Ecuador’s hemp sector is projected to approach or surpass $20 million in 2026 as companies move beyond raw biomass into chocolates, cosmetics, supplements, veterinary products and other finished goods. With more than 700 companies operating across the supply chain, the industry is now looking to capture more value domestically while expanding finished-product exports into international markets.

When people talk about the hemp industry, it can be hard to picture what that actually means beyond a field of crops. In Ecuador, the answer is starting to show up in very tangible products: chocolates, gummies, herbal infusions, craft beer, kombucha, creams, serums, oils and pet products are all part of an increasingly diverse market for non-psychoactive cannabis—meaning cannabis that does not get you high and contains very low levels of THC.

That shift from raw plant material to finished goods is at the heart of a sector that, according to figures provided by industry representatives, grew from roughly $10 million in revenue in 2024 to $15 million in 2025 and is projected to approach or surpass $20 million in 2026, according to El Universo.

The ecosystem now includes more than 700 companies involved in everything from seeds and cultivation to processing, laboratories, retail and finished-product manufacturing.

But that number tells only part of the story. One of the industry’s biggest bets is moving beyond hemp as biomass or raw material and capturing more value by turning it into finished products inside Ecuador.

From Hemp to Chocolate: The Money’s in Finished Products

Ecuador’s Cannabis, Industrial and Medicinal Hemp Industries Cluster brings together roughly 30 small and midsize companies, with goals that include strengthening the production chain and developing finished goods rather than biomass alone.

That strategy is already visible on store shelves and in product catalogs. Forbes Ecuador identified chocolates, gummies, teas, herbal infusions, craft beer, kombucha, ointments, creams, oils, flower, anti-aging products, balms, lubricants, probiotics, prebiotics and oils for pets already on the market.

One company that helps illustrate that range is CBD Solutions, a family business that began taking shape in 2020 and later developed its own small lab as it moved from artisanal production toward manufacturing under more formal standards. Its portfolio includes sublingual oils, creams, ointments, lip balms, chocolates, craft beer, kombucha, herbal infusions, gummies, coffee with CBD kief, extract cartridges and flower.

Hemp Ecuador Labs represents another part of the production chain: research and formulation. The company has operated since 2021 and, according to Forbes, has developed close to 200 products across its own projects and work for third parties, while offering around 45 products under its own brands. Its manager, Eduardo Monge, said bringing a cosmetic or supplement to market can take roughly six months of research, formulation, testing and analysis.

Mayu Ecuador, meanwhile, sells supplements, oils, infusions, chocolates, gummies, creams and a cosmetic serum, along with products for the veterinary market. The company distributes its lines through more than 100 locations nationwide and also works with two compounding pharmacies in Quito and Cuenca.

As far back as 2021, data from Ecuador’s National Agency for Health Regulation, Control and Surveillance, known as ARCSA, showed that 144 CBD products had been authorized for sale in the country, with 95 of them in the cosmetics category.

Among the examples at the time was Laboratorios Beautik, which had developed a CBD hair-care line including shampoo, conditioner, leave-in cream and a hair mask.

What has changed is the scale. Industry sources now point to more than 2,000 products with health notifications or registrations, while other recent counts cite more than 2,500 products registered with ARCSA and more than 50 types of veterinary products registered with Agrocalidad.

Ecuador Has Drawn a Clear Line Between Psychoactive and Non-Psychoactive Cannabis

Ecuador’s growth is taking place within a defined regulatory boundary separating this industry from debates over psychoactive cannabis and adult use. In the country, non-psychoactive cannabis—containing less than 1% THC by dry weight—was removed from the country’s controlled-substances framework and placed under agricultural regulation.

For processed foods and supplements, the rules are even more specific. Resolution ARCSA-DE-2022-014-AKRG allows parts of non-psychoactive cannabis, hemp, or their derivatives to be used as ingredients, but requires the finished product to contain less than 0.3% THC.

Companies seeking health notification must submit testing showing that concentration, along with analyses for heavy metals and pesticides. The same regulation prohibits the use of psychoactive cannabis or its derivatives in those foods and supplements, as well as THC concentrations of 0.3% or higher.

That framework helps explain why the recent shelving of a broader cannabis proposal did not halt this industry. The bill shelved in August addressed issues including adult use, home cultivation and THC-containing products, while the non-psychoactive segment has been operating under its own regulations since 2020.

This also puts another figure highlighted by the industry Cluster into context. According to its president, Lizbeth Fajardo, no health alerts have been reported in connection with the sale of registered products in this market.

The Next Step Is About Much More Than Exporting Biomass

Ecuador’s industry already exports raw material and biomass to other markets, including the United States, Switzerland and Germany, according to sector representatives. The next challenge is increasing exports of finished products, allowing more of the formulation work, technical know-how, intellectual property and commercial value to remain in Ecuador.

Hemp Ecuador Labs, for example, has already tested products in Colombia, Paraguay and the United States and is now working toward meeting the volumes required by those markets. 

Mayu, meanwhile, is working to enter the markets of the United States, Spain, Iceland, France and Costa Rica. One of its CBD chocolates was selected as a semifinalist in the II Ecuadorian Cacao Innovation Award, earning the company the opportunity to present it at the Salon du Chocolat in Paris.

That example captures where the industry wants to go. Ecuador can produce flower and biomass, but the business strategy behind that projected $20 million market goes much further: turning raw material into something recognizable, regulated, and marketable, whether that means a gummy, a cosmetic, or a veterinary product.

