San Francisco officials are seeking public input on newly released draft rules for cannabis cafes in line with a California state law enacted last year that authorizes local governments to let marijuana retailers to expand their services.

In July, the city’s Board of Supervisors and mayor approved an ordinance to let marijuana dispensaries serve food and drinks inside their on-site consumption areas. On Friday, the city’s Office of Cannabis posted proposed regulations for how those cannabis cafes will operate.

The draft rules touch on operations plans, employee training, security, deliveries, inventory control and access for medical cannabis patients.

Public feedback is being accepted through September 25.

In late 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed AB 1775, allowing marijuana businesses to offer non-cannabis food and non-alcoholic beverages and host live events such as concerts in their on-site cannabis consumption areas if they get permission from their local government.

The new law officially took effect last January, but it has taken months for local officials in San Francisco and other cities to begin enacting their own ordinances to lay out the rules for how cannabis cafes can operate.

Under the San Francisco proposal, a business would need to obtain a new Cannabis Café Permit as well as a Cannabis Consumption Permit.

Businesses would need to implement written procedures “designed to discourage customers from removing cannabis products intended for on-site consumption from the designated consumption area” or the overall premises.

There would be some restrictions on the name of cannabis cafes, barring those that would be likely to “mislead members of the public into believing cannabis products may legally be sold to persons under 21 years of age” or that would entice minors to attempt to patronize the businesses.

Dispensaries would need to maintain accommodations for medical cannabis patients, which may include providing an area where the can communication confidentially with employees and maintaining an adequate supply of medical marijuana products.

Written comments on the proposed cannabis cafe rules can be sent by email to [email protected] or via mail or in person to Office of Cannabis; 49 South Van Ness; Suite 660; San Francisco, CA 94103.

City officials separately released proposed rules changes to incorporate cannabis cafes into the existing Good Neighbor Policy for marijuana businesses.

They also posted new resources for businesses to check their eligibility to open a cannabis cafe, as well as bulletin and a FAQ on the issue.

Prior to signing the current cannabis cafe law, Newsom vetoed a prior version of the bill, saying that while he appreciated that the intent was to “provide cannabis retailers with increased business opportunities and an avenue to attract new customers,” he felt “concerned this bill could undermine California’s long-standing smoke-free workplace protections.”

To that end, the measure as enacted contains changes to create separation between public consumption spaces and back rooms of businesses where food is prepared or stored in order to better protect the health of workers in line with the governor’s concerns.

The law makes explicitly clear that hemp-based food items or drinks are not considered “non-cannabis” products that could be sold at the cafes. It also says that non-cannabis items “shall be stored and displayed separately and distinctly from all cannabis and cannabis products present on the premises.”

The legislation also allows live musical or other performances on the premises of a cannabis retailer in areas where on-site consumption is allowed.

Ahead of the governor’s signing of the measure, actor Woody Harrelson—who owns a marijuana lounge in West Hollywood called The Woods, alongside co-founders comedian Bill Maher and tennis star John McEnroe—called for its enactment. Whoopi Goldberg also joined in that push, with a video encouraging the governor to sign it.

Earlier this month, Newsom announced that legal marijuana sales have generated nearly $8.4 billion in tax revenue for California communities since voters approved adult-use legalization in 2016.

He also recently signed legislation to more clearly define the types of marijuana packaging and labeling that is prohibited due to appealing to children.

The governor recently took credit for helping to lead the push for the state to legalize marijuana and discussed his own limited experience with using cannabis.

Last October, however, he vetoed a bill that would have allowed certain marijuana microbusinesses to ship medical cannabis products directly to patients via common carriers like FedEx and UPS, stating that the proposal “would be burdensome and overly complex to administer.”

Newsom did sign a bill earlier that month aimed at streamlining research on marijuana and psychedelics.

—
Marijuana Moment is tracking hundreds of cannabis, psychedelics and drug policy bills in state legislatures and Congress this year. Patreon supporters pledging at least $25/month get access to our interactive maps, charts and hearing calendar so they don’t miss any developments.

