“They basically thought it was impossible when all these companies were fighting, and now the workers are winning.”

By Rebecca Rivas, Missouri Independent

Missouri cannabis workers are trying to turn a string of recent union victories into broader organizing momentum across the state.

High Profile Cannabis dispensary workers in Columbia last week unanimously ratified what union officials say is the state’s first collective bargaining contract for cannabis workers, securing higher pay and paid vacation time.

“Now for the first time in Missouri, dispensary workers are FEELING THAT CONTRACT HIGH!” the United Food and Commercial Workers International Local 655 posted on its Facebook page Wednesday.

And in St. Louis, Proper Brands post-harvest workers—who process and manufacture products—won their election to unionize last week, and Vibe Cannabis post-harvest workers are scheduled to hold an election at the end of July.

“I’ve been hearing from more and more production and dispensary workers all over the state who want to find out what they need to do in order to organize their workplaces,” said Sean Shannon, organizing director at UFCW Local 655. “They basically thought it was impossible when all these companies were fighting, and now the workers are winning.”

After Missouri legalized recreational marijuana in 2023, the state saw a surge in cannabis jobs that was soon followed by a push to unionize.

Several groups of workers endured yearslong legal battles and company pushback. This year, some are finally seeing the results.

Sierra Lutz was among the employees who organized the High-Profile union petition in 2023. She’s now a trimming tech at Vibe Cannabis, where she is leading the unionization campaign. She and her fellow post-harvest workers filed a petition to unionize last month.

After hearing the news about High Profile’s contract, Lutz applauded the workers’ dedication.

“I’m so proud of their perseverance,” she said. “They deserve every second of this glory.”

Her work with High Profile taught her some key lessons she’s bringing to the Vibe campaign, she said. The main one: “patience is everything.”

“The workplace won’t change overnight, but change will come,” Lutz said. “That’s been my biggest point I’ve been communicating to Vibe employees.”

Other Vibe employees are also organizing veterans, after participating in the unionization effort at BeLeaf Medical’s Sinse cultivation facility in St. Louis. In May, Sinse workers won a significant legal precedent for post-harvest workers after nearly three-year battle, with a decision affirming their right to unionize under federal labor law.

“More and more workers are feeling empowered,” Shannon said, “and I believe we’re going to see a huge wave and a rise in workers rising together.”

‘A seat at the table’

Katie Hazelwonder, a trainer in Proper’s post-harvest department, said she was overjoyed that workers voted 25-21 to unionize on July 1.

“We put a lot of work into this, and I’m so thankful to everyone that stood together to make this happen,” Hazelwonder said. “That’s honestly the only way we got through this, we stood together and never backed down.”

Hazelwonder acknowledged this was a stressful month for “both sides of the vote,” but said she believes the effort will result in better pay, job security and working conditions.

“This victory is about all of us having a voice and having a seat at the table,” she said, “and we’re looking forward to negotiating a fair contract that reflects the hard work and dedication of everyone.”

John Pennington, founder and CEO of Proper Brands, said in an email to The Independent that the company respects the post-harvest team’s decision and their right to determine how they want to be represented.

“Proper Brands has always believed that our people are the foundation of our success, and that commitment remains unchanged,” Pennington said. “As we move forward, our focus will be on building a constructive relationship rooted in mutual respect, open communication, and our shared goal of producing the highest-quality cannabis products for Missouri.”

Pennington also said the company remains committed to “providing a safe, supportive workplace where every team member has the opportunity to grow and contribute to our continued success.”

“We are pleased to be a part of this process,” he said, “and look forward to working with the UFCW.”

Hazelwonder previously told The Independent that the Proper team was encouraged by a May decision from the National Labor Relations Board, which decides labor disputes and sets national policy on union organizing.

The board rejected another St. Louis marijuana company’s argument that post-harvest employees are agricultural workers, who are excluded from a federal law that protects most private-sector employees’ right to unionize without fear of retaliation.

“Thanks to the recent NLRB ruling we have the opportunity to sit at the table and make it better for us and the others to come,” Hazelwonder said.

Vibe

At Vibe, Lutz said she and other production workers were told they’d have the federal Juneteenth holiday off this year. But then a few days before the holiday, she says managers told them they would have to work. They later learned the company paid for another department’s employees to go to Six Flags theme park on Juneteenth.

It’s part of the favoritism, such as free meals and other perks, her team doesn’t get to enjoy.

“I love that that department gets all of that extra stuff, like, genuinely,” Lutz said, “but our department gets absolutely nothing.”

Juneteenth was the last straw for post-harvest employees who were on the fence about unionizing, Lutz said, and Shannon filed the petition to unionize on June 18.

Katie Parker, human resources manager for Vibe, said the company had no comment on the petition or the issues raised by employees.

Since the petition was filed, Lutz said workers have been required to meet individually with two consultants, who told employees the company hired them to educate workers on the union process.

Lutz works in the trim department, where she operates the Mobius trimming machine, she said. During the summer, she said, the room is often 80 degrees with poor air circulation.

“They’ve told us many times that the thing that they are worried about getting above 80 degrees in that room is not our wellbeing as employees,” she said, “but the wellbeing of the product.”

She said she and her colleagues do challenging work that’s vital to the quality ofVibe’s product, but they don’t see the pay raises other departments do.

Bird Herndon, who has worked in Vibe’s post-harvest department for about a year, agreed with Lutz.

“Cannabis cultivation and processing are physically demanding and almost always impact respiratory health,” Herndon said. “Making sure we have consistent access to safety equipment like respirators is a top priority.”

Herndon said a structured collective bargaining process would allow the team to “work collaboratively with management to formalize, streamline, and uphold high-standard safety procedures and equipment protocols for everyone.”

Among the group’s demands is the option of a 401(k) so they can plan for retirement.

Vibe employees have been in touch with organizers at Proper and BeLeaf, Herndon said, to learn from their experiences.

“We can all help each other,” Herndon said. “More minds on the problem leads to a better solution for everyone.”

This story was first published by Missouri Independent.

Photo courtesy of Chris Wallis // Side Pocket Images.

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Before cannabis, Stacey Rusch spent years learning how to hold an audience, whether the room contained yoga students, morning-news viewers, QVC shoppers, or a table full of Real Housewives.

There is a 2021 résumé still circulating online that explains Stacey Rusch better than most reality-TV biographies ever could.

It is from years before SHAYO and before The Real Housewives of Potomac turned her particular cadence, optimism, and pearl-clutching composure into Bravo fodder. Under “Skills,” Rusch lists sales experience, improvisation, storytelling, live performance, health and wellness, and the ability to make guests comfortable on air. Her work history jumps from Washington television to QVC to yoga instruction. Among her former yoga clients: the White House Athletic Center, American University, the CIA, and NASA.