In that sense, the clearest way to understand what Ecuador’s “hemp industry” looks like today may be to stop looking only at the plant and start looking at everything companies are making from it.

Cover photo created with AI.

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The traditional off-ramps, pensions, savings, Social Security that actually covers your bills, family structures that absorb an aging relative, have been eroding for a long time, and they’re eroding faster than most people are willing to admit out loud. When legitimate retirement stops being available to a growing number of people, some of them are going to find illegitimate versions of it.

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Let me put it another way: the United States government spent more than fifty years making it functionally impossible to study drugs that millions of people were already using, that indigenous cultures had employed for centuries, and that early research before the Controlled Substances Act was passed in 1970 had flagged as potentially valuable for mental health treatment. Then they were shocked, shocked, to discover that people were self-medicating with them anyway.

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New Jersey’s THC beverage market is heading into the most consequential stretch of its short life. A federal change to the definition of hemp takes effect in November 2026, and the state has set November 13 as the last day licensed liquor stores can sell hemp-derived THC drinks. After that date, any beverage carrying a meaningful dose of THC moves into the same regulated system as flower, vapes, and edibles, sold only through licensed dispensaries. 

For the brands that built their followings in liquor-store aisles and grocery coolers, the deadline marks a real turning point. One New Jersey company has spent the past year preparing for it in an unusual way, by making the same drink twice.

High Tide, a seltzer brand based in southern New Jersey, produces four flavors in two separate formulations. There is a 10-milligram hemp-derived version that has lived in the liquor-store and direct-to-consumer world, and a 5-milligram cannabis version, made with what the company describes as real marijuana, that is sold only in licensed dispensaries. 

The flavors are identical on both sides: Citrus Surge, Lemon Lime Splash, Island Punch, and Riptide Cola. The drinks are vegan and made without artificial dyes, added sugar, or alcohol. The two-track approach looks, at first glance, like a careful hedge against a shifting regulatory map. 

According to the company, it started as something much smaller.

A Taste Test That Outgrew Its Purpose

High Tide’s hemp line was not originally conceived as a product. It began as a way for the team to taste what they were building. Because the flavor emulsion tastes nearly the same in either formulation, the company wanted to sample the profiles before committing to a full production run on the cannabis side. At the time, no one else in the state was producing real marijuana-derived drinks, and the priority was making sure the finished product would be as pleasant to drink as it was to look at.

Taste came first. The goal was to find flavors that worked so naturally with the earthy character of the cannabis emulsion that a drinker would not register it as a separate note. “We were absolutely not trying to hide the flavor of the emulsion but instead wanted to find flavors that worked so well with it that you don’t even recognize it,” the company says. The hemp version was the test kitchen for that work. 

In the company’s own words, “it was never actually supposed to stick around. It was just so we could really taste it. The people had other plans.”

Those plans became clear when High Tide brought the drinks to MJUnpacked, an industry trade event. The response to the hemp beverages was immediate and large, both as a preview of the cannabis line and as a product in their own right. With manufacturing on the marijuana side still a few months from being fully ready, the company made a decision that reshaped its business: it kept the hemp drinks in production to meet the demand. 

What had been a temporary sampling tool became half of the catalog, and the reaction to the flavors and the effect convinced the team that they had found something worth keeping on both sides of the aisle.

The Insight Hiding in the Demand

The more revealing part of that early response was not the enthusiasm for a new drink. It was what the enthusiasm seemed to be about. As the company describes it, the market was not short on beverages. It was short on something the beverage represented. “The market was not missing a category, a ‘drink,’ but the market was missing the social element that came with that product,” High Tide says. “Not a drink but the social acceptance and inclusion that ‘drinking’ brings.”

That framing lines up with where the broader THC beverage category has been heading, positioned less as liquid cannabis and more as an alternative to alcohol for people who still want a cold drink in hand at a gathering. High Tide leans into that idea directly, with packaging that promises a lifted mood and a clean finish, and a tagline that warns the drinks are smooth enough to make a person forget there is THC in them. The company’s stated goal is to bring the fun back to social consumption without the next-morning cost of alcohol.

The customer base has turned out to be broad. According to the company, buyers include people replacing alcohol entirely, people adding the drinks to other forms of cannabis consumption, and experienced consumers who use the low dose as a social option rather than a strong one. 

“For those that have a higher tolerance this is not going to blast you to the moon,” the company says. The team has watched customers treat the seltzers as a mixer and even as the base for an ice cream float. The through-line is flexibility. The drink is designed to slot into whatever social moment a person is already in.

Two Shelves, Two Shoppers

If the demand told High Tide what people wanted, selling on both sides of New Jersey’s split market has taught the company something about who those people are. The two channels do not attract the same shopper, and the difference is not only about product. It is about comfort.

“Some hemp drinkers have never been in a dispensary, while most cannabis consumers have seen the inside of a liquor store,” the company observes. That single asymmetry explains a great deal about why the coming shift is more complicated than a simple change of address. The liquor store is familiar ground for nearly everyone. The dispensary, with its ID scan, its regulations, and its association with cannabis specifically, still carries friction for a segment of the beverage audience that found these drinks precisely because they did not require a trip to one. 

Both groups, the company notes, are ultimately after the same thing. They are just arriving from different directions.