Learn more about our marijuana bill tracker and become a supporter on Patreon to get access.
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Last September, the governor also signed a measure into law to put a pause on a recently enacted tax hike on marijuana products.

Meanwhile, a lawmaker spoke to Marijuana Moment about her decision to put her own bill to legalize cannabis dispensary drive-thru windows on hold for now.

California’s treasurer recently said the marijuana legalization law that voters approved a decade ago has been a “complete failure” and should be replaced with a new ballot initiative that prioritizes consumers and small businesses.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, who is endorsed by President Donald Trump, recently told Marijuana Moment that taxes and regulations on cannabis are “too high.”

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Five years before High Times existed, a fifty-cent magazine out of a Buffalo dorm room made the exact argument the DEA just made in federal court. It also named, in 1969, the people who would spend the next half century saying we need more research first.

The government’s closing brief in the marijuana rescheduling hearing was filed on August 17, 2026. It argues that cannabis has an accepted medical use, that the evidence has been sitting there for years, and that the people insisting the science isn’t ready yet are applying a standard the law does not require.

Somebody made that argument first, on newsprint, for fifty cents, in the winter of 1969.

The magazine was called The Marijuana Review. Volume one, number two, dated January through March 1969, twenty-four pages, Updated by an outfit called LeMar International out of Box 71, Norton Hall, at the State University of New York at Buffalo. LeMar was short for Legalize Marijuana. The editors listed on page 3 are Mike Aldrich and Ed Sanders. Under a heading reading “consultant gurus,” the first name is Allen Ginsberg.

It is generally credited as the first American magazine devoted entirely to cannabis. High Times would not exist for another five years.

Reading it now, next to a federal docket, is a strange experience. Not because the 1969 magazine looks quaint. Because so little of the argument has moved.

“The Mugwumps’ Mistake”

The editorial runs on page 3 under that title, opening with a line from T.S. Eliot about the stripe down the middle of the road being yellow. A mugwump, in the American political vocabulary of the era, was a fence-sitter.

Its target is not the drug warriors. It is the moderates.

The editorial describes a specific type: people less openly bigoted than the narcotics bureaucracy, who will concede that marijuana is not a narcotic, is not inevitably a path to heroin, insanity or crime, and then say the sensible thing is to wait for more research before changing any laws. The magazine calls that position a way of ignoring the fact that virtually nothing is known about a drug people have used across a wide variety of cultures for centuries, and it accuses the moderates of demanding a standard nobody could ever meet: proof of harmlessness.

Its counterargument, set in capital letters because that is how you shouted in 1969, is that we already know enough about marijuana to change the laws.

The editorial ends by reframing the whole debate as a single question. Not whether marijuana is safe. Whether a program of marijuana regulation other than criminal prohibition would be more effective, more just and more humane than what exists.

Now hold that against what happened in Arlington this summer.

Over eleven hearing days, the parties opposing rescheduling did not primarily argue that cannabis is a narcotic or a gateway. They argued about sufficiency. That the studies supporting therapeutic use would not survive an FDA new drug application. That the two-part test the government used to establish accepted medical use is too permissive and the older five-part test should govern instead. That the evidence base is too thin, the products too variable, the research too incomplete.

The government’s answer, across fifty pages, is that one accepted medical use is enough under the statute, that federal health officials found three, and that the more demanding standard was set aside in 2024 as impermissibly narrow.

Which is to say the DEA spent this summer arguing the Mugwumps’ Mistake, in a federal proceeding, against a room full of mugwumps. It took fifty-seven years for a Buffalo dorm room and the Drug Enforcement Administration to arrive at the same position.

The Treaty Argument, Fifty-Seven Years Early

Page 11 carries a piece by Michael R. Aldrich arguing that the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the 1961 treaty that has anchored global drug prohibition ever since, does not actually require the United States to keep marijuana criminal.

