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Built by a former cannabis regulator, Policy, Decoded helps operators read the policy terrain before it shifts beneath their feet.
Today's editorial is sponsored by Podium. Their support is what keeps these briefings free for readers.
This week, the federal government has to do something it has not done in fifty years. It has to walk into a courtroom and argue the opposite of everything it has said about cannabis since 1970, that the plant it called dangerous and useless and filed next to heroin is, in fact, medicine. I want to say plainly where we land on that. It is right, and it is fifty years overdue. Patients have been getting real relief on their doctors' advice for years. Prohibition never delivered the safety it kept promising. A schedule was never meant to be a tomb. We are for this.
But can the government can do the overdue thing without losing it, or breaking the people who built the industry on the way in? The hearings that start tomorrow look like the main event, and it is not. It is dull administrative procedure, stacked with only opponents by a quirk of standing law, and it decides nothing by itself. The real fight already moved across the river to the D.C. Circuit, where April's order rescheduling medical cannabis is under challenge for the shortcut the government took to move fast. And the real disruption is already loose: April split the industry in two, medical in Schedule III with tax relief, adult-use still in Schedule I with none, a fault line now running straight through the same companies, the same shelves, the same customers.
I spent enough years as a regulator to know the trap. A decision you cannot defend on appeal is just a reversal with a delay on it, and the fastest way to lose a reform is to win it badly. We walk through what the hearing actually is, what the courts will do with the record, and where the next turn of the wheel lands, on the budtender, the grower, the family that signed a personal guarantee, the people the rule will never name and reach all the same.
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