That overlap points to a possibility the company is careful not to overstate. If the hemp drinks reach people who have never set foot in a dispensary, they may end up serving as an on-ramp, a low-stakes introduction that makes the licensed cannabis market feel less foreign. “Will hemp be a bridge for some consumers to find a path to cannabis and break down a barrier?” the company asks. “Maybe. And if so we welcome being able to contribute to that progress for the plant.” Whether or not that proves true at scale, High Tide’s presence on both shelves has given it something rarer than a single loyal audience: recognition from shoppers on either side of a divide that the state is about to make permanent.

The looming deadline has added a layer of urgency to how those shoppers behave. High Tide reports that some hemp drinkers are stocking up, setting aside higher-dose products and familiar brands from liquor-store shelves while they still can. Retailers are reacting unevenly. Some are pulling in whatever inventory they can find, while others have paused new orders entirely. Visits to stores, the company says, have not turned up empty shelves so far.

All of this is playing out inside a state market that was already under pressure. New Jersey’s legal cannabis industry has grown quickly to more than 250 licensed dispensaries, with tight margins and stiff competition, and operators have watched the hemp market draw consumers away from the regulated one. The November deadline is, in part, an attempt to pull those consumers back inside the licensed system.

What Changes on November 13

The mechanics of the shift are set in state law. Since late May 2026, an intoxicating hemp beverage sold in New Jersey has been capped at 5 milligrams of THC per serving and 10 milligrams per container. Licensed liquor stores and cannabis retailers have been permitted to sell within those limits during a transition window. That window closes on November 13, 2026. 

After it, a beverage containing more than a trace amount of THC is treated as cannabis rather than hemp, which means it can be produced and sold only through the licensed cannabis supply chain. Lawmakers have revisited the rules several times, including proposals to change container sizes and potency ceilings, but the November cutoff for liquor-store sales has remained in place through each revision. Anyone planning around it should confirm the current status close to the date, since the timeline has moved once already.

For most hemp beverage brands, that cutoff is a hard problem. For High Tide, it is a decision the company has been positioned to make. Its cannabis line is already inside the system that survives the deadline, and the company reports that the real marijuana drinks are stocked in more than 50 New Jersey dispensaries, a number it says is still growing. The open question is what happens to the 10-milligram hemp version once liquor stores can no longer carry it.

The company frames the answer as a fork rather than a crisis. “We either move the 10mg hemp into dispensaries exclusively or we discontinue it,” High Tide says. “Either way we decided to go down both paths so we would be here for the consumers no matter what.” On the potency debate, the company expects the 5-milligram serving standard to hold, and says it has options ready if the rules change instead. That readiness is the practical payoff of an origin story that began as a taste test. 

By building both versions early, High Tide gave itself a path through the deadline that does not depend on which way the rules finally break.

Building for Whatever Comes Next

High Tide describes itself less as a cannabis company or an alcohol-alternative company than as a brand built around a feeling. The team is from just outside Philadelphia in southern New Jersey, and the reference points are local and specific: a drink worth raising at a beach gathering, a tailgate, a New Year’s toast, a quiet end to an ordinary day. The company says its founders are drinkers at heart who wanted an option for themselves, something cold and refreshing with a light lift and none of the regret.

That identity is meant to travel across whatever channel the state leaves open. “If we don’t have to pick a side, we won’t,” the company says. “If we do have to stop producing the hemp High Tides, we will. Either way, High Tide will be here.” As New Jersey’s market continues to consolidate around the licensed system, and as the state’s cannabis scene keeps drawing national attention, the brands most likely to endure are the ones that understood early what their customers were really buying. High Tide’s read is that people were never only after a drink. They were after a reason to gather, and a way to be part of it. The company intends to keep supplying both, on whichever shelf the tide leaves it standing on.

Photos courtey of High Tide

Partner Content Disclosure: This article was produced in connection with a promotional partnership with High Tide. Reporting is based on interviews with the High Tide team and information shared during those conversations about the company, its products, and its experience in New Jersey’s THC beverage market.

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Mormon Wives star Mikayla Matthews says medical cannabis was “literally life-changing” for her nerve pain and sleep, bringing weed into a show already built around the tensions between modern Utah life and Mormon expectations. But the Church’s position is more nuanced than a simple prohibition.

Mikayla Matthews, one of the stars of Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, has opened up about using medical cannabis for severe nerve pain and to help her sleep, calling the experience “literally life-changing,” according to Green State. 

In the season five premiere, Matthews visits a Utah dispensary with her husband, Jace Terry, where she speaks with a pharmacist and looks through different products. Matthews has said she suffers from Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome, or CIRS, a condition that has left her dealing with painful symptoms.

“It was mainly just for sleep at first,” Matthews says in the episode. “I had debilitating nerve pain through my whole body.”

Then came the moment that has attracted attention well beyond the reality-TV universe.

“The first time I tried it, it was literally life-changing,” she says. “It was the only thing that had ever taken away my nerve pain, and I’m finally well-rested.”

For a show with “Mormon” in its title, a dispensary trip might sound like an obvious act of religious rebellion. The reality, however, is considerably more complicated.

Actually… The Mormon Church Doesn’t Ban All Medical Cannabis

Matthews was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon Church, although she has said she has not been an active member for around a decade.

The Church is famously associated with the Word of Wisdom, its health code, which restricts substances like alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea. Adult-use weed also falls outside what the Church considers acceptable. But… medical cannabis is a different matter.

Current Church policy explicitly distinguishes between recreational and medicinal use. The Church opposes cannabis for non-medical purposes but permits it when administered under the direction of a competent physician.