Aldrich works through the treaty’s own text. He notes that Article 36, the provision on criminal penalties, is expressly subject to a signatory’s constitutional limitations. He notes that Article 2 asks each country to determine which form of control best fits its own conditions. He points out that the Indian delegation, during the treaty’s drafting, argued that prohibiting a relatively harmless habit would simply create a black market. And he quotes Harry Anslinger, the retired federal narcotics commissioner, telling a Senate committee in 1967 that one reason to join the convention was that people in the United States were agitating to liberalize marijuana controls, and that if the U.S. became a party, they would never be able to change the law.

Aldrich’s conclusion is that the treaty recommends punishment but does not compel it, and that the debate over a better system of marijuana control remains wide open under international law.

In April 2026, the acting attorney general used that same treaty as the legal mechanism to move state-licensed medical cannabis and FDA-approved cannabis products to Schedule III. His position was that treaty obligations left the government several viable scheduling options and that he could act on them directly.

Same document. Opposite use. Anslinger thought the Single Convention would lock the door forever. A graduate student with a mimeograph machine read it and said it wouldn’t. Fifty-seven years later, the Justice Department used it as a key.

What the Laws Were Actually Doing

The most quotable pages of the issue are the theory. The page that stops you is the accounting.

Under a masthead reading “Bust Measurements,” the magazine ran a running column of arrests and sentences collected from readers and the underground press. The entries from this issue include a Michigan man reported to be serving 20 to 30 years, a Seattle man appealing a 20-year sentence over a single joint sold for a dollar, and a Dallas case in which the magazine reports a 50-year sentence. The column ran alongside a Day of the Dead skeleton drawing and an appeal for readers to send in more clippings.

Elsewhere in the same issue, the magazine cites a figure it attributes to a drug policy official at the National Student Association: better than 100,000 people arrested on drug charges in California alone during 1968, about two thirds of them for marijuana, and the overwhelming majority young.

Those numbers are secondhand and nearly six decades old, and we present them as what the magazine printed rather than as verified counts. But the shape of the thing is not in dispute, and it is the part of this story that rescheduling does not touch. Moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III changes tax treatment and research access. It does not open a cell.

Rescheduling is movement. It is not freedom.

A Blueprint Nobody Followed

Page 2 reprints, with permission, a nine-point reform proposal that the psychiatrist Tod H. Mikuriya had originally Updated as a letter in Playboy in July 1968.

Read cold in 2026, it is uncanny. Mikuriya proposed moving regulatory responsibility away from narcotics enforcement and toward ordinary state and federal control agencies. He proposed that possession without intent to sell not be a crime. He proposed vending licenses modeled on alcohol, with prohibitions on sales to children. He proposed that the FDA take responsibility for assaying resin content, biological activity and purity where interstate commerce was involved. He proposed registration for growers, importers, manufacturers and dealers, and separate registration for physicians, pharmacists and researchers. He proposed a home-cultivation allowance and a tax on production and sale earmarked for research.

Strip the 1968 vocabulary and that is a state-legal cannabis market with a federal registration layer and product testing standards. It is, roughly, the thing the industry has spent thirty years building one state at a time, and the thing the DEA registration framework is now bolting onto the medical side.

Mikuriya went on to become one of the architects of California’s medical cannabis system. In 1969 he was a doctor writing to Playboy.

The Rest of the Issue

It is not all argument. The magazine is a genuine artifact of its moment and it is funnier than its subject matter suggests.

There is a letters page with a note signed by Timothy Leary. There is a column called the Gage Price Gauge listing what weed and hash were going for that December in New York, San Francisco, London, Toronto, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago and what the magazine calls the Midwest hinterlands, with editorial notes on quality and supply in each market. There is a recipe page, Kozy Kitchen Kannabis Kuisine, offering a guacamole and a chili. There is a cultural heritage feature on a South African pipe. There is coverage of Andrew Weil’s Boston study, then newly Updated in Science, with Weil identified as a 26-year-old Harvard medical student. There is a report on Britain’s Wootton Report. There are quotations from the 1894 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission. The back cover is a full-page ad for the Whole Earth Catalog.

