozen U.S. states, often working directly for the governments doing the regulating. His answer reframed the whole thing.

Start with what is true. Rescheduling did not legalize carrying weed through an airport. Recreational marijuana is still Schedule I, and simple possession is a federal offense under 21 U.S.C. 844, the statute covering personal-quantity possession. Even the state-licensed medical products moved to Schedule III in April are not automatically legal to possess, because a Schedule III substance is lawful to hold only with proper authorization, and whether a state medical card satisfies that federally is one of the questions the order left open. On paper, a joint in your carry-on is still a federal risk. Hoban’s point is about how that law actually gets enforced.

Federal enforcement, in practice, tends to focus on trafficking-scale quantities rather than personal possession. When the TSA comes across someone’s personal stash, its own policy is to refer the matter to local law enforcement, not to call in federal agents. Depending on the state, that can mean a shrug, a confiscation, a small fine or a ticket. The federal system tends to hand the small stuff off.

So a person in the comments saying they fly with weed is, in Hoban’s read, describing conduct that is technically illegal and realistically not the thing federal authorities are going to pursue. The risk is real on paper and small in practice.

Which makes it the wrong confession to fixate on.

The Real Confession Is On A Federal Form

Here is the one that counts. On April 23, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order moving state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I, the federal government’s most restrictive drug category, to Schedule III, the tier reserved for drugs with accepted medical use. To collect the benefits of that move, including relief from Section 280E, the tax rule that blocks cannabis businesses from writing off normal expenses, medical operators have to register with the DEA.

That registration form is where the legal tension becomes unavoidable. Section 4, the Liability Questions, asks each applicant one question that many operators in the country have to answer the same way:

“Has anyone who will be involved in the ownership or operation of the firm previously manufactured, distributed, and/or dispensed any controlled substance without a DEA registration authorizing such activity?”

DEA Medical Marijuana Dispensary Information Submission form, Section 4

Read it again. A state-licensed cannabis company that has manufactured, distributed or dispensed marijuana, a controlled substance, without a DEA registration, because that registration did not exist until now, has an honest answer of yes. And a yes comes with instructions: name every person involved and write a brief explanation of the conduct, as Cannabis Business Times laid out when it first flagged the question.

In plain terms, the form asks operators to account for what they did before this registration existed. Answer honestly, and you may be documenting federally illegal conduct. Answer falsely, and you create a separate legal problem. Filing false information on the application carries up to four years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The Government’s Answer

Cannabis Business Times, which first reported the issue in late April, put the question to the DEA directly. The agency’s position is that this is routine. It described the question as standard background information relevant to compliance, said it is not limited to any particular timeframe, and later added that it is not meant to work as an automatic bar to getting registered.

The constitutional question is not clean either. Courts have long upheld broad disclosure requirements in regulated licensing systems, which is part of why this sits in legally murky territory rather than on clearly unconstitutional ground.

Hoban does not dispute that the language tracks the kind of disclosure any regulated industry demands. Alcohol, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, all of them make you open the books to get a license. His point is narrower and harder to wave off. In every one of those industries, the conduct being disclosed was legal when it happened. For cannabis operators, it was not.

Why Going Legit Is The Trap

This is the bind Hoban built a career inside. When he started, he says, the lawyers working in cannabis refused to put anything on paper. No leases, no contracts, no invoices, because every document was evidence of a federal crime. Hoban argued the opposite. If you wanted to be treated like a real business, you had to paper yourself like one, and hand the government the records it needed to license you, tax you and let capital in.

For years, one thing made that gamble survivable. The Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, a budget rider Congress kept renewing, barred the Justice Department from spending money to go after state-legal medical marijuana. It was never extended to recreational cannabis. So the real exposure always sat on the adult-use side, where the federal shield never reached.

Which is why Hoban’s read on rescheduling runs opposite to the industry’s celebration. Schedule III is being sold as relief, and for a medical operator, it may be exactly that. The complication is that most operators are not only medical. They run adult-use, too, and adult-use marijuana stays Schedule I. To claim the medical benefits, you register with the DEA. To register, you account for your conduct. And if you are still selling recreational marijuana on the other side of the business, you are either describing ongoing federal crimes or betting the government will not connect the two halves of your own company.

His advice to clients is structural. Put the medical licenses in one company, the adult-use and hemp licenses in others, commonly owned but run and located separately, so a problem on one side cannot reach across to the other.

For a decade, the industry was told to come out of the shadows, put it on paper, become a legitimate business. The paperwork finally arrived. To prove they qualify now, operators may have to describe the years when federal law still treated their state-licensed work as a crime.

Editor’s note: This article draws on public records, linked reporting and an interview with attorney Bob Hoban. It describes federal law and one attorney’s legal analysis. It is not legal advice and is not a suggestion to travel with cannabis, which remains illegal under federal law. Where the application of federal law remains unsettled, that is stated in the text.

<p>The post Our Readers Admitted Flying With Weed. A Cannabis Lawyer Says The Real Self-Incrimination Risk Is Going Legal, Not Getting High. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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