That makes Matthews’ dispensary visit less doctrinally explosive than it may initially appear. She is using cannabis within Utah’s regulated medical system and discussing it as a way to manage physical symptoms, not simply as an intoxicant.

Matthews herself appeared uncertain about the distinction on the show. “I assume that the Church doesn’t like marijuana, but they also didn’t like soda,” she joked.

The soda comparison is particularly telling in a Mormon context. Coffee and tea remain prohibited under Church teachings, while caffeinated soda does not—a distinction worth noting when considering Utah’s celebrated “dirty soda” culture.

The Mormon Church Helped Shape Utah’s Medical Weed Laws

The Church’s acceptance of medical cannabis does not mean it embraced legalization without reservations.

Utah became a major battleground over medical cannabis in 2018, when voters considered Proposition 2, a ballot initiative that would have established a statewide medical program.

Church leaders opposed the proposal, arguing that it was too permissive and did not contain sufficient safeguards around distribution, dosage, and access. At the same time, Church officials repeatedly emphasized that they did not oppose cannabis as medicine in principle.

Instead, Church representatives, lawmakers, medical organizations and cannabis advocates eventually negotiated a more restrictive compromise.

Utah voters nevertheless approved Proposition 2 with roughly 53% of the vote. Shortly afterward, state lawmakers replaced much of the initiative with the negotiated medical cannabis framework during a special legislative session.

The debate also showed that ordinary Latter-day Saints were hardly united against medical weed. Polling before the vote showed substantial support for legalization among Church members, although opposition increased among highly observant members after Church leadership publicly campaigned against the initiative.

So, medical cannabis had already been part of the conversation within Mormon communities for years before a Mormon Wives camera entered a dispensary.

‘Mormon Wives’ Has Always Been About Where the Rules Bend

The Hulu series follows members of MomTok, a group of Utah-based mothers and influencers whose relationships with Mormonism range from active religious participation to cultural identification and outright distance from the Church.

The show became a hit largely by leaning into that contradiction. Its cast navigates sex, marriage, divorce, drinking, therapy, cosmetic procedures, and Mormon expectations while constantly debating which rules still matter to them. Now cannabis enters that conversation.

The series has previously featured medical or wellness-oriented use of substances including ketamine and nitrous oxide, creating an unusual contrast with a religious culture that strongly discourages intoxication, but Matthews’ experience may be the clearest cannabis example yet.

She even tells viewers that, amid the stress surrounding the series and MomTok drama, cannabis has been “fixing everything.”

Photo by Bailey Burton on Unsplash // Edited with AI

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Chains reorder every two weeks and earn twice the discounts. Independents stock the same breadth of product and win on everything that isn’t a spreadsheet.

Dispensaries generally fall into one of two camps: part of a multi-state chain, or an independent operator. Those independents might own several stores within one state (a single-state operator), or they might be a classic “mom & pop” shop with a single location. Consumers have good reasons to shop at either, and sometimes it just comes down to location and convenience. However, when pressed, it seems renegade cannabis consumers prefer the indies.

Consistency and Pricing

One argument for chain dispensaries is consistency. Shoppers who travel between legal states may prefer a recognizable name — if they know a brand from their home state, they can trust the product selection will be reliable. These customers may worry about wasting a trip on a local independent store that doesn’t carry the brands they’re used to. Chains may also be able to secure better prices simply because they’re buying inventory at scale. According to Chain Store Age, 85% of respondents cited lower prices as their reason for shopping at a chain, while 71% cited greater product variety.

Better Pricing

“The economies-of-scale assumption holds,” said Mitch Barton, VP of Transformation at Sun Theory, which operates in the wholesale market described here. The company has collected recent data looking at wholesale orders across five states, broken down between independents and chains. Barton said chains earn roughly twice the discounts and credits that independents do — about 4% to 5% of sales versus 2%. Per unit, the edge is modest, but he said it’s consistent, and it favors scale.

He added, “One of the biggest takeaways from our wholesale data is that the difference between chains and independent dispensaries isn’t how much they buy at one time; it’s how often they buy. Across our five-state wholesale network, chain operators accounted for roughly 54% of active retail accounts but nearly 73% of wholesale volume, because they reordered about every two weeks, compared with roughly every 24 days for independent retailers. That consistency has a meaningful impact on inventory planning, forecasting, and the entire supply chain.”

Variety

Another reason shoppers may end up at a chain versus an indy store is better selection. That variety is likely a function of size. Research on retail generally, not cannabis specifically, published in The Review of Economic Studies found that chain stores are two to five times larger in square footage than independent shops, and on average generate forty times the revenue and twenty-five times the profit of their independent counterparts. Bigger footprints also tend to mean more parking — a real convenience, since nobody likes circling the block or hiking in from a far-off spot.

Sun Theory’s data, however, doesn’t bear that pattern out in the cannabis industry. “Independents are often described as carrying a narrower or more curated selection,” Barton said. “Here, both buyer types stock the same breadth of the line, around eight SKUs per order across a comparable catalog. The character shows up in how they sell, not in how much of the line they carry.”

“The character shows up in how they sell, not in how much of the line they carry.”

Mitch Barton, VP of Transformation, Sun Theory

Character

The argument for independent stores usually comes down to character. Without a corporate parent dictating consistency and brand standards, owners are free to give their stores whatever personality they want. It could be a zen theme with a living plant wall and fountain, or a muscle-cars-and-fire aesthetic. Edgy or laid-back, there’s plenty of room for creativity.