And there is a short letter from the consumer relations department of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, replying to an inquiry about whether it had registered trademarks on strain names. The company says it has no plans along those lines and has not registered them, and offers to be quoted saying so.

Big Tobacco, in 1968, fielding a question from a legalization zine about weed branding. Somebody was thinking about that market a long time before anybody could sell into it.

Who Made It

Aldrich was a graduate student at Buffalo when this issue went out. He founded the first college chapter of LeMar there in 1967 and edited The Marijuana Review from 1968 to 1973. In 1970 he completed what is generally described as the first doctoral dissertation on cannabis at an American university. He later curated the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library, at one point the largest collection of drug literature and artifacts in the world, and co-founded a San Francisco dispensary. High Times interviewed him in 1998, when he described himself as an archivist and a rememberer.

Ed Sanders was a poet, a bookstore owner and a member of the Fugs. Ginsberg was Ginsberg. LeMar itself grew out of their circle, and the through-line from there to Amorphia to NORML to everything that followed is a straight one.

The issue is dedicated to a poet who had died three months earlier. The dedication line does not say he died. It says he was murdered by Cleveland.

The Part That Should Bother You

It would be easy to read all this as vindication. They were right, everyone else was wrong, the arc bends, and so on.

That is not quite the lesson.

The Mugwumps editorial was not making a prediction about science. It was making one about behavior. It said the wait-for-more-research position is not a scientific posture, it is a way of never having to decide, and that the people holding it would keep holding it no matter what the research said, because the point was the delay.

Fifty-seven years later, the federal government’s own scientific review has found accepted medical use for three conditions, more than 30,000 practitioners are authorized to recommend cannabis to more than six million patients, and the argument in front of the administrative law judge was still that the evidence isn’t good enough yet.

The magazine got the prediction right. That is the depressing part. Being right in 1969 bought nobody an early release, and it has not yet bought a final rule.

The judge has not filed his recommendation. The administrator has no deadline. Somewhere in a Buffalo mailbox in 1969, fifty cents bought you a magazine that already knew how this would go.

The Marijuana Review, Vol. 1 No. 2, January to March 1969, was Updated by LeMar International, Buffalo, New York. Quotations and descriptions are drawn from an original copy in the collection of Jeff Doshier, who provided photographs of the issue and permission to publish them. Figures reported by the magazine in 1969, including arrest counts and sentences, are presented as that publication reported them and have not been independently verified.

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Using marijuana appears to have a “positive outcome” on people struggling with some eating disorders, according to a new study.

“Cannabis is widely used by people with eating disorders and is widely perceived as beneficial in restrictive and food-averse, but not binge, eating disorder subtypes,” the paper, published in the Journal of Eating Disorders, found.

Researchers at the University of Sydney in Australia surveyed more than 7,500 people with a diagnosed or self-reported eating disorder (ED), with more than 3,o00 of whom that used cannabis within the past year. Respondents represented 76 countries, with most residing in Australia (29.7 percent), the United Kingdom (21.7 percent) and the United States (17.6 percent).

“Cannabis received the highest mean ratings of any drug for improving ED symptoms” among people avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder, anorexia nervosa and other specified feeding and eating disorder, the study found. People with unspecified feeding or eating disorder “also reported a favorable rating.”

For people with anorexia nervosa specifically, “cannabis use drove reductions in food-related anxiety and guilt, which, together with appetite stimulation, helped normalise their eating,” the study found. “The gastroprotective and antinausea properties of cannabis appear to provide additional therapeutic benefits over and above those provided by appetite stimulation and anxiety reduction.”

For people with avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID), which involves a lack of desire to eat and aversions to food based on sensory factors such as texture, taste and smell, there is a “transformational effect of cannabis” related to “increased appetite and enhanced ability to recognise hunger cues,” the researchers wrote.

