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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After five years, two applications, six figures in expenses, and a maze of shifting rules, one New York cannabis entrepreneur finally secured a retail license—and learned how legalization can still punish the people it was supposed to help.

The process to get to this point has been, in a word, farcical. From shifting goalposts to inexplicable delays, New York’s recreational cannabis license rollout has come with significant teething pains.

Despite my best efforts to do everything by the book—and most of the time there was no book to follow—roadblock followed roadblock with little way to push back. Now that my license is approved, I finally feel comfortable lifting the lid on what this bureaucratic nightmare has been like from the inside.

This Felt Like an Opportunity Made for Us

New York approved recreational cannabis in 2021 and announced its legal sales framework the following year. Kudos to lawmakers for this policy, but unfortunately, legalization and regulation didn’t move in lockstep.

The plan was to first launch retail dispensaries under Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary (CAURD) licenses—special permits that prioritize those convicted of a state marijuana-related offense. The intention here was good: prioritize people most harmed by prohibition, get them into the legal market first, and then open regular licensing to everyone else.

But there was a catch. At the time, the state planned to source and sublease a space to you under CAURD. For an entrepreneur, that sounded less like owning a business and more like being handed the keys to someone else’s. In any case, it was our best shot and we took it.

My business partner spent three years in prison on state and federal cannabis charges, which meant we were, on paper, exactly who the program was designed for. We hired an attorney, got our ducks in a row, and applied in 2022. For us, it felt like the state was finally righting past wrongs, and this was our opportunity for the taking. Then the lawsuits started.

Roadblock After Roadblock

The first delay came in 2023 after a federal judge blocked five regions in New York (including ours, of course) from opening dispensaries. An out-of-state applicant alleged they were unconstitutionally disadvantaged by cannabis regulations that “favor” state residents. The courts soon lifted that CAURD block, but others followed, leading to a cat-and-mouse game of injunctions that froze everything.

After six months of stalemate, we started to perceive changes at the Office of Cannabis Management (OCM). My attorney’s reading, and he wasn’t alone, was that the conditional program was effectively being wound down in favor of processing everyone in the normal round. The OCM rushed to open that window and we rushed with it, resulting in another application and another round of legal fees.

The regular license requirements—released with barely two months’ notice—introduced new hoops to jump through. This application round required site control, meaning we needed to prove ownership or an active lease for our proposed cannabis business. This left us scrambling to sign a lease that not only made commercial sense in Buffalo but also complied with distance requirements from schools, churches, and parks. We applied just before the end of the year only to find our luck was going from bad to worse.

Unlike CAURD, which seemed to operate on a first-come, first-served basis, the regular round was a lottery. Out of 2,200 hopeful applicants in New York, we were around position 2,100. There was nothing to do but wait and pay for an empty storefront in the meantime, 2500 dollars a month and counting.

Congratulations, Now Give It Back

Then, in the fall of 2024, there was a breakthrough. Without word or warning, the original conditional license was approved at random. But it was too good to be true: OCM wouldn’t allow us to use the conditional license at our leased location. Their position, communicated to my attorney in writing, was that a CAURD license couldn’t be used to open at a storefront already attached to a pending regular application. Both applications were identical in every other detail, but it didn’t matter.

Our options: Keep the conditional and withdraw our regular application, which would have meant losing our proximity protection at that location. Proximity protection is a board-granted status that places your storefront on an official map and prevents any future licensee from opening within 1,000 feet. Losing it would mean reapplying from scratch, going to the back of the line, and hoping it would be granted again. Or, we wait to open our preferred location with the regular license. So, we handed back our hard-fought conditional license and spent another year-and-a-half in limbo.

Last summer marked the final, painful stretch. An analyst from OCM picked through our application and flagged minor deficiencies one at a time, with two weeks between responses. Then, after three more months of radio silence, there was one last problem in October: a single wrong digit in the address on our municipality notification letter—a required filing that gave the local government 30 days to raise objections to the proposed dispensary. Sure, it was a different unit but still in the same plaza, and yet it triggered a mandatory month-long response window anyway. 