Read five years later, it feels less like an old TV résumé than a blueprint. Rusch has spent years learning how people connect to a person, a product, and a story. Now she has brought those skills somewhere considerably messier than a television studio: cannabis.

“The joy of connection!” Rusch tells High Times when asked what connects the various versions of her career. Later in the same answer, she puts it another way: “my passion is and always will be making a positive connection.”

That may sound relentlessly sunny. With Rusch, relentless sunniness appears to be part of the point.

Before the Housewives, There Was the Pitch

Selling something on live television is a strange art. There is no edit to save you, no dead air to disappear in post, and no room to suddenly discover that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Rusch’s résumé says her QVC work was live and unscripted, requiring detailed product knowledge and the ability to improvise.

In a 2025 interview with Vulture, Rusch described the machinery behind that ease: hours spent learning brands and products before going live, then drawing on her own life to make whatever was on the table feel familiar. It is easy to joke about QVC. It is harder to deny the training.

Before Rusch ever had a cannabis company, she had learned how to translate products for people who might know nothing about them. Before reality TV, she knew how to speak directly into a camera without a script. Before either, she taught yoga.

The yoga chapter matters because few words in commercial cannabis have been stretched thinner than “wellness.” Plenty of brands discover it at roughly the same moment they discover a market segment.

Rusch has a stronger claim to the territory. Her yoga work predates SHAYO by years, and her old résumé identifies her as a health and wellness expert while listing teaching work with institutions ranging from American University to NASA and the CIA.

“My intention was to start a wellness company,” she says. “As a former yoga teacher, I wanted to develop products that help people live a fuller, more joyful life.”

SHAYO centers on two rosin-infused fruit chews: Rise, a Blood Orange Pomegranate chew with a 1:2 THC-to-CBG ratio, and Rest, a Berry Vanilla chew with a 1:2 THC-to-CBN ratio. The brand’s current lineup also includes one-gram all-in-one vapes under the Rise and Rest names.

The more interesting question isn’t whether cannabis needs another wellness brand. It’s why Rusch believed her own history gave her a credible reason to build one.

Stacey Rusch Is Very Good at Being Stacey Rusch

Reality television introduced a different problem. On QVC, polish is competence. On Housewives, polish can become evidence against you. Rusch’s unusually formal delivery and relentlessly composed personality quickly became part of her character on Potomac. Her castmates have repeatedly questioned whether the Stacey they see on camera is a performance, extending that suspicion to her relationships and even the timeline of her cannabis business.

Her professional history makes that tension easier to understand. Rusch has worked in professions where controlling the message is not deception. It is literally the job. Journalism rewards preparation. QVC rewards fluency. Yoga rewards calm. Reality television rewards the moment when somebody loses all three. Rusch sees the distinction.

“Reality TV is different in that you have to let go of telling a story and live the story,” she says. “You cannot be prepared. There are no scripts or teleprompters. It’s organic in a way that’s both exciting and terrifying.”

That might be the most revealing thing she told High Times. For someone whose career has involved communicating with intention, Housewives asks her to surrender control and then turns that surrender into entertainment. Cannabis puts her back on more familiar ground. Here, she gets to decide what the story is.

Weed, Without the Apology

Cannabis still carries stigma, particularly for women whose public identities sit somewhere between family, television, and wellness. We asked whether there was anyone she worried about disappointing when she entered the industry.

“No.”

That was the entire answer. It lands harder than a paragraph about empowerment ever could. Rusch doesn’t present entering cannabis as rebellion. She doesn’t need a story about secretly smoking weed for decades to establish credibility, and she doesn’t perform an edgy reinvention now that cannabis is commercially useful. Her stated interest is much more consistent with the career she already had: wellness, connection, and women.

But SHAYO also places her inside a cannabis industry where access and ownership are much more complicated than celebrity entrepreneurship can make them appear.

Jushi Holdings launched SHAYO with Rusch in 2025, initially bringing its rosin-infused fruit chews into Virginia’s medical market before expanding the brand into Nevada’s adult-use market later that year. Jushi describes SHAYO as a brand “co-created” with Rusch. Rusch describes the relationship enthusiastically.

“In partnering with JUSHI I was able to do just that with the best quality of products and expert guidance in this ever changing industry,” she says.

That partnership matters because Virginia is no California. Non-medical cannabis sales remain illegal in the state, with regulated adult-use retail scheduled to begin July 1, 2027. Virginia’s medical cannabis system is divided among five geographic health service areas, each with a licensed pharmaceutical processor. Jushi holds the processor license for Northern Virginia, and those pharmaceutical processors are currently the only authorized growers and dispensaries of medical cannabis in the state.

SHAYO, in other words, wasn’t born in an open marketplace where anybody with a clever logo could rent a storefront and start moving gummies. It entered through one of the few existing gates. That context makes Rusch’s next ambition much more interesting.

What Does Ownership Mean When the Gates Are This Narrow?

“I made history as the first Black woman to own her own brand in Virginia,” Rusch tells High Times, “and now my duty is to continue to shape history by helping other entrepreneurs enter this space and thrive.”

Rusch, for her part, is increasingly interested in the structural side of the business. She says she is a member of the U.S. Cannabis Roundtable and has participated in two congressional briefings about her experience as an owner and advocate for women’s wellness.

“I’ve found solidarity in the excitement for change,” she says. “This is a pivotal time in the industry.”

For Virginia, that is literally true. The state is now building the rules for a recreational market scheduled to open next year, including licenses for retail stores, cultivation facilities, processors, delivery operators, and microbusinesses.

The next version of Virginia cannabis will have more doors. The harder question is who will be able to walk through them.

Joy Is Not the Same Thing as Naivety

Spend enough time with the language surrounding Rusch and eventually the word “joy” starts appearing everywhere. Rusch uses it. SHAYO uses it. Her professional history uses it. Even when asked what joy means when life decidedly does not cooperate, she refuses to abandon the premise.

“When life isn’t joyful, I find comfort in gratitude,” she says. “No matter your circumstance, you can always find something to be thankful for. I find solace in my faith.”

Then comes the line that could only belong to someone who agreed to join The Real Housewives:

“I know that God will always lead me back to who I am inherently – delusionally optimistic!”

There it is. The useful mistake would be to confuse optimism with softness. When asked what viewers misunderstand about her, Rusch describes a life far quieter than her television job suggests.

“I’m a Brave Housewife but I’m so lowkey,” she says. “Outside of the blessings of glitz and glamour that come with being on TV, I live in a small community of the best people. My weekends are filled with swim meets and sleepovers.”

That version of Stacey Rusch can coexist with the woman who mastered live television, volunteered her private life to Bravo, entered one of the most regulated industries in America, and now wants a seat in cannabis policy conversations.

