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Cannabis Conversation Reset, 2026

Sheed, mad about Weed

I’ve been grumbling about this on social media for long enough, and today is a “weed holiday” for many purposes, but also a professional holiday for yours truly, so I’m going to lay out some…nonsectarian and sincere gripes I have, as an informed expert, about US cannabis policy and regulation.

(Disclaimer: these are purely personal takes, none of these reflect the opinions of my employer or any political group that I may be affiliated with. This is crusty weed-wonk stuff, straight from my policy-nerd heart. It is likely upsetting to some interest or another, but comes from a place of wanting good policy for everyone. I have no stakes in an active or dead cannabis license, I do not handle plants in a licensed capacity, I have not written cannabis policy for a state or municipality, I am a senior regulatory analyst for the longest-running cannabis compliance platform in the biz. I draft and review audit checklists and standard operating procedures.)

Things in legal cannabis are bad, chat. Most any thing related to a “licensed operator” and “legal weed” is struggling, dying, or dead.

This comes as a surprise to some folks, who see headlines and think “oh wow, working in weed must be awesome,” or “look at those fatcats making money on a historically oppressed substance,” and let me tell you: there aren’t any cats who are fat these days. Big companies have become medium companies, and even some of the “strongest” companies in licensed cannabis are toting around nine-figure tax bills that will come due. Small companies have sold on, closed up, or found a small size that is somewhat sustainable (if you’re on a border with a prohibition state).

And while what I’m about to say could obviously be read in a conspiratorial or seething voice, I promise you I’m just saying this as a mundane fact: the groups that have unquestionably brought in revenue in the first decade plus of adult-use cannabis are the state governments, and sometimes the municipal governments. No one else has secured a steady revenue within the cannabis industry.

Which kinda brings me to my Gripe: we need a new conversation about cannabis policy, one that can get us past the gooey Early Days hype/concern/boom cycles of the 2010s and lower interest rates and national enthusiasm shoved into a handful of states’ markets. We need a conversation about cannabis that involves policymakers and regulators and politicians realizing that the first decade of cannabis was generally a failure for everyone but some customers and most governments. The pile of “failed cannabis businesses” dwarfs the pile of “sustainable or successful cannabis businesses”, and the pile of successes is dwindling, not growing.

We need resets to policies that were written as guesses, educated and otherwise. We need to be able to say that some of the guesses were quite wrong, and try completely new regulatory structures and processes.

This is not a comprehensive list of specific examples or complaints, but I want to demonstrate the comprehensive nature of the misses. A survey of takes:

Every state so far has gone through a predictable Boom/Bust cycle after launching adult-use cannabis in a serious manner. Early prices for adult-use weed are bold and pricey, but as the gray market and the additional licenses enter a state, the prices collapse to levels below what can be a profitable return on the early model. The long term burdens on every cannabis licensee have been (i) absence of basic business deductions for federal taxes, a significant anchor on accounting, and (ii) absence of normal business services in banking and finance. Without regular business banking, companies rely private financing that comes at much more intense rates.

Market saturation has effects on existing states. California and Colorado and Washington benefitted from having national customer bases funneled into state-sized markets. As more states legalize, the booms get smaller, and the early states shrink. There aren’t big, profitable weed businesses in Colorado, and that’s better than California, where many of the biggest names in cannabis have completely retreated!

Private interests have died, retreated, or moved on. Like I just mentioned above, the notions of “Big Weed” and dangers of their corporate control are very antiquated or nonsensical to anyone who’s been in legal cannabis in the 2020s, let alone the 2010s. The names that have lost money trying to be early Weed Business Tycoons (coughcough Jay Z) are long. Anyone who is serious about money has pulled way back on cannabis, and is waiting for federal legalization and integration with basic business accounting before returning.

“Regulate cannabis like alcohol” has failed. There’s a whole lot to be written about the ways that cannabis and booze are different, but: as a question of regulation, it’s just not similar to alcohol production or pharmaceutical production. Alcohol is produced through brewing or distilling, which involves inputs and infrastructure that…sits in one place, and people know about it. Cannabis did not get the name “weed” for arbitrary reasons– it can grow all over the place. Monitoring or controlling unlicensed production of cannabis is an expensive and exhausting prospect (that increasingly looks like the old War on Drugs), even in a state with legal weed. Just ask California.