Indy stores can also feel more in tune with local flavor. Owners are usually from the area and know what resonates with their customers. They may also be more inclined to work with small local producers who get overlooked by larger chains because they can’t supply at the scale big stores demand — reinforcing that homegrown connection.

Adolphus A. Busch V, CEO of Teal Cannabis, whose company opened the independent dispensary Current Cannabis in the St. Louis area, said, “As a local operator, we are part of the community. We live here, work here, and build relationships here. That gives us a firsthand understanding of our customers’ preferences, interests, and values.”

Scale

While chains are perceived as offering lower prices, they also carry larger overhead. Pricier real estate and the cost of supporting a bigger operation don’t always translate into savings for the customer. Smaller, more nimble businesses with lower overhead can often pass those savings along to shoppers.

“Nimbleness is the independent’s superpower,” said Shavon Sullivan Wright, CEO and founder of The Grass Cab. “A larger operator is still routing a deal through procurement in another state while I’ve already shaken the grower’s hand, texted my regulars, and probably fed everyone lunch. We move at the speed of relationships; they move at the speed of spreadsheets.”

“We move at the speed of relationships; they move at the speed of spreadsheets.”

Shavon Sullivan Wright, CEO and founder, The Grass Cab

Adam Stettner of cannabis lender FundCanna said, “Chains and operators with multiple locations have real purchasing power, but that’s not the same as running a smarter business. The challenge that operators with multiple locations face is that consumer behavior shifts county to county, even neighborhood to neighborhood. If they’re running on their own data plus a source like Headset or BDSA, they can still buy for local demand. It’s a question of scale and efficiency, not whether one model is inherently smarter than the other.”

Freedom of Choice

“Here’s the part people get wrong: independent and multi-state aren’t opposing teams,” said Wright. “Someone once told me, ‘If you don’t like multi-state operators, build your own’ — and that stuck. My goal isn’t to stay small forever; it’s to grow without losing the character that makes an independent worth driving across town for. Because people don’t go out of their way for ‘fine.’ They show up because a place feels like theirs. The real question for this industry isn’t chain versus indy — it’s whether you can scale and still keep a soul.”

Luckily for consumers, they have the freedom to choose between an independent store and a chain outlet. There are roughly the same number of stores in each category across legalized states. However, some states have regulations that favor independents — Vermont, for example, limits operators to one license — while others are more comfortable with larger operators.

A small, unscientific poll I ran on X asked my followers which type of store they preferred. Sixty percent chose indies.

“People do not typically drive past three dispensaries just because one has the lowest price on a product,” added Busch. “They go where they trust the recommendations, where they feel welcomed, where the staff knows them, and where they can discover products they may not find everywhere else.”

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We head to Canna Country Farms in Humboldt for Legendary Strains to discover the Ocimene Queen herself, Canna Country #26.

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Cannabis advocates should take the lesson here too. The industry doesn’t need to inflate its own case any more than prohibitionists need to inflate theirs. The honest version of the story, that legalization didn’t unleash chaos and also didn’t cure society’s ills, is compelling enough on its own. It’s also, as far as I can tell, the actual truth.

The post The Sky Didn’t Fall: What a Decade of Legalization Actually Taught Us appeared first on Paradise Found.

Twenty patient associations from across northeastern Brazil are meeting in Fortaleza this month, inside a free three-day arts fair. The agenda item that matters: how to keep supplying patients when every step of the chain, from seed to prescription, sits on unstable ground.

Brazil’s medical cannabis system doesn’t look much like anything in the United States. There are no dispensaries. Patients get access through court authorizations and through nonprofit patient associations that cultivate and supply members, operating in a legal space that shifts with every new regulation and every judge.

From September 18 to 20, roughly twenty of those associations are gathering at the Dragão do Mar Center for Art and Culture in Fortaleza, capital of Ceará, for the second Northeastern Meeting of Cannabic Associations. It runs inside Febre de Arte, a free arts and culture fair now in its second year.

What they’re actually discussing

Two roundtables open the fair on Friday. The first covers associative governance and how associations can partner with each other under RDC 1014, the current Anvisa framework.

The second one is titled, plainly enough, “Insecurity in the routine of associations: from seed to cultivation, from prescription to logistics.” That title is the whole problem in one line. Associations in Brazil operate under constant legal uncertainty at every link, and the northeastern region gets substantially less attention than the wealthier southeast.

Confirmed participants include ABRACAM, Adapta, Verde Ouro, Pangaia, ACAFLOR, Risoflora Medicinal, Terra Livre, Ceará Saúde Livre, IRACEMA, AME-CE and Aliança Medicinal, among others.

The Argentine in the room

Saturday’s talks bring Gabriel Gimenez, former director of ARICCAME, Argentina’s hemp and medical cannabis regulatory agency, and former national federal articulation director at INASE, the country’s seed institute, where he led the creation of Argentina’s national cannabis seed registry.

His talk is on seed regulation and why a national registry matters. It’s a more interesting subject than it sounds: seed genetics and traceability are where most cannabis regulatory systems either hold together or fall apart, and Brazil doesn’t have a registry of its own.

Gimenez pointed to “the importance of articulation beyond the southeastern region of the country, especially due to the cultivation potential and its social and economic benefits for the Brazilian Northeast.”