Maybe that is the throughline. Not wellness. Not television. Not even cannabis. Rusch has made a profession out of walking into rooms where attention is currency and figuring out how to hold it.

The Next Thing She Wants to Sell Is Possibility

Celebrity cannabis has had enough famous faces dropped onto packaging. Rusch is more interesting when SHAYO is treated as another stop in a longer career rather than its culmination.

She was teaching yoga before wellness became a cannabis marketing category. She learned sales before influencers learned to call affiliate links entrepreneurship. She learned television before Bravo made the question of whether she was “performing” into part of her television persona.

Cannabis brings all of those histories together, but it also gives her something television never really could: the chance to build an asset that exists when the camera turns off. That appears to be the part she most wants to matter.

“I hope that my story of entrepreneurship will inspire more people to feel empowered to build brands,” Rusch says. “Especially people like me.”

Then she leaves very little ambiguity about how she sees the work ahead.

“I want to utilize my work, brand, and voice to change that.”

“And I will.”

Images courtesy of Stacey Rusch and SHAYO.

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“We already got our raises. Our [personal time off] is taking effect. Bonuses have been handed out…and job security is in place.”

By Rebecca Rivas, Missouri Independent

It’s been nearly a month since Key Cannabis Dispensary employees in Springfield ratified their first collective bargaining agreement that includes wage increases, bonuses and additional time off to workers.

And employees are feeling pretty high.

“Now that the contract has been ratified, we’re rocking and rolling already,” said Sally Powell, a retail associate at Key Cannabis Dispensary. “We already got our raises. Our [personal time off] is taking effect. Bonuses have been handed out…and job security is in place.”

Powell was among the employees who in 2022 voted 6-3 to unionize, under the representation of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 2.

The agreement is a milestone in Missouri’s still-young marijuana industry, where dispensaries have proliferated since recreational sales began in 2023 but organized labor has made only limited inroads. The Springfield workers are just the second group of cannabis employees in the state to secure a union contract, and their four-year path to one offers a glimpse at how difficult it can be to turn a successful organizing vote into tangible workplace protections.

The delay was partly because the previous owners, Bloom Medicinal, sold the dispensary in January 2024 to Elevate Cannabis.

Nico Pento, chief legal officer for Elevate Cannabis, said it was a unique situation because the company was “thrown into the middle” of the unionization process, as part of its acquisition of a few facilities from Bloom.

“A lot of what we settled on is not much different than what we do as an organization,” Pento said. “But, I respect the right of everybody to want to be represented by a union if they so choose. I’m happy we could come to an amicable agreement.”

While the company has a merit increase system in wages, Pento said this store’s employees were on a hiring freeze during the lengthy collective bargaining process.

“We needed to get through the entire [collective bargaining agreement] negotiations before we could make any adjustments to compensation,” Pento said, “so the increases that we gave them were really more of a true-up to get them to where we felt they would have been had they not chosen to unionize.”

The ratification bonus was similarly something the company decided was the “right thing to do,” he said.

“They had gone over two years without getting a wage increase,” he said, “so we wanted to find a way to properly compensate them for that kind of two-year delay.”

Powell said the contract creates more stable scheduling and clearer disciplinary guidelines. One of the most important provisions for Powell were the non-discrimination, anti-harassment and inclusion protections.

“With the cannabis industry just being a super inclusive industry as is,” she said, “it’s nice to just have some extra language to protect that. Being gay myself, we have quite a few gender-fluid people in our facility. It’s just been great to be able to be your true self and not have to worry about who you are.”

Elevate Cannabis is owned by a group of family and friends based out of the Kansas city area, he said, and the company has 14 dispensaries and two manufacturing and cultivation facilities. It is among the largest cannabis companies in Missouri.

Another reason it took so a long time to get a union contract ratified, Pento said, is because the labor negotiation process “is definitely a little old school.”

“Everything is in person,” he said. “You’re trading drafts back and forth in person. It’s not like a typical, you know, sale or acquisition where you’re exchanging red lines and can bang it out in a couple weeks.”

However, Pento commended the union representative, Saul Guerrero, for being reasonable and easy to communicate with.

Chad Price, UFCW Local 2 director of collective bargaining and retail servicing, praised the workers for their hard work and dedication.

“We want to welcome them to our union family,” Price said. “Together, we will continue building contracts that improve lives and strengthen our workplaces for years to come.”

This story was first published by Missouri Independent.

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Forty-five million people in the U.S. speak Spanish as their dominant language. The cannabis industry has existed legally for over a decade. And it took until 2026 for one of the country’s largest dispensary chains to build a full Spanish-language experience for them. Curaleaf finally did it. Took a minute.

The program rolled out this month across Curaleaf’s 73 medical cannabis dispensaries in Florida. It covers in-store kiosks in Spanish, a fully translated curaleaf.com, a Spanish SWEED e-commerce storefront, printed bilingual education materials, and paid media built for Spanish-speaking audiences. Curaleaf says it plans to scale the model to other states and other languages.

If you are wondering why this took so long, you are not the only one.

The math the industry kept ignoring

The U.S. Census Bureau pegs the country’s Hispanic population at 68 million as of 2024, one in five Americans. Data compiled by the Cervantes Institute and reported by Euronews earlier this year put the number of dominant Spanish speakers (monolingual and bilingual) at at least 45 million, with another 15 million at varying levels of fluency. That makes the United States the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. Only Mexico has more.

Florida is one of the densest pockets of that map. 6.7 million Hispanics, 28.7% of the state’s population. It is also one of the largest medical cannabis markets in the country, with close to a million registered patients.

The arithmetic was never the hard part. The hard part was getting a major operator to actually move on it.

The budtenders called it

The initiative did not come out of a strategy deck. It came out of the retail floor.

Justin Miller, Senior Vice President of Brand Marketing at Curaleaf, told High Times the program was triggered by feedback from the staff who actually deal with patients every day.

“This initiative started with our budtenders telling us there were people walking into our stores who weren’t able to access the full Curaleaf retail experience in their primary language. That’s the kind of feedback you have to act on.”

Justin Miller, Curaleaf

That is the cleanest signal a brand ever gets. Not a survey. Not a focus group. The person at the counter, listening to the same conversation over and over.

Cultural translation, not Google Translate

This is where most attempts at Spanish-language brand programs fall apart. They run English copy through a translator, slap it on the same template, and call it done. The patient opens the page and immediately knows it was not built for them.

Miller was clear that Curaleaf took a different route.

“Curaleaf’s approach was deliberately built around cultural fluency, not just language conversion.”

Justin Miller, Curaleaf

In practice, that meant three things. Legal and regulatory copy (THC warnings, mandatory product disclosures) got professionally translated and certified, because mistakes there carry real consequences. Brand and product names, including strain names, run on locked glossaries so the core identity stays consistent even as the surrounding copy adapts. And the marketing copy, offers, calls to action, and educational content all got rewritten with local tone and idiom, instead of converted word-for-word.