“The higher frequency of daily cannabis use amongst those with ARFID may well reflect self-medication for these therapeutic benefits,” they said. “Indeed, daily use of cannabis flower was generally associated with higher ED symptom improvement scores relative to intermittent use, suggesting that symptom improvement may drive frequency of use.”

In contrast, people with binge eating disorder and bulimia nervosa, “provided lower ratings” for marijuana’s efficacy—perhaps because “the appetite-stimulating properties of THC may exacerbate binge/purge symptomatology,” the paper said.

When participants were prompted with open-ended questions, “general mental health was self-reported as improved by cannabis in most respondents regardless of diagnosis,” the researchers wrote. Participants also said cannabis helps with improved ability to eat, improved awareness of hunger cues, reduced guilt related to their eating disorder, less nausea and diminished food-related anxiety.

“Our findings suggest that cannabis is widely used by individuals with an ED or disordered eating and that naturalistic use of cannabis is self-reported as having a positive outcome on ED symptoms.”

That said, “a substantial number described mixed experiences of both improvement and exacerbation of ED symptoms,” the study found.

The research is a follow-up to an earlier paper that some of the same authors published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found that marijuana and psychedelics were “the highest rated” drugs in effectively addressing eating disorder symptoms.

“Our top-level analysis indicated that cannabis was commonly used among respondents and was one of the few drugs rated positively for ED symptom improvement. In [anorexia nervosa], [avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder,], and [other specified deeding and eating disorder], this positive rating was superior to all prescription drugs.”

While daily use of marijuana flower specifically was more associated with improved eating disorder scores than intermittent use in the new study, symptom improvement didn’t vary overall based on cannabis product type or cannabinoid composition.

The researchers noted that the self-report and naturalistic nature of the study means that no strong causal conclusions can be drawn, saying that “future clinical trials of cannabis products are warranted in eating disorders.”

They also flagged concerns about cannabis dependence and “other adverse effects” of frequent use that some participants reported.

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Researchers hooked a flowmeter to pre-rolls at social smoke sessions in five states and found three distinct ways people pull on a joint. All three moved more smoke than the cigarette settings cannabis research has been running for decades.

Researchers found three ways people smoke a joint, and you are almost certainly one of them.

That’s the finding of a new white paper from the Network of Applied Pharmacognosy, which took a flowmeter to social consumption events across California, Massachusetts, New York, Nevada and South Carolina between September 2024 and June 2025, handed people a one-gram pre-roll, and asked them to smoke the way they normally smoke.

Sixty-two people did. Eleven recordings were thrown out for bad data. The remaining 51 sorted, almost embarrassingly cleanly, into three groups.

Which One Are You?

The intense puffer is the majority, 57% of the group. Sharp pull, peak flow almost immediately, done in a couple of seconds.

The slow puffer is the smallest group, 20%. Long, steady draw that takes nearly twice as long and never spikes.

The double puffer, 23%, takes two hits back to back, one or two seconds apart, as a single event. This is the one you can spot across a circle.

Riley Kirk, a co-author on the paper, put the difference between the first two in terms anyone who has ordered a drink can follow.

“It’s really a difference between a fast intense pull, almost like you’re sipping boba from a straw, versus a long, slow pull that’s more like sipping a thick milkshake.”

Riley Kirk, Network of Applied Pharmacognosy

And here is the counterintuitive part. The gentle one moves more smoke.

“The intense pull hits its peak strength almost immediately, under a second in, and the whole thing is over in about 2 seconds,” Kirk told High Times. “The slow pull takes almost twice as long to build up, and never hits as high a peak, but it holds there instead of spiking. Interestingly, that’s what actually pulls in more total smoke per puff than the intense style. The slower pull feels gentler, but the extra time more than makes up for the lower intensity.”