And the rest of it

Saturday’s Febre Talks run under the theme “Science, innovation, and stories that transform.” Sunday’s shift to politics, regulation and access, with speakers including UFC medical school professor Dr. Magda Almeida, anti-prohibitionist lawyer Bianca Cardial, Marcha da Maconha Fortaleza co-founder Tamára Silva, and Luisa Cela, former Culture Secretary of Ceará.

Around all of that: short film screenings, visual art from Fortaleza-based artists, performances, and two nights of live music programmed with Auê Feira, a local fair that has drawn more than 500,000 people across 100-plus editions.

Everything is free.

Details

• When: September 18, 19 and 20, 2026
• Where: Centro Dragão do Mar de Arte e Cultura, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil
• Hours: Friday 9 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 4 p.m. to 10 p.m.
• Admission: free
• Full program: febredearte.com

High Times is a media partner of Febre de Arte 2026.

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In 1968, a few joints I gave away left me facing the possibility of decades in prison. More than half a century later, I walked into a legal dispensary and paid for cannabis at the counter.

My attorney peered at me from behind his imposing oak desk that night in January 1968 and told me what I faced: one felony charge that carried a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and four that could each earn me another 15 years behind bars.

I didn’t know much about the law, but I knew enough math to be terrified. Four times 15 equals 60, plus 10 is 70. I was 19 at the time, so I figured I might get out of prison at age 89.

An Unexpected Visit

Stretched out on my bed in my mother’s house one night about five months earlier, I was pondering options for my first semester at Suffolk County Community College on Long Island, New York, that fall. Should I take the courses that sounded like fun or the ones that my guidance counselor advised would be most helpful in getting me accepted into a four-year school? I was still vacillating when the phone rang.

When I picked up the receiver and said hello, I heard, “Hey, Jeff, it’s Noel!”

I recognized the name and voice of one of the most high-profile kids in my high school class.

“Sorry I’ve kind of been out of touch,” he said. “A lot going on.”

“Been out of touch”? I thought. We’d never really been in touch. We’d had a few quick conversations, and he’d written a couple of witty lines in my yearbook before graduation, but we weren’t friends and had never even seen each other outside of school.

“I’m in the neighborhood with a couple of guys,” Noel said, “and I thought maybe we could stop by and hang out.”

“Sure,” I said. Though surprised to hear from him, I was flattered by the attention of such a popular kid. Besides, I was getting tired of looking through the college course catalog.

Minutes later, Noel showed up at the front door, his friends in tow. He was wearing his standard granny glasses, blue jeans, and Army jacket. As usual, he looked as if he hadn’t shaved in a few days. His companions, whom he introduced as Billy and Larry, wore jeans and T-shirts and, like me, had shoulder-length hair. Larry had a string of beads around his neck, and Billy had a mustache and beard. They appeared to be a few years older than Noel, in their mid-20s, maybe. They smiled at my mother as they passed her on the way to my bedroom.

I asked how they knew one another, and they said they used to work together in an electronics store. Then I asked whether they’d like to hear some music. I put on Pink Floyd’s debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which had only been out for a couple of weeks.

“Wanna get high?” asked Noel. “I’ve got some out-of-sight grass.” He stuck a hand in his pocket but came up empty. “Uh-oh, I guess I left it at home. You got anything, man?”

In fact, I’d tried marijuana for the first time only a few weeks earlier, and a friend had given me a small baggie.

“I do,” I said.

I pulled it out from a hidden corner in a drawer of my desk, closed and locked my door, and lit incense to mask the smell. Noel produced rolling papers and proceeded to make a joint, which we passed around.

Less than an hour later, when the album had ended and we all had a nice buzz, Billy looked at his watch and then at Noel.

“Hey, man, we’d better get going.” Then he turned his eyes to me. “But that was some good weed. Got any you could sell me?”

“I don’t,” I said. “Sorry.”

Billy smiled, and they said goodbye and left.

“Who are they?” asked my mother a few minutes later.

“The guy with the Army jacket is Noel,” I explained. “I went to high school with him. The other two are friends of his.”

“There’s something I don’t like about them,” she said. “I can’t put my finger on it.”

Stopping By the Campus

About a week later, on August 20, I drove over to the campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where I often went to hang out and where I would later attend concerts by artists such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Doors. The university’s archives document the campus’s remarkable concert history during those years.

The Stony Brook campus had opened only five years earlier, in September 1962, with 780 students and was rapidly expanding. It was attracting thousands of long-haired students. Some formed a campus chapter of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society, burned draft cards, or picketed the draft board office in nearby Smithtown. Others passed out leaflets about the Vietnam War at local supermarkets.

The town’s residents weren’t happy about any of this. Until the school opened, Stony Brook had had a Norman Rockwell ambiance, with an anachronistic downtown, two museums, and half a dozen historical sites.

“This was a bigoted, conservative community,” university professor Paul A. Newlin told me for an article I wrote in 1975. “And before the school came here, let’s face it, this was really an idyllic place for the people who had something, who were upper middle class. The university changed all that. You could see the proliferation of shopping centers and that kind of thing. And people saw the university bringing more people into the area that they didn’t want. A lot of them thought the university was responsible for ruining the life they had back in 1955.”

“Many people didn’t want the school here in the first place, and then it started expanding all over,” another area resident told me. “The weird-looking people began going into the shops. I don’t think many people enjoyed that. There was a stigma against college students.”