Curaleaf also pulled in internal Spanish speakers to vet tone and cultural nuance. Miller named Angel Rodriguez, the company’s SVP of HR and a native Spanish speaker, as a key voice in the review process.

Why Florida first

Curaleaf operates 73 medical dispensaries in Florida. That alone makes the state the natural pilot.

“Florida felt like the right place to prove this out, given how large and important the Spanish-speaking community is here.”

Justin Miller, Curaleaf

The plan is to use Florida as a template. If the model holds, Curaleaf will replicate it in other states and eventually in other languages.

The early feedback is reportedly positive. Miller said physicians and medical-card providers across Florida have told the company they have not seen anything like this in the market, and that their patients are visibly happy to have Spanish-language materials for the first time.

For new patients, Curaleaf is offering a 60% discount on the first three visits. The educational handouts circulating in dispensaries include a Cannabis 101 piece titled “Bienvenido al Cannabis,” covering how the plant works, THC and CBD basics, product types, dosing, onset and duration. There is also a Florida-specific guide explaining the three steps to get a medical card in the state. None of this is groundbreaking on its own. What is new is that it exists at scale, in Spanish, inside a major operator’s full retail and digital stack.

Curaleaf’s pitch describes the program as the first of its kind from a major MSO. That claim deserves a sober look.

Other operators have done bilingual work before. Happy Munkey, the New York dispensary built on a Latino-led brand identity, has a Spanish-language presence in its stores. Other state-level operators have rolled out Spanish signage and materials to varying degrees. What Curaleaf is claiming is narrower. Asked to be precise, Miller said it like this:

“This is the first time a major multi-state operator has built a fully integrated, end-to-end Spanish-language experience spanning retail, e-commerce, digital and media, with a defined plan to scale it nationally.”

Justin Miller, Curaleaf

That is the honest version. And at MSO scale, in legal U.S. cannabis, no other operator currently has anything comparable.

What this means for the rest of the industry

Curaleaf operates in 17 U.S. states and has international operations in Europe, Canada and Australasia. The company closed Q1 2026 with $324 million in revenue and $70 million in net income. In April, it completed the buyout of Germany’s Four 20 Pharma, an EU-GMP and GDP licensed producer. The Spanish-language program slots into a broader market-localization strategy.

Miller hedged on projections. The company is treating this like any new-market expansion: start with a strong base in Florida, measure engagement, refine, then scale.

Here is the part that should make every other MSO uncomfortable. The U.S. cannabis industry has had more than a decade to build for Spanish-speaking patients. The data on Hispanic consumers, Florida patient populations, Latino purchasing power and bilingual retail performance have been sitting on every operator’s desk that whole time. The market did not change. The marketing did not change. Until now.

Curaleaf got there first. Later than we expected, but first. The next question is which competitor moves second, and how long the others wait before they have to explain to their boards why they ignored 45 million potential customers.

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“The sad part was people who were targeted when there was prohibition on cannabis, those same individuals were excluded from the cannabis industry.”

By Will Hammann, Maryland Matters

When Candice Peters opened Coastal Cure Cannabis in Delmar on June 1, it was the culmination of more than two years of hard work on a decade-old dream.

And that’s a fast turnaround compared to many of her peers.

Of the 83 “social equity” licenses for dispensaries that have been distributed by the state since 2023, only 17 are currently in operation, twice the number that were open at the start of this year as more and more finally get their businesses off the ground.

In addition to the challenges faced by any wishful entrepreneur, license holders say they also struggle with unique zoning issues, limited investors and unwilling real estate partners as the still-pervasive stigma around their product hangs in the air.

“It’s been a journey,” said Peters. “And there have been a lot of long nights, and longer days trying to jump…all of these hurdles.”

Peters, a physician who had long been interested in medical use of cannabis, first sought a license after marijuana was legalized for medicinal use in Maryland more than 10 years ago. But she didn’t come away with one then.

“There were no minorities, or very few minorities that got these licenses,” she said. “They were supposed to be a very blind application process. That turned out not to be true, which is how we end up here.”

The Cannabis Reform Act, which made recreational sales legal in 2023, also created the Maryland Cannabis Administration and the Office of Social Equity. It created the social equity licenses, for new dispensaries, growers and processors who came from Maryland communities—or who attended schools in communities—disproportionately affected by the war on drugs.

“The sad part was people who were targeted when there was prohibition on cannabis, those same individuals were excluded from the cannabis industry,” Peters said. “Multimillions of dollars have been made, and no one who was affected by it, decades ago, was able to really profit from that.”

That was echoed by Malcolm Gillian, founder of the Maryland Coalition for Cannabis Equity, a trade association representing social equity licensees like Peters.

“Cannabis should never have been illegal—the enormous impact and harm on folk in arrests and everything else—I definitely want to see that be corrected,” said Gillian, who said he is a few months away from opening his own dispensary.

He said his coalition, made up mostly of self-financed entrepreneurs, works to “make sure social equity licensees have the right funding opportunities, and frankly, when they get to market, have a chance to compete,”

Gillian said Maryland’s law, and the Cannabis Administration, have “created a very healthy, very robust, legal marketplace versus other states that are still challenged with killing the illegal markets.”

Sales have increased each year since recreational cannabis was legalized in 2023, according to data from the Cannabis Administration, totaling $3.46 billion since then and hitting a monthly record in April of $105 million in combined medical and recreational sales.

“The MCA remains committed to providing a safe, equitable and accessible medical and adult-use cannabis industry for qualifying patients and adult consumers,” the administration said in a statement.

Most dispensaries in the state began as medicinal-use operations that converted their licenses to sell recreational cannabis as well. There are 99 non-social equity equity licensed dispensaries currently operating in the state, according to MCA data.

Peters noted that part of regulating the industry has been ensuring that new businesses weren’t founded or swept up by larger investors with multiple locations, sometimes across multiple states.

“The resources that these multistate operators have, I mean, they’re so far above what we have access to,” she said. “Not just financially but in who we know, who we can contact to get expedited services.

“This round of licenses was critical to, not even evening the playing field, but at least allowing us to have a seat at the table,” Peters added. “If half those licenses are bought up by multistate operators, the other half of us would never be able to compete with those numbers.”

Making sure that social equity licenses stay in local hands is just one of the challenges the new businesses have faced. Peters, Gillian and Frank Hayes, an owner of Crabtree Cannabis in Kensington, said the law requiring that 65 percent of equity is held by the qualified applicant can make it especially difficult for social equity licensees to raise capital.

Hayes, who sits on the board of the Maryland Dispensary Association, has spent time lobbying to strike a balance between attracting investors and keeping ownership in the hands of the people the special licenses were meant for.