The numbers back it up. The intense profile peaks at 41.7 mL/s and averages 59.3 mL of smoke per puff. The slow profile peaks at barely half that, 22.4 mL/s, and still averages 72.5 mL. The double puff, counting both hits, comes in highest at 76.8 mL.

Science Has Been Studying You as a Cigarette Smoker

Here is why anyone outside a smoke circle should care. When a lab wants to know what is in cannabis smoke, it doesn’t ask a person to smoke. It programs a smoking machine. And for decades those machines have been running puff settings borrowed from tobacco research: roughly a two-second puff pulling 35 to 55 mL, the ISO and Health Canada standards built to model a cigarette smoker.

Every one of the three cannabis profiles is bigger than that.

“Cannabis smoke research has been borrowing cigarette puff settings for decades, and the issue is that cannabis consumers just don’t smoke like cigarette smokers do,” Kirk said. “Cannabis consumers typically inhale far more deeply and hold their breath much longer than cigarette smokers, which produces very different puff volumes.”

She added that some smokers in the dataset had puff volumes well over 100 mL, “so we’re likely underestimating smoke and compound delivery just by using the cigarette numbers as a stand-in.”

What that means in practice is that the existing body of lab work on what comes off a burning joint has largely been built around cigarette puff settings that don’t fully reflect how cannabis consumers actually smoke.

What the Chemistry Might Do

This paper measures behavior, not smoke. It does not tell you whether one style delivers more THC, more terpenes or more of the things nobody wants in their lungs. But it sets up the question, and Kirk has a hypothesis.

“Our working hypothesis is that puff length and flow rate change the temperature of the ember itself, and that a longer, slower burn could produce meaningfully different chemistry than a short, hot pull, resulting in more or less of certain cannabinoids, terpenes, or combustion byproducts,” she said. “We haven’t measured that chemistry yet, though. But that’s exactly what this data sets up, and it’s the focus of the next paper.”

That next paper will run the three profiles on smoking machines and analyze what each one produces. “This paper showed us there are clear, distinct ways people smoke cannabis,” Kirk said. “The next one will tell us what that means for the consumer, whether one profile delivers more THC, more terpenes, or more of the byproducts we’d rather people weren’t inhaling.”

Real People, Real Sessions

The thing that surprised Kirk was not the shapes. It was how tidy they were, given where the data came from.

“This wasn’t a controlled lab session. We collected data at real social gatherings across five states, with different products, papers, and filters, all factors we know introduce variability. Given all that, I expected the puff shapes to be all over the place. Instead, three clear patterns emerged anyway.”

Riley Kirk

The authors are upfront about what that setting costs them. Sixty-two people at parties is not a randomized sample, and the profiles reflect who happened to be in those rooms. Paper, filter, grind, moisture and age of the pre-roll all vary and all affect the draw. Each recording covers at least three minutes, not a whole joint, so it misses how the pull changes as the coal settles, the joint shortens and resin builds. And the device itself, with its tubing and altered mouthpiece, may change how somebody smokes.

They also note something that no cigarette protocol has ever had to account for: people pass joints around, while cigarette smokers generally smoke their own.

What the paper claims for itself is narrow and worth stating plainly. It is the first documented set of cannabis-specific puff profiles, and the first set of parameters a lab could program into a smoking machine instead of the cigarette defaults. Whether that changes what we know about cannabis smoke is a question for the next study.

In the meantime, the next time somebody in the circle takes two quick hits before passing, you know what to call them.

Disclosure: “From User Behavior to Laboratory Standards: Developing Cannabis Smoking Machine Protocols from Real-World Puff Topography Data” is an open-access white paper Updated by the Network of Applied Pharmacognosy in June 2026. It has not been peer reviewed. The measurements were taken with the CannaFlo, a flowmeter made by Cambustion Ltd., and two Cambustion employees are co-authors. The authors say the white paper itself received no direct funding, and that the broader Science of Smokability research program is supported by industry sponsors including Abstrax, Boveda, Cannatrol, Curaleaf, Custom Cones, Day Savers, the Ganjier Group, the Hemp Mine and Plant Life Co.