No one knew. Pharma-vice was a guess. When citizens voted to legalize adult-use weed (never forget, voters faced bipartisan resistance for legalization), we forced state governments into truly foreign territories of policymaking. We tasked states with crafting regulations for the licensing, production, sales, testing, and handling of cannabis and cannabis goods. And (conservative guess) at least 85-90% of the people tasked with drafting the regulations and schemas were non-consumers of cannabis, and many with an overt suspicion and ignorance about how cannabis is made or commonly consumed. The regulations and rules defaulted to a strict and comprehensive ideal of controlling cannabis. We could track it from “seed to sale”, or so we promised each other. Instead of approaching cannabis like a botanical or a commodity crop, we gravitated to models like an extreme version of a brewery or a pharmacy– controls and taxes on retail and customers, but also stringent tracking and surveillance requirements for every step of the production process. This has generally served as onerous to operators, but ineffective at preventing “diversion” of product from licensed retailers to unlicensed markets. Put simply: tracking requirements are more often used for “stacking up penalties upon discovery by another method” rather than ” a source of detection of bad-faith actors by regulators”. (there’s all kinds of allegations and conspiracies about this fact, to put it lightly)

Truly have found the limits of federalism for an…outlaw…industry. It’s banking and taxes. As always. Cannabis in the US is a fascinating experiment in federalism– not many places have the dichotomy to allow one of our constituent states to declare a felony substance a recreational product within their boundaries. The system only arose with prosecutorial discretion, and at any point those policies could change. But it’s undeniable that American cannabis arose in a novel manner, in light rebellion of federal law and jurisprudence. But there’s still limits to federalism for a state-legal substance, and the biggest limit is “federally regulated banking systems”. Cash handling and security, extremely heavy interest rates on private loans, these kinds of impediments are a drag on any business, let alone a fledgling industry trying to fit in.

I don’t think there’s an industry that is more ruled by non-experts. I mention it above, but: even compared to my friends in LLMs or computing, or my friends in firearms or oil and gas or any other highly regulated division of the world– at least those places have some industry voices that are taken as authoritative that policymakers will account for. Cannabis is mostly regulated by liquor-cop style agencies, with rules written by squares (to put it bluntly). I’m not against regulating substances (more on that below!), but: alcohol rules are written mostly by people who are familiar with a drink or two, or at least presume to know what the effect of “one unit” is. Cannabis is still written and handled by policymakers who presume cannabis dangerous, and it is hard to convince people who’ve never consumed that their assumptions are overcooked. Cannabis is a relaxed parent drug, it’s not “highway to fucked up”, definitely not in this current landscape (gestures at dark web).

Cannabis is weird. Cannabis is a recreational substance, and a medical substance, and a botanical substance, and a commodity crop. It’s been treated as a narcotic for many decades, and now we’re trying to do something different. An earlier accommodation, the 2018 Farm Bill, tried to split the baby by deeming certain kinds of the plant “hemp” (and safe for Red States, outside of law enforcement) and the other kinds “cannabis” (Blue State stuff, left to die in US legislative hell). This, as we all know now, went very unexpectedly. But the fact of the matter is: any attempt to shove cannabis into one of these regulatory silos (liquor cops, ag cops, lab tech cops, retail cops, etc) is insufficient, and many of them unnecessary. What it will take is people being open to something different than the past decade. This will include a lot of private investors and operators who are similarly married to the model of previous regulatory schemes– they may have privately benefitted at some points, but the entire system is so miserable that we all have to be open to walking away from the status quo.