“We’re very limited in terms of what we can do from a marketing and advertising perspective,” he said. “We’ve lobbied to try to loosen up some of those restrictions with pretty little success.”

There are other challenges. Hayes and co-owner Felicia Covel Rami, owner of a catering business and Baltimore native who won a social equity license in the state’s lottery in 2024, were renovating a former bank to become their dispensary when the state ordered work halted after complaints from two nearby churches. State regulations prohibit dispensaries within 500 feet of places of worship.

It turned out the churches themselves lacked permits, and they were forced to move. Months after filing a lawsuit, the order was lifted, and their renovation could continue.

Hayes said just finding a location was a challenge, as many landlords or their major tenants are unwilling to share space with a cannabis dispensary, even if it complied with zoning laws.

“I think there is still certainly a stigma associated with cannabis because it’s federally illegal,” said Hayes, whose dispensary opened April 14. “I think a lot of that stigma originates from the war on drugs, which in my opinion was pretty misguided on behalf of the federal government.”

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in April reclassified medical cannabis from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug. That put cannabis on the same level as pain medicine and ketamine, in the eyes of the federal government, instead of side by side with drugs like heroin and LSD.

That’s progress, said Peters and Hayes, who hope to see more cannabis research now that the rescheduling opens the door. But the order also created an uneasy future for the recreational side of dispensaries, since the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) still considers recreational cannabis illegal.

“If anything, this April decision has just created a lot of confusion,” Hayes said. “Some licensees have chosen to register and apply with the DEA, others have chosen not to, but I don’t think either camp has confidence [nor] clarity on the path forward.”

He and Covel Rami decided to register after their suppliers said they planned to do so, since registered businesses can’t deal with unregistered partners. Peters was already registered because of her medical career. But she noted that the DEA is the same agency that led the war on drugs that inspired the social equity license program and, “Choosing to trust them now, even for good reason, does cause me to pause.”

“To now include something that’s federally illegal, and submitting information to the DEA is a little frightening,” she said.

Hayes and Gillian, both of whom previously worked in California’s cannabis industry, said high taxes there in the past on adult-use cannabis had allowed an illegal market to continue to flourish. That is not the case in Maryland, which charges a 12 percent sales tax on the use of recreational cannabis, they said,

“There is no longer like a local weed guy [in Maryland], everyone just goes to the dispensary,” Gillian said. “It’s safe, it’s clean.”

“We’re in a state that has supported us,” Peters said. “I think Maryland does want us to be successful, so I’m hoping that they will support us going forward and moving through this whole process.”

As Peters moves forward, she said she hopes the unique perspective of social equity licensees can fulfill the program’s purpose.

“We’re intentionally trying to hire returning citizens, we’re intentionally trying to hire people of the underserved communities, and we’re intentionally trying to get the products out to those people as well,” she said. “I think as we destigmatize this, we’re only going to get more people that are using cannabis in a safe way.”

This story was first published by Maryland Matters.

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The clinical evidence is real. The valuations are not. Compass Pathways: $560 million market cap, zero revenue. MindMed: up to $2 billion, zero revenue. Even Ozempic lost half its value with $49 billion in real sales. When this bubble pops, the casualties won’t be on Wall Street. They’ll be the patients this medicine was supposed to reach.

The clinical evidence for psychedelic-assisted therapy is real, it is growing, and it matters. In the past five years, rigorously designed trials have shown that psilocybin can produce rapid and durable reductions in depressive symptoms that conventional antidepressants often cannot match. 

A dose-response meta-analysis of randomized placebo-controlled trials published in the Journal of Affective Disorders confirmed short-term efficacy for major depressive disorder. A VA-funded pilot study found that 60% of military veterans with severe treatment-resistant depression met response criteria three weeks after a single 25 mg dose, with 40% still in remission at twelve weeks—in a population that had failed multiple prior treatments. 

A Phase 2 trial of COMP360 psilocybin for PTSD showed rapid, durable symptom improvement lasting up to 12 weeks, with no serious adverse events, offering a potential breakthrough in a field with just two FDA-approved medications and persistently high dropout rates from trauma-focused therapy.  

In Germany, the first compassionate-use psilocybin therapy program launched in 2026 for patients with treatment-resistant depression. In the Czech Republic, lawmakers approved therapeutic psilocybin use for severe depression. In New Zealand, the first authorized prescriber began administering clinical doses in 2025.

For people living with conditions that resist everything else in the pharmacological toolkit, psychedelic therapy represents a genuinely novel mechanism—one that works through neuroplasticity, through the disruption of rigid default-mode network patterns, through the creation of psychological flexibility that allows patients to process trauma and break free from depressive loops. 

The need for legal, regulated access to these therapies is not speculative. It is clinical. It is urgent. And it is precisely because these substances have so much potential that the financial ecosystem building up around them demands scrutiny—not to undermine the science, but to protect it.

The Gap Between Science and Spreadsheets

I’m curious about how big this market could actually get. I pulled market-size estimates from ten research firms as of early 2026. For the base year alone—what the psychedelic therapeutics market is supposedly worth right now—estimates ranged from $603 million (Fact.MR) to $4.51 billion (Data Bridge, for the U.S. alone). That’s a sevenfold disagreement about the present. 

The forward projections fan wider: $4.2 billion by 2030 (Grand View Research), $9.6 billion by 2032 (Coherent Market Insights), $11 billion by 2034 (Precedence Research), $12.3 billion by 2035 (Research Nester). A 2021 report from Data Bridge projected $6.86 billion by 2027. We’re in 2026. That number exists nowhere outside the PDF.

Meanwhile, the only functioning regulated psilocybin market in the United States—Oregon’s Psilocybin Services program, launched in 2023, has generated approximately $1.7 million in cumulative revenue over three years, while roughly a third of its licensed service centers have closed. The state had to tap $3.1 million from its general fund to keep the regulatory program operational. 

The Ozempic Check

I want to hold the psilocybin sector’s financial profile against a drug that worked commercially, clinically, at a global scale, and see what it teaches us about what separates market speculative behavior from real-life value.

Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide—the molecule behind Ozempic and Wegovy—is the most successful pharmaceutical story of the past decade. FDA approval for diabetes came in 2017 after extensive Phase 3 trials. Approval for obesity followed in 2021. Revenue went from $21.3 billion in 2021 to $48.6 billion in 2025. The semaglutide franchise alone generated roughly $33 billion last year. Net profits in 2024 were approximately $14.6 billion. The company is spending $9.5 billion this decade on new production capacity in a single Danish town.

This is what a pharmaceutical blockbuster looks like when the science is proven, the trials are complete, the FDA has approved the product, 38 million Americans are in the patient base, the reimbursement infrastructure exists, and the revenue is real. 