Newspapers attacked the school for its alleged moral degradation, as did letter writers, one of whom wrote to the Long Island daily Newsday to speak up for “the rights of the student who was not accepted at the state university. He’s over in Vietnam now, and some pot smoker is taking his place.”

At the college on August 20, I took a seat on a couch in the student union and started reading In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, a book by humorist Jean Shepherd. I was a few pages into it when I looked up and saw Noel, Larry, and a guy I didn’t know standing before me.

“Fancy meeting you here!” said Noel as they sat down.

We made small talk, and then Larry’s friend, Joey, asked whether I had any grass I could sell.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m not selling, and I don’t have much, anyway.”

“Just a little?” Joey pleaded. “I’m really low, man.”

I smiled and gave him a couple of joints.

“No charge,” I said. “Have fun.”

I ran into Noel and his friends on four other occasions between then and late October, three times at Stony Brook and once at a fast-food joint called Space Burger. Each time they asked whether I could sell them any grass, and each time, I offered to give them a bit. A couple of times, when they insisted on paying, I accepted a few dollars.

5 A.M. Knock at the Door

I didn’t see them after October, and the holidays came and went. By then, I had smoked grass maybe a dozen times, but I was now mostly preoccupied with adjusting to college and doing my homework.

Then, on the morning of Jan. 17, 1968, when I was on winter break, a loud banging on our front door woke me at 5 a.m.

“Police!” a man shouted. “Open up!”

As I headed for the door in my pajamas, my heart beating fast, my mother came up behind me and said, “Don’t open it! It could be robbers pretending to be police.”

But she peered through a curtain, saw two radio cars and several uniformed cops with guns drawn, and unlocked the door.

“We have a warrant for the arrest of Jeffrey Burger and another warrant to search the residence,” announced one of the men as they poured into the house.

My mother, in a state of shock, offered them coffee, but they waved her away. Several cops ransacked my bedroom while others moved on to search the bedrooms of my 14-year-old brother and 11-year-old sister.

In my brother’s room, a detective pulled drawers from a dresser until he came upon approximately 60 metal Band-Aid boxes, at which point he yelled out to his colleagues, “I found it! I found it!” apparently thinking he’d discovered a drug stash.

The first box he opened contained wooden railway ties for my brother’s model train layout. The second had tiny railroad spikes to fasten the track to a table. Another had a couple of dozen “grain-of-wheat” light bulbs to use in tiny streetlights or inside buildings on the large model train layout behind the detective. After opening most of the Band-Aid boxes and finding nothing but toy train parts, the detective gave up. He came downstairs, told my mother the police were impounding my car as evidence, demanded a key, and drove it away. Then one of his companions said he’d give me five minutes to get dressed.

After I threw on some clothes, the cops cuffed my hands behind my back, led me outside, and drove me to a police station in nearby Hauppauge for booking. On the way, one of them laughed and said, “Time for a haircut.” Another said, “You’re some big dope dealer, aren’t you?”

In Hauppauge, to my astonishment, I saw several of my high school friends, plus people I knew from Stony Brook University and Suffolk County Community College. As I later learned, there were about three dozen of us. Stony Brook University’s archives put the number at 35, of whom 24 were students at the school. All were first offenders aged 16 to 22, and most were charged solely with the sale of marijuana or simply possession.

The majority were Stony Brook students; others, like me, were what a police spokesman called “transients.” In its 1968 coverage of the raid, Newsday quoted the spokesman directly: “They’re like parasites who live with students and hang out on campus to use dope and have fun and games with the girls.”

Virtually all of us had been nabbed with the assistance of Noel, who we later learned had himself been arrested many months earlier and threatened with extensive jail time if he didn’t help undercover agents make drug buys from his classmates and friends.

Two Hundred Cops, With Reporters in Tow

His cooperation had led to what contemporary coverage described as the nation’s largest campus crackdown on drug users up to that point. It had been carried out by 198 police officers, according to the university’s own timeline, who had attended a 3 a.m. briefing and worked from a 107-page plan book that included dossiers on each suspect with descriptions such as “he wears an American flag as a cape” and “he is a member of the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society].” A 47-page appendix contained maps and floor plans of the homes and dorms where the suspects lived. At the invitation of the police, reporters had attended the predawn briefing and accompanied officers on the raid.

Newsday‘s big front-page story, “Drug Raid Hits State U Dorms,” reported that federal and state agencies had participated in the action and that “undercover agents posing as hippies were able to buy dope at the school on their first day there.” Headlines of sidebars included “DA Plans Grand Jury Probe of Stony Brook” and “Raid Climaxed 4-Mo. Probe” but also “A Third Have Tried Pot: Dean” and “Students Say Why Not?” A New York Times article, “Students Decry Stony Brook Raid,” quoted one undergraduate as saying, “I think someday we’ll look back on this raid like our parents looked back on police raids of the Prohibition Era.”

While newspaper subscribers were digesting all these articles, I and several dozen other young people were being booked and fingerprinted in Hauppauge. Then we were ushered onto a police bus for the 45-minute drive east to Riverhead, the county seat, where we were jailed, about a dozen to a cell. Sleep-deprived and rattled, I sat in one of those cells for about four hours. Finally, a guard called my name and led me to a courtroom, where he told me to sit and wait for my name to be called for my arraignment.

I did as I was told and listened as the judge set bail for a man who’d been arrested for shooting a gun at his neighbors. Then I heard, “The State of New York versus Jeffrey Burger.”