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“Because marijuana use remains illegal under federal law, standard supervision conditions may prohibit consumption.”

By Sephria Reynolds-Tanner, Reason Foundation

Medical marijuana is legal in 47 states, the District of Columbia and three U.S. territories. Yet for millions of Americans on probation or parole suffering from qualifying conditions like chronic pain, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety, that legalization is worth very little in practice. In many states, people on probation and parole are forbidden to use medical marijuana, even when legally recommended by a physician.

It’s an oversight that state lawmakers need to address.

Nearly four million adults in the United States are on probation or parole, almost double the number of people held in jails and prisons combined. Because marijuana use remains illegal under federal law, standard supervision conditions may prohibit consumption. A positive drug test can trigger a violation of probation or parole and result in jail or prison time.

In 2023, states collectively spent an estimated $3 billion re-incarcerating people for “technical violations,” such as missing a check-in appointment or failing a drug test. The exact share attributable to marijuana-related test failures is unknown because agencies do not collect substance-specific violation data. But, because marijuana is the most commonly used controlled substance and remains detectable in urine for up to 30 days, that share is likely substantial.

This problem for patients is rooted in marijuana’s Schedule I designation under the federal Controlled Substances Act, which deems it to have “no currently accepted medical use.”

But even the federal government is changing its position. Last year, President Donald Trump ordered the attorney general to expedite rescheduling marijuana to Schedule III. In April, then-Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a final order moving Food and Drug Administration-approved and state-licensed medical marijuana to Schedule III, while setting an expedited hearing on broader rescheduling that ran through July 15, with a formal recommendation still pending.

Federal rescheduling at least removes the primary legal justification agencies and courts have used to strip those under community supervision of legal access to medical marijuana. Yet, federal rescheduling will not fix the problem for people under state supervision who need medical marijuana. Most states independently schedule marijuana in their own drug laws, and supervision conditions that prohibit marijuana specifically need to be revised.

Courts in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan have already struck down state bans on people under supervision using medical cannabis, with judges ruling that the immunity granted by state medical marijuana legalization does not simply disappear because someone is placed on probation.

Legislatures in Connecticut, New York, Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado have also taken steps to harmonize their supervision systems with medical marijuana legalization, enacting laws to allow those under supervision to participate in medical marijuana programs.

Corrections agencies in Washington, Florida and Minnesota have implemented administrative policies to do the same, creating a system to verify registration with medical marijuana programs and maintain oversight without categorical prohibition.

But for those under supervised release in many other states, re-incarceration is still a risk if they use doctor-recommended cannabis.

Probation and parole officers do not prohibit people under supervision from taking prescribed controlled substances like Adderall, Xanax or OxyContin. Standard probation conditions include carve-outs that permit the use of prescribed drugs, managing risks through documentation, monitoring and clinical intervention when problems arise.

States should extend the same framework to medical marijuana: Verify the recommendation, document it in the case files and treat it like any other prescribed medication rather than an automatic violation that can lead to reincarceration.

The states that have legalized medical marijuana have already made the policy decision that patients with qualifying conditions deserve access to physician-recommended treatment without criminal penalty. Supervision systems in those same states should reflect the intent of medical marijuana laws and protect patients.

Sephria Reynolds-Tanner is a criminal justice and drug policy analyst at Reason Foundation and a former probation and community corrections officer in Washington state. She is the author of Medical Cannabis Access Under Probation and Parole: Removing Barriers to Doctor-Recommended Treatment.

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4,516 people logged what they drank for three weeks. On the days they had a THC beverage, their odds of also drinking alcohol fell by roughly half. The finding held for 23 of the 36 products tested, and moved the same direction in every one.

The largest real-world study of hemp THC beverages has published its numbers, and the clearest thing in it has nothing to do with sleep, pain or productivity.

It’s beer.

MoreBetter, a Philadelphia research firm that has run observational studies on consumer products since 2