That timeframe expired in December, which in turn was too close to the next board meeting to make the agenda. January’s meeting was canceled without explanation. We finally won our regular recreational cannabis license in February of this year.

All of This Just To Sell Some Weed

It’s a mix of emotions to be on the other side of this process. Honestly, the most overwhelming feeling is anger because it really didn’t need to be so hard or expensive. Two rounds of legal consultation and two years of rent aren’t chump change. And that’s without factoring in taxes, utilities, administrative costs, and the sheer time investment. Applicants shouldn’t be expected to front up that kind of money just to have a shot, particularly when the whole point was to give people like my partner their chance in the legal market. The kicker when approval finally came? The congratulations email arrived alongside a $7,000 fee to issue the certificate for in-store display.

There’s also a feeling of disappointment that we’ve lost a lot of opportunity in the interim. We were on track to be a first adopter for New York recreational cannabis. Now competitors have years of online reviews, customer loyalty, and brand recognition. The headstart the CAURD program was supposed to give us has been completely inverted.

Meanwhile, amid the countless stops and starts in trying to follow the letter of the law, the gray market grew exponentially. Sticker shops popped up on seemingly every other corner across New York, letting customers purchase stickers or other small goods and receive cannabis as a “gift”. Enforcement is slowly ramping up, but a $10,000 fine isn’t much of a deterrent to $100,000 in illicit sales, especially when customers who go the legal route face added taxes and higher prices. We were drowning in paperwork while the unlicensed market went on comparatively freely, and that same market still threatens to eat into our customer base before we’ve sold a single gram.

But despite everything, surprisingly, I remain hopeful. I know the ins and outs of this industry—founding Vitality CBD in a largely unregulated hemp market, advocating for clearer rules, and always believing that the barriers would eventually come down. Now, having seen the iterations of cannabis over the years, legalization has arrived in my state and I’m licensed to legally sell the same plant that my business partner was locked up for. Even though it was painful, and even though there are many kinks to iron out, that fact alone makes it worth it. Perhaps the hope is misplaced but it’s still there all the same.

This article was written by an external contributor based on their firsthand experience navigating New York’s cannabis licensing process. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of High Times. Regulatory details were accurate to the best of the author’s knowledge at the time of publication.

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Nearly every consumer category now delivers or ships. Cannabis was one of the last to catch up, and the shift is changing who buys THC and how.

Most of what Americans buy now arrives without anyone leaving the house. Dinner comes in twenty minutes. Groceries are ordered on a phone and left at the door. Prescriptions refill automatically. Convenience has become the baseline expectation across nearly every retail category, and consumers notice immediately when a product fails to meet it.

Cannabis was one of the last categories to catch up. For most of the legal era, buying THC meant driving to a dispensary, waiting in line, and paying in cash. That is changing, and platforms like Edibles.com are part of the reason why. Launched in March 2025 and based in Atlanta, the wellness-focused marketplace ships vetted, third-party-tested hemp-derived THC products directly to consumers across more than 30 states, including many where no dispensary exists.

Why Cannabis Retail Can Be Inconvenient

The dispensary model was not designed around the shopper. It was designed around compliance.

State cannabis programs are built on a controlled point of sale, because a controlled point of sale is what makes seed-to-sale tracking work. The ID check at the door, the product held behind glass, the cash-only counter, the limited delivery radius… each of those features exists to satisfy a regulatory requirement, not a consumer one. The result is a retail experience that has little in common with how Americans buy anything else.

The industry has spent years trying to reduce that friction. Curbside pickup, order-ahead apps, and express lanes have all been deployed to shorten the trip. In Los Angeles, one operator has opened a fully automated dispensary where the entire transaction runs through machines and a mobile app, eliminating the counter altogether.

Those experiments improve the in-store experience. They do not eliminate the store. Under state cannabis law, the trip remains a structural requirement in most markets, and delivery—where it exists at all—is generally limited to licensed operators serving a defined local area.

How Hemp Changed the Delivery Equation

Hemp-derived THC products operate under a different framework, and that framework permits something state cannabis programs structurally cannot: shipping.

The 2018 Farm Bill legalized hemp at the federal level, defined as cannabis containing no more than 0.3% Delta-9 THC by dry weight. Products meeting that standard can move through the mail and cross state lines. For consumers in states without adult-use or medical programs, that has meant access to tested, trusted THC products for the first time—delivered, discreetly, without a dispensary in the equation.

The category’s growth reflects that. Hemp-derived THC beverages have moved into grocery chains, liquor stores, and even arena concessions. A five-milligram hemp drink is now sold at Chicago’s United Center for roughly the price of a beer, a placement that has drawn opposition from the alcohol industry. NielsenIQ’s April 2026 tracking put THC beverage sales at $239 million over the prior 52 weeks, an increase of 135% year over year in measured retail channels.

That growth is less a story about the products themselves than about where and how they can be purchased.

Convenience Depends on Curation

Delivery alone does not make a category convenient. Getting the box to the door is the simpler part of the problem.

The harder part is everything that happens before it ships. A dispensary offers one thing an open online market does not: a budtender who has already reviewed the product and can direct a customer toward something appropriate. Remove that person and the work does not disappear; it shifts to the shopper, who is now responsible for evaluating lab results, comparing formulations, and assessing brands with no clear basis for comparison.

That is the gap Edibles.com is built to address. Every product on the platform is vetted and third-party tested before it is listed, and the assortment is organized by the outcome it supports—sleep, energy, relaxation, or social occasions—rather than by strain or potency. The roster includes established names in the category, including Wyld, Wana, Camino, and Papa & Barkley. The company also operates a retail location in Atlanta’s Inman Park neighborhood.

“We’re not marketing ‘getting high’; we’re marketing better sleep, less stress and overall functional outcomes,” Edibles.com says. “That’s the bridge between cannabis and wellness.”

The premise is straightforward: the selection work has already been done. For a consumer without a dispensary nearby, and without a budtender to ask, that pre-vetting is the difference between a functional marketplace and an overwhelming one.

Who Is Actually Buying

The consumer driving this shift is not the traditional dispensary customer.

Edibles.com describes its core audience as canna-curious and canna-familiar shoppers, people with little or no prior THC experience, or some experience and a growing interest in using these products intentionally. 

The company reports that women over 40 represent a significant portion of its customer base, a demographic that has historically been underserved by dispensary retail and is often more comfortable ordering online than shopping in person. These are consumers who are now able to participate in regulated hemp THC for the first time, as they are mostly in states where legal regulated marijuana laws don’t exist. 

For that consumer, the appeal is not novelty or potency. It is access, discretion, and the confidence that the product has been tested and labeled accurately. Delivery is not a convenience feature for this shopper. It is the entire reason the purchase happens at all.

The Regulatory Picture

The framework enabling direct-to-consumer hemp shipping is currently under review. Section 781 of the 2026 appropriations act, signed in November 2025, revises the federal definition of hemp to a total-THC standard and caps finished hemp-derived cannabinoid products at 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container, with an effective date of November 12, 2026. 

Bipartisan proposals to delay or replace the provision are pending in both chambers, and the outcome will determine what can be shipped and where. High Times has covered what the deadline means for the category in detail.

What the rules will not change is the expectation. Consumers have been trained by every other retail category to assume that products come to them. Cannabis and hemp businesses will build around that expectation or lose customers to the ones that do.

The convenience revolution reached cannabis late, but it is not going to leave.

Photos courtesy of Edibles.com

Sponsored Content Disclosure: This article was published as part of a paid partnership with Edibles.com and is not independent editorial content. Claims about the company’s products, testing, shipping reach, customer base, and wellness positioning were provided by Edibles.com and have not been independently verified by High Times. Hemp-derived THC laws vary by jurisdiction, and product availability is subject to change.

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