A second later, a man seated behind me called out: “Stuart Namm, your honor, representing Mr. Burger.” I turned and saw my mother sitting beside him. She’d made some quick early-morning phone calls to request the attorney’s appearance. She had paid him a $1,500 fee and he arranged for my release on $2,000 bail, which she paid via a bail bondsman by using her house as collateral.

Facing Decades in Prison

I left the courthouse and met with Namm that same evening, which is when he explained that giving marijuana away was legally equivalent to selling it and said I faced up to 70 years in prison.

A few days later, I was summoned to the office of the dean at Suffolk County Community College. He told me that townspeople were up in arms about the drug use exposed by the raid and that it was not in his school’s best interest to be associated with the arrests. Consequently, he said, I could attend classes in the spring only during the evening, when my attendance would be less noticeable, or I could take a leave of absence. I opted for the leave.

Some weeks later, my mother got a call from Namm. He’d negotiated an agreement for the felony charges against me to be dropped in exchange for guilty pleas to misdemeanors for being a “youthful offender” on five dates. (This was possible because I was under 19 at the time of the crimes with which I was being charged.) I went to court shortly thereafter, said “guilty” five times, and received a sentence of three years of probation.

I considered myself lucky, not only because probation sounded much better than the prison term that I’d originally faced but because a few of the arrestees did do time. At least one didn’t even get out before trial because his parents refused to supply bail money.

A probation officer visited me monthly for a while, then confided to me that he was leaving the department to join a commune out west. In the fall, meanwhile, I was allowed back into daytime classes at Suffolk County Community College and, after finishing there, I transferred to the State University of New York at Albany, where I was assigned a new probation officer.

He met with me once, after which I was asked to complete and mail in a monthly questionnaire to attest to my good behavior. It included queries such as “Are you avoiding habits, places, or people which led you into difficulty?” and “Where do you spend your evenings?”

Then, on Nov. 13, 1970, I received a notice that read, “Effective this date…your probation is hereby terminated. Very truly yours, William H. Stalker, Chief Probation Officer.”

Half a Century Later

Flash forward more than half a century to 2023. Cannabis legalization was spreading nationwide, and the legal adult-use market in New Jersey, where I now live, was still relatively new.

At a dinner party at the house I share with my wife, I mentioned to a friend that I sometimes had trouble staying asleep through the night. She said she’d had the same problem and told me that she used cannabis gummies. She suggested trying a 5-milligram gummy marketed as indica and said she typically took half of one at bedtime.

I hadn’t used cannabis for many decades, but I decided to give her suggestion a try. After Googling “marijuana retailer near me,” I found two multistate chains with local stores, Ascend and RISE, and drove to the former. As I entered the parking lot, an attendant approached my vehicle. When I rolled down the window, he asked, “Medical or recreational?”

I said the latter because I didn’t have a medical marijuana ID, and he directed me to the parking area for recreational users. Inside the building’s lobby, I showed my driver’s license to prove I was over 21. I was in my 70s by then. Then I entered the retail facility, a large room with high ceilings.

It looked and felt a lot like an Apple Store. Rock music played, and big video screens displayed messages about ending marijuana prohibitions in states that still had laws on the books. Plexiglass cabinets held attractively displayed assortments of cannabis products, everything from packages of loose marijuana and rolled joints to gummies and paraphernalia. A row of touchscreens offered a convenient way to place orders.

A staffer guided me through the touchscreen process as I selected a package of pomegranate-flavored gummies. Then he pointed me to the checkout line, where several dozen people of all ages, none of whom looked remotely like the hippies of yore, waited to pick up their purchases.

When my turn came, a cashier handed me my candies in an attractive metal tin that had a sticker listing ingredients and a “best by” date. She placed the tin in a bag emblazoned with Ascend’s logo and told me the price was $32.16, including state and local cannabis tax.

“Will that be cash or debit?” she asked.

I smiled at the cashier.

More than half a century earlier, a few joints had put me in handcuffs. My mother had put her house up as collateral for my bail. I had been pushed out of daytime college classes and left wondering whether I might spend decades behind bars.

Now marijuana was a regulated product I could purchase over a counter. The behavior that had once brought police to my mother’s front door at 5 a.m. had not somehow become more innocent with the passage of time. What changed was the machinery surrounding it.

In 1968, there were undercover agents, warrants, nearly 200 police officers, jail cells, felony charges, bail, and probation. In 2023, there were touchscreens, taxes, product labels, a checkout line, and a cashier asking how I wanted to pay.

I felt vindicated by the changed laws, and I wished my mother had lived to see this day.

But the transformation remains incomplete. Laws still vary widely from one jurisdiction to another, and the arrests never stopped. State and local police recorded 200,960 arrests for marijuana possession in 2025 alone, roughly one every three minutes, in a country where legal cannabis stores now operate openly in half the states.

As I walked out of the dispensary with my gummies, I thought about how much suffering decades of marijuana prohibition had caused, and how strange it was that an act once treated as evidence of serious criminality could now be processed like any other retail purchase.

Imagine how much trouble could have been avoided if marijuana buyers over the past half century had been confronted with “Cash or debit?” rather than “Police! Open up!”

<p>The post In 1968 I Faced 70 Years for Giving Away Joints. Fifty-Five Years Later, I Paid $32.16 at the Counter. first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post In 1968 I Faced 70 Years for Giving Away Joints. Fifty-Five Years Later, I Paid $32.16 at the Counter. appeared first on Paradise Found.