Overzealous protections do not come without serious costs. I understand the presumption that some might have– take it slow, take the industry-side squabbles as expected noise, but Just Be Safe, Make Sure No Kids Consume. But the slow and unnecessary costs aren’t just on unsympathetic cannabis operators, they’re impacting the environment writ large. Every state in the country has mandated “child-proof packaging” for all adult-use cannabis products, before any evidence or arguments were made. It’s just common sense, right? What has happened is the laws have mandated millions of pieces of plastic packaging, most that (by regulation or law) cannot be recycled. And to questionable effect! The vast majority of children-consuming cannabis events in our time are “kids eating unmarked edibles”. Children like gummies, they aren’t (or at least haven’t in big numbers) encountering joints and bags of cannabis flower and getting down to business behind their parents’ backs. We need protections for packages that look like candy, I can agree to that, but there’s millions of pounds of useless plastic (in the shape of those little tubes for joints, or forbidding any reusable containers for cannabis flower) that are doing nothing but soothing someone’s misplaced sentiments.

plastic tube packaging that does NOTHING to prevent children from consuming cannabis

We need agility and broader understanding that we’re learning as we go. Look, I have a LOT of complaints about cannabis policy, I can sound like I think I know everything good or bad about cannabis, and why everyone else is wrong and I’m correct. That’s not the case! I have great sympathy for the challenge of figuring out how to safely and reasonably regulate an interesting plant. What grinds the gears is (for work) watching state after state re-enact the structures and forms and assumptions of CA, CO, and WA regulatory systems and rules. The people pass a referendum for adult cannabis, and then state regulators look out there and riff off what someone else has done– it’s the most plausible deniability you can get, it’s the form of regulation most tolerable to legislators and sturdy enough to survive administrative challenges, there’s a reason why the inertia leads this way. But most people who write these rules then just put cannabis aside. It’s an accomplishment to tout, not a vital industry to monitor, respond to, or modify. “Legal weed” isn’t a promised land, it’s a new realm of attention.

We need to chill out. For all the problems of regulating weed, it has to be re-iterated, again and again in the face of clickbait and fretting– most of the problems of Rampant Weed have been light. We don’t need to do a big and exhausting fight about “harms of alcohol” among society and youth, vs “harms of cannabis”. That can be later, but I think, both in popular perception and in the granular details, cannabis’s impact on socially-deleterious behaviors is somewhere between 1/5th and 1/10th and 1/50th the burden of alcohol. And this is in an age with huge interstate markets for discount bootleg hemp-derived THC products! There are serious problems with preventing kids from accidentally consuming edibles, there are serious problems with ensuring some people with mental health conditions avoid THC , there are serious problems with people consuming cannabis while operating machinery like “trading desks” or “infrastructural computing work” or “DOGE crap”. But even the rates of “cannabis and driving”, when we get down to some kind of sturdy data, is way way lower than alcohol. We can take cannabis seriously, without handling it frantically or apocalyptically.

We need to figure out what the goals are. Is the goal to limit cannabis sales to the safest and most overseen manner? Is the goal to allow cannabis businesses to become regular participants in lawful commerce? Is the goal to ensure generational wealth for a limited few license holders? Is the goal to develop sturdy jobs and careers for as many people as possible? Whatever your priority is, we need more earnest and comprehensive discussions about it– how do we make that happen? Is Policy ____ in the interest of us, the enabling or in-power political party, and our political caucuses? There’s just so much Serious Talk to be had, and the intersection of cannabis with existing political struggles (like labor, environment, healthcare) is pretty easy to do…as long as you don’t just keep treating it like Booze Light.

Weed is here, we’re figuring it out, let’s try to be serious about it.

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Cannabis Policy

No One Takes Cannabis Seriously

I don’t mean literally everyone, of course. There are some folks who are intrigued by what cannabis presents, and are interested in studying what cannabis is with an open mind.

In general, however, after a decade of legal recreational use of cannabis in dozens of states, almost no one takes cannabis seriously, in the government or in many cannabis businesses. Rather than see it as the peculiar plant that it is, with wide variety of uses and therapies, governments and business see it as New Booze or the New Medicine, and try to treat it as such.

We have industries and governments treating “cannabis” and “hemp” as if they are distinct plants. This is an unserious distinction, and the ensuing decade of hemp-based cannabinoid products has rendered the labels a mockery. The “two different plants” have even established political coalitions in legislatures, and battle lines have been drawn over a nonsensical concept.

We have operators who act like Consumer Product Good manufacturers, floating to wherever the regulations are weakest. Companies that used to work with licensed cannabis cultivators have left the adult-use states and set up shops in “hemp” jurisdictions. On an individual level, you can’t blame a business for seeking to get out of the red, but it comes at the cost of clarity about the cannabis plant, the products they sell, and the quality they promise.