Even with all of that, Novo Nordisk’s stock dropped more than 55% from its 52-week high in the past year. Competition from Eli Lilly, pricing pressure from government negotiations, and market saturation among patients who can afford $1,000-a-month drugs deflated even this juggernaut. The company lowered its guidance four times in 2025.

If the most successful drug franchise of the 2020s can lose half its market value despite $49 billion in annual revenue, what exactly is supporting the valuations of psychedelic companies that have never generated a dollar of commercial revenue?

The Valuation Question

COMPASS Pathways: market cap of approximately $560 million. Trailing revenue: zero. Net loss: nearly $288 million. Operating expenses of approximately $157 million per year. Every analyst forecasts $0 revenue for 2026. 

MindMed (now Definium Therapeutics): market cap $1.5–2 billion. Revenue: zero. Quarterly net loss: $42.7 million. Cash runway into 2027 only if current burn rates hold. 

The Valuation Gap: Zero Revenue, Billion-Dollar Market Caps

COMPASS Pathways

2026 Revenue Forecast

$0

MindMed (Definium Therapeutics)

Quarterly Net Loss

$42.7M

Cash Runway

Into 2027 only if burn rates hold

Sources: Company filings. Every analyst forecasts $0 commercial revenue for COMPASS in 2026.

Atai Life Sciences merged with Beckley Psytech after a 40% single-day crash when a trial failed. Cybin, now Helus, secured $500 million in financing but has no product anywhere near market.

In October 2025, AbbVie completed its acquisition of Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals’ bretisilocin for up to $1.2 billion. Bretisilocin is a synthetic analog designed to retain psilocybin’s antidepressant mechanism while shortening and softening the psychedelic experience. It is, by design, a pill that Big Pharma can route through conventional channels—no facilitators, no service centers, no therapeutic relationship architecture.

Novo Nordisk’s success was built on a molecule backed by a decade of trials, regulatory approval, massive patient populations, and reimbursement infrastructure. AbbVie’s bet follows the same logic, but has nothing to do with psilocybin as the therapeutic community understands it. The question for the movement is whether the path to legalization and access runs through this kind of deal, or gets swallowed by it.

Compare this to cannabis at peak hype: Tilray’s 2018 market cap of $13.4 billion on $43 million in revenue was absurd. But there were revenues. A product was being sold to real people.

Too afraid of letting ancestral therapies lose, politicians, lobbyists, and regulators are making psilocybin climb the pharmaceutical Mount Everest when they should be allowing small producers to actually work with the substance in controlled humanized environments.

But what’s the point of creating the constraints necessary to form a unicorn that can bypass regulations with science if it’s only going to make millions of investors lose money? This looks like a trade for the few, losses for the many.

The cannabis movement taught us what happens when the people who write the rules are the people who profit from them: patients get priced out, small operators get crushed, communities of color absorb the costs of prohibition, and none of the benefits of legalization, and the plant’s therapeutic credibility gets buried.

In psychedelics, there’s an additional layer. Mazatec communities in Mexico have publicly rejected the commercialization of their ceremonial practices. Peru declared ayahuasca knowledge a cultural patrimony in 2008. Brazil restricted legitimate use to religious contexts. 

Meanwhile, corporate firms file patents on compounds derived from these very traditions—strategies that legal scholars have flagged as potentially covering practices in use for centuries. If legalization advances without benefit-sharing frameworks, without indigenous consent structures, and without market architectures that prevent the kind of consolidation that gutted cannabis, then the science’s promise will be captured before patients ever see it. That is not an anti-psychedelic position. It is the most pro-psychedelic position there is.

The Industry These Substances Deserve

A veteran with treatment-resistant depression who found remission after a single psilocybin session at a VA medical center: that is real. 

A PTSD patient in a COMP360 trial who engaged with traumatic material for the first time without retraumatization: that is real. 

A facilitator in Portland running a lean clinic at $900 a session and clearing $10,000 a month doing meaningful work: that is real. 

A multi-billion-dollar industry sustained by market research PDFs that disagree with each other by a factor of seven: that’s BS.

Stock valuations unmoored from any commercial activity: that’s BS. 

Lobbying infrastructure that precedes the market it claims to represent, and a $1.2 billion acquisition of a compound redesigned to bypass the very therapeutic model the movement promised: that’s BS.

Novo Nordisk built the greatest drug franchise of the decade on rigorous science and massive real-world demand, and still lost half its stock value in a year. The psychedelic sector lacks that foundation.

Science is too important to be gambled on a winner-takes-all bet. 

The patients who need these therapies are too important to be overlooked. The path forward is better legalization: evidence-governed, community-accountable, structurally resistant to capture, and honest about what we know and what we don’t. If the cannabis experience taught us anything, it’s that the worst thing that can happen to a medicine is for it to become a financial instrument before it becomes accessible to the people who need it.

This article is reported analysis based on publicly available clinical trial data, SEC filings, institutional market research and on-the-record journalism. Financial figures reflect information available at time of publication and are subject to change. High Times does not endorse or encourage illegal activity of any kind.

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Federally legalizing marijuana would generate $57.9 billion in new tax revenue over a decade, according to a new Yale University analysis—and additional states also moving to legalize cannabis would nearly double that haul.

The report, from the university’s Budget Lab, notes that the “cannabis market has grown into a substantial economic sector” but caveats that there is an “unusual degree of uncertainty” about the fiscal projections, however, given the “complicated legal context” of marijuana.

“Marijuana presents an appealing target for taxation,” the Yale analysis says, noting that it is considered by many policymakers to be “socially undesirable”—as is the case with alcohol and cigarettes.

“A tax levied specifically on marijuana could serve the dual purposes of discouraging use and raising revenue, thereby funding new public spending or replacing taxes on socially desirable activities like work or savings,” it says.

Researchers projected that if cannabis were federally rescheduled and an excise tax of $0.00625 per mg of THC were applied, a gram of marijuana would be taxed at $1.31. “At an average price of $8.59 per gram of marijuana, this tax would amount to about a 15% increase in the tax-inclusive price,” the report says.

The tax would result in $57.9 billion in new revenue over the course of ten years, the researchers project, If all remaining states were to also legalize marijuana in their jurisdictions, the total haul would be $111.3 billion over a decade.

The Yale report bases its estimates on existing state tax revenue to determine that the recreational marijuana market was about $25 billion in 2024

“We project that, if the market continues to grow without federal legalization or any new states legalizing, the market will reach nearly $40 billion in 2035,” it says. “The medical segment, while more established, represents the smaller share of total activity at only about 20 percent. As such, the medical marijuana segment accounts for between $5 and $8 billion in sales each year from 2024-2035.”

Uncertainties underlying the revenue estimates include how much illicit activity would convert to the regulated market under legalization, as well as the effect of taxes on consumer purchases.

Legalization would also cause some cannabis workers who are not currently paying income and/or payroll taxes to begin doing so.

“Federal legalization would likely generate income and payroll tax revenue beyond that collected through the excise tax. Workers in the illicit cannabis economy—cultivators, trimmers, distributors, and retail-facing sellers—currently earn income that is neither reported to the IRS nor subject to FICA withholding, because their employers have no lawful basis for establishing formal employment relationships at the federal level. Federal legalization would bifurcate this formerly invisible workforce into two distinct categories for tax purposes. Employees absorbed into licensed, formally structured cannabis firms—the multistate operators, vertically integrated cultivators, and dispensary chains that already operate in the state-legal market—would receive W-2 wages, generating both the employer and employee shares of FICA taxes as well as federal income tax withholding.”

People who own cannabis businesses would also enter into the tax system and be subject to self-employment taxes or federal income tax on net profit—”income streams that are currently entirely outside the federal tax base,” the report says.

“Federal legalization could result in a large-scale transfer of economic activity from the untaxed underground economy into the tax-compliant legal market,” the analysis says. “This shift holds implications for income and payroll tax revenue that is analytically distinct from, and additive to, the excise tax revenues. The scale of the illicit market that would be subject to this transition is substantial.”

Another piece of uncertainty that researchers did not attempt to account for in their calculations stems from the fact that federally legal marijuana businesses would be able to take advantage of tax deductions and credits that they are not eligible for in light of cannabis’s Schedule I status under the law known as 280E.

Despite the uncertainty, the report says, federal legalization would undoubtedly lead to new revenue.

“Federal legalization, by eliminating federal restrictions on banking access, interstate commerce, and formal employment relationships for many illicit operators, would reduce the structural advantages that sustain the black market and pull a meaningful share of that activity into the regulated economy,” the analysis says.

A separately recently published federal report from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that states where marijuana is legal have generated nearly $15 billion in tax revenue from legal cannabis sales since late 2021.

Another report from the advocacy group the Marijuana Policy Project found that states have generated more than $28.4 billion in tax revenue from recreational marijuana sales since the first markets launched over a decade ago.

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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.

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Illinois officials have posted a new form that recreational marijuana dispensaries can file in order to get permission to begin selling medical cannabis, which is taxed at a much lower rate than adult-use products.

The expanded opportunity for marijuana businesses comes as part of omnibus cannabis legislation that was passed by lawmakers and signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker (D) this session.

The law also doubles the amount of marijuana that adults can legally possess, allows drive-thrus and curbside pickups at dispensaries and lets them stay open for longer hours of operation, among other changes.

The five-page form released this week by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation (IDFPR) allows businesses holding an active Adult Use Dispensing Organization License issued under the state’s Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act to apply for a separate Medical Cannabis Dispensing Organization license.

“Any adult use dispensary holding an active license in good standing may opt-in for a medical dispensary license,” IDFPR said in previously issued guidance about changes made by the new cannabis omnibus legislation. “This medical dispensary license will allow the dispensary to sell cannabis to medical cannabis patients at the medical tax rate up to the medical patient’s allotment.”

Dispensaries can begin filing the form on September 10, and then they must wait for their so-called “15-37 License,” named after the section of the legislation, to be issued before they can begin medical cannabis sales.

Applicants must submit a non-refundable fee of $5,000 and, if approved, their standard renewal fee will then increase by an additional $10,000 per renewal cycle.

The new form, noted earlier by Illinois New Joint, asks about a business’s disciplinary history, ownership structure and tax compliance.

It also asks questions such as:

• Does the dispensary include materials or signs informing patients that possession of cannabis is illegal under federal law?
• Does the education plan offer information available to patients on the potential side effects of cannabis?
• Does the dispensary offer materials or signs informing patients that consuming cannabis is prohibited in public places?

Businesses also need to submit a patient prioritization plan that includes details about designating a medical cannabis line and registers that will serve medical cannabis patients first, as well as a floor plan showing a dedicated consultation area for patients.

The medical cannabis sales option for adult-use businesses is part of SB 3222, which was approved by the legislature and signed by Pritzker in June.

As enacted into law, the measure also allows residents of the state who are over 21 years of age to possess up to 60 grams of marijuana flower—double the amount in prior law. They are also able to have up to 10 grams of cannabis concentrates and infused products with up to 1,000 mg of THC—also double the earlier limit. Possession amounts for adult non-residents are also doubled under the bill and are generally set at half of what residents can carry.

Additionally, people with past convictions for possession of up to 60 grams of marijuana are now able to have those records expunged—double the previous cutoff allowing only those with convictions for up to 30 grams to be eligible.

The legislation also recriminalizes hemp THC products with more than 0.4 milligrams of THC per container, in line with a federal ban that is set to take effect in November.

The state’s list of medical marijuana qualifying conditions is also being expanded to add female orgasmic disorder, endometriosis, ovarian cysts and uterine fibroids.

The governor held a signing ceremony for the legislation at a marijuana dispensary, saying he is “proud that Illinois continues to lead the nation in showing what thoughtful, balanced cannabis policy can achieve.”

In 2019, Pritzker signed the state’s initial marijuana legalization policy into law.

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The legal weed business taught customers to chase the next deal, and independent dispensaries are paying the price.

Twenty percent off flower. Buy two vapes, get the third for a penny. Thirty percent off the entire store until noon. Double loyalty points on Wednesday, unless Thursday’s sale turns out to be better. 

Cannabis retail has become a relentless hunt for the next markdown. In mature markets, falling cannabis prices have made legal weed dramatically more affordable for consumers. They have also left retailers fighting over shoppers who may have no reason to return once the coupon expires. 

Cortney Brown, Marketing Chair at the Cannabis Chamber of Commerce and CMO at cannabis advertising and analytics company MediaJel, believes retailers helped create the problem themselves. 

“I think we’ve trained them,” Brown told High Times. “Consumers love finding value, but they don’t wake up hoping to wait until Friday to buy cannabis. The industry created that behavior by teaching customers that if they wait another day, someone will inevitably offer a better deal.”

The Cannabis Price Wars Were Trained Into Existence

Price compression is not necessarily bad news for the person standing at the register. Lower prices can make legal cannabis accessible to people who were previously priced out, particularly in states where taxes and regulatory costs pushed dispensary weed far above traditional-market prices. 

The problem starts when lower base prices collide with a retail culture built around constant promotions. 

According to Headset’s analysis of cannabis retail margins, average U.S. gross margins fell from 52.6% in 2021 to approximately 42.7% during 2025. That decline has consequences beyond the sales floor. Less gross profit can mean tighter payroll, smaller purchasing budgets, late vendor payments, and less money available for expansion or product development. 

Brown traces the discount spiral to a familiar pattern. Supply increased, markets matured, and competition got nastier. Retailers pulled the fastest lever available. 

“Price compression is really the result of an industry-wide race to solve a long-term problem with short-term tactics,” she said. “Markets matured, supply increased, competition intensified, and retailers understandably reached for the fastest lever they had: discounting.” 

Promotions worked, at least initially. They moved inventory, boosted traffic, and gave customers a reason to choose one shop over another. Then every shop started speaking the same language. 

“The problem is that when every retailer follows the same playbook, discounting stops being a differentiator and becomes the expectation,” Brown said. “Eventually, the conversation shifted from ‘Why should I shop here?’ to ‘Who’s offering 30% off today?’” 

Once that happens, the store is no longer selling selection, knowledge, trust, or identity. It is testing how much margin it can surrender before the customer walks across the street. 

Brown helped develop the Cannabis Price Wars initiative through a partnership between MediaJel and the Cannabis Chamber of Commerce after seeing retailers across the country face the same challenge: shrinking margins, increasing promotional pressure, and declining customer loyalty.

Rather than simply pointing out the problem, the Cannabis Chamber of Commerce has made it a priority to help operators navigate it. Through the Price Wars Campaign, the Chamber is providing free educational webinars, practical playbooks, industry discussions, and a 90-Day Discount Escape Plan designed to help retailers build healthier, more sustainable businesses. The initiative encourages operators to compete on customer experience, retention, and long-term value, not just deeper discounts.

The campaign does not argue that every sale is a mistake. Instead, the Price Wars Campaign encourages retailers to shift their focus from short-term discounts to long-term customer value by measuring profitability instead of revenue alone, personalizing offers instead of blanket promotions, strengthening loyalty through better customer experiences, and building brands customers choose for trust, education, and community, not simply because they’re the cheapest.

Promotions can clear aging inventory, introduce a new product, attract first-time shoppers, or turn a cannabis holiday into an actual event. Trouble arrives when the sale calendar becomes the entire marketing department. 

“Discounting becomes a problem the moment it starts replacing strategy,” Brown said. 

A Discount Can Rent a Customer, but It Cannot Buy Loyalty

Cannabis businesses tend to measure the immediate result of a promotion: traffic rose, units moved, and the daily sales total looked healthy. Those numbers do not necessarily show whether the shop made money or created a customer who will ever return. 

In a report examining millions of customers across more than 1,000 retailers in nine states, Headset found that two in three cannabis customers never return after their first visit. That retention gap suggests acquisition alone cannot carry a dispensary, no matter how packed the store looks on 4/20. 

“The biggest mistake is assuming discounts create loyalty,” Brown said. “Most discounts simply rent customers.” 

The distinction matters. A loyal customer chooses a store because it consistently delivers something they trust. A rented customer appears when the price drops and disappears when another dispensary offers an extra 5% off. 

Brown argues that retailers need to look past daily revenue and examine gross margin after discounts, repeat purchase rates, average order value, customer acquisition costs, and customer lifetime value. Those measurements show whether a promotion produced a worthwhile relationship or attracted a wave of bargain hunters. 

Retailers also burn money by offering the same deal to everybody. A regular customer who already visits twice a month may not need 30% off. Someone who has not returned in six months may need a thoughtful reminder. A first-time customer may respond better to patient service and credible product guidance than another automated text shouting about gummies. 

“Not every customer needs an incentive to buy,” Brown said. “Loyal customers may simply want recognition. Dormant customers need a reason to come back. First-time shoppers need trust.” 

Constant markdowns can also ripple back through the supply chain. When retailers sacrifice margin, brands face pressure to lower wholesale prices, fund promotions, or accept unfavorable payment terms. Cultivators, manufacturers, and small vendors absorb the squeeze. 

“Margins fund innovation,” Brown said. “When retailers and brands are constantly sacrificing margin, they have less to invest in, product development, staff education, merchandising, technology, marketing, and customer experience.” 

That is where the price war stops being a clever promotion and starts reshaping what reaches the shelf. 

Independent Dispensaries Cannot Outspend the Chains 

Large multistate operators can use scale, purchasing power, and vertical integration to survive prolonged price battles. An independent dispensary rarely has the same cushion.

Trying to beat a national operator by offering cheaper weed is therefore a fairly efficient way for a neighborhood shop to bleed out. As recent High Times reporting on small cannabis operators documented, lower prices and increasingly mature markets can produce a brutal environment for businesses without deep reserves. 

“Independent retailers shouldn’t try to out-discount national operators,” Brown said. “They should out-experience them.” 

Experience can sound like empty retail jargon until it becomes concrete. It is the budtender who remembers that a customer hated the last disposable they bought. It is a menu curated by people who have actually tried the products. It is a local vendor pop-up, a patient education session, or a store that does not make a first-time shopper feel silly for asking a basic question. 

The broader point is not that every independent dispensary needs couches, events, or an aggressively quirky identity. It needs a reason to exist beyond proximity and price. 

The Cheapest Store Will Not Always Win 

Cannabis spent decades building communities outside conventional retail. People passed down genetics, shared cultivation knowledge, warned friends away from bad flower, and remembered the person who always came through with something special. 

Legalization brought testing, bright menus, rewards programs, and online ordering. Somewhere along the way, parts of the industry started treating the customer relationship like a coupon-delivery system. 

“Cannabis has always been about community,” Brown said. “Long before legalization, it was built around shared experiences, education, and connection. I think we’ve lost some of that in the race to compete on price.”

None of this means consumers should feel guilty for shopping within their budgets. Cheap weed is sometimes exactly what a person needs, and falling prices have created genuine benefits. The responsibility belongs to retailers that trained shoppers to believe full price is a sucker’s game and then acted surprised when loyalty vanished. 

A healthier market would leave room for fair prices without forcing every operator into permanent clearance mode. Promotions would serve a defined purpose. Staff knowledge, product curation, community relationships, and consistency would carry the rest of the weight. 

Brown hopes initiatives like the Price Wars Campaign encourage retailers to see that they don’t have to solve these challenges alone. Through the Cannabis Chamber of Commerce, the goal is to give operators practical resources, real-world education, and opportunities to learn from one another so they can build stronger businesses without relying on perpetual discounts. The campaign reflects the Chamber’s broader mission of strengthening the cannabis industry by supporting operators with actionable tools, not just commentary. 

“The cannabis industry doesn’t have a discount problem, it has a differentiation problem,” Brown said. “When every dispensary looks the same, price becomes the only thing left to compete on. The retailers that thrive over the next decade won’t be the cheapest. They’ll be the ones that create so much value that customers stop asking, ‘What’s on sale?’ and start asking, ‘When can I come back?’” 

The stores that survive may not be the ones sending the loudest 30%-off text every Friday morning. They will be the ones customers remember after the sale ends.

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