We have policymakers across the country who do not know the first thing about cannabis, but who know (i) it can bring the local governments some revenue, and (ii) it should be treated like alcohol, and taxed like it. Most policymakers see the cannabis industry as a vice or luxury goods business, and have little patience for complaints about regulations– they see all of it as a privilege they, the policymakers, gave to the public.

Most policymakers also refuse to take seriously the idea that the “US Government is incapable of controlling cannabis production”, even though we spent decades and billions of dollars trying to do just that. They act as if the government has a capacity it never has had, and that the question is just one of the policymakers fiddling around with new privileges and punishments to bring the industry into line.

We will have over a decade of licensed cannabis markets, and almost all of them have withered every person who’s stayed in the game. The functional tax rates are exorbitant, and there is little serious interest in fixing them. There has been roughly 1000x more interest and movement in “fixing” cryptocurrency regulations over the past decade than there has been for fixing federal laws to allow state-compliant cannabis businesses access to standard business services and tax deductions. The policymakers take cryptocurrency far more seriously than cannabis.

And finally, plenty of consumers don’t take cannabis seriously either. They see it as an alternative to booze, and relentlessly search for THC numbers that have little to do with the high one receives. They slam down poor-regulated products with abandon, and think claims about quality or safety are not important. They’ll take cannabis in any form they can get.

I don’t know if the lack of seriousness will go away. I hope it does. Cannabis is a supremely interesting plant, and has loads of applications and opportunities. But until we take cannabis seriously— as a consumable, a commodity, a medicine, a flower, a textile — we will stay in these messes.

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Cannabis Policy

Some Thoughts on Regulating Cannabis Sales at Live Events

I want to start a little ongoing series of thoughts about integrating cannabis products and cannabis sales into venues that host events like sports and concerts. I want to keep this more abstract for several concrete reasons:

  1. We are just starting to see licensed cannabis groups working their way with cannabis consumption in public venues. In Illinois this weekend, the “Miracle at Mundelein” is a prime example of an inaugural attempt– no cannabis sales in the consumption space, but you can purchase products at the dispensary across the street– but it’s a very hodgepodge affair. The state regulators aren’t deeply involved, and the on-site regulations and requirements are an ad-hoc mixture of local rules and state laws. Trying to speak concretely about “public cannabis sales” writ large is useless at this point, we’re only getting started, and each state is its own challenge.
  2. Almost every state’s laws and licensing schemes for cannabis are designed against sales of cannabis at public venues. The laws are designed to control the sales of cannabis– to limit the sales to licensed facilities and dispensaries, and prohibit all other cannabis sales to customers that take place outside of a licensed dispensary. This was done by legislators at the behest of many in the licensed cannabis industry, at least initially. License holders pay large amounts for their privilege, and are generally against the idea of creating more places to buy licensed products, which undercuts their own sales.
  3. Every state’s cannabis laws are different. Their own peculiar licenses, their own requirements for acquiring licenses, and their own landscape of regulatory requirements for licensed operators. There are of course similarities between states, but there is absolutely no uniformity or consistency across jurisdictions.

Given these facts, there’s no single strategy or set of changes that a person could recommend, it’s just too thorny and contingent on other circumstances.

I want to invert the framing of this challenge: rather than talk about all the things that need to be modified or changed from our current position in any state’s system, I want to focus on the destination, where we’re trying to get to. If we can start developing a consensus on what safe Public Cannabis Sales might look like, my hope is that we can more easily agree on what needs to change in each jurisdiction.

So for today, I want to highlight some principles or values that an effective Public Cannabis Sales system should enforce and support, and that all stakeholders (communities, regulatory agencies, licensed operators) should be able to rally behind:

  • Safe – Everyone should be interested in people using cannabis in a safe environment, and cannabis should only be permitted to be sold in a safe manner. There’s no need to grant the privilege of cannabis sales to a facility or operator that doesn’t take safety seriously– if someone’s so uncaring as to be unsafe, there’s always going to be another willing operator who can meet the requirements of public safety.
  • No Minor Use – Everyone should be interested in preventing underage cannabis use and sales, especially the cannabis industry. There’s already significant evidence that developing brains shouldn’t consume THC, and little room for the idea that it’s good or even non-harmful for young people to consume cannabis. Even if there are many people in the modern cannabis industry who don’t realize it, they have a long-term interest in preventing young people too: people who start smoking later in life tend to consume more than the people who started too early! Keeping young people from smoking or vaping weed is an effective way to preserve your future customer base.
  • Risk-Based – Rather than fear based regulations, or stigma-based laws, our system for Public Cannabis Sales should be both based on measurable evidence and on a forward-looking mindset of anticipating problems where they actually are occurring. The first decade of cannabis regulation has shown quite clearly that legislators are unable to fully anticipate the risks and challenges of a regulated industry, and have both over-legislated and under-legislated in particular areas. Public cannabis sales, if anything, are even more important to get right than licensed site sales. We need a system that is consistently compared against on-the-ground reality, and willing to be audited and updated to better address risks where we discover them. We also need a system that is willing to let go of old fears that have been proven to be low-risk.
  • Responsive and Agile – Public Cannabis Sales’ issues are not strictly limited to the site of an event and the holders of the license– there are surrounding communities and households that are just as much impacted by sales and customer behavior, as well as on-site employees and public transit workers servicing the event. A successful system for regulated public sales will need to have built into it a standard of responsiveness and adaptability, as well as public standards of being answerable to community-based input. Annual assessments by a third party would possibly be the pipe-dream for creating a responsive regulatory stance.
  • Positive – We are not trying to banish cannabis to the shadows anymore, and we should be aiming for cannabis’s inclusion to be as positive as we can make it, rather than deny its very existence or potential inclusion. This doesn’t mean pushing cannabis into places without consent, but it means allowing the market for public cannabis to grow towards a demand-based amount in public. Sales of cannabis shouldn’t be unlimited,of course, but instead only limited when informed by evidence of public risk. (See: Risk-Based, above). Having legislators set standards for public use based on their personal levels of taste/distaste for cannabis is an inconsistent plan, and a recipe for more head-aches. Not Positive!

I’m definitely going to have more thoughts on this later, but hopefully we can at least start getting more policy-minded folks involved with the question. This isn’t an issue that should be solved by a closed room of agency regulators, industry lobbyists, and public health partisans, and I think crafting an effective solution to public cannabis sales will have huge impacts to everyone, both inside and outside of the industry.

As a final thought: over the weekend I went to an outdoor concert featuring Run The Jewels, Wu-Tang Clan, and Deltron 3030 (rap nerd flex!). It was a great show, even if it’s always kinda funny to watch these poor sea-level rappers struggle to breathe. As you can imagine, there was a massive amount of weed smoked in this amphitheater, for hours straight. Also, given that these acts have fans from 30 years ago, the age range in the crowd was from teenagers to 60somethings. In terms of a strict reading of current regulations, this concert was an enforcement mess, and thousands of people congregated to break a clear legal requirement. And yet….outside of the usual concert injuries (people falling down the steps while drunk, a fight or two in the back between drunk people)… no one who attended that concert or was in the surrounding areas was harmed by the illegality. After the show, and after my mind cleared, I kept coming back to the idea of consent– how the context of consent mattered to determining the amount of social harm to be mitigated.

Does attending a Wu-Tang concert mean an implicit consent to be exposed to secondhand cannabis smoke? Obviously by the strict letter of the law, no, it doesn’t. But in the realer world of experience, I think it’s safe to say that there was an implicit consent. I know that for myself, there was a full-minded awareness that the show would include that environmental condition. Did the working staff and vendors of the amphitheater have the same level of consent? Obviously not. But rather than presume to speak for the employees, I will instead say: I would love some surveys and data about live event staff’s views and perspectives on working events that are all-but-assured to include secondhand cannabis smoke.

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Once I figure out how to get comments working on this here dang blog, I’ll open them up below for your thoughts or feedback. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to ping me on Twitter (@wisetendersnob) or BlueSky (@snowdenst), I’d love to hear other perspectives, especially from folks with experience working as vendors and staff for cannabis-heavy events as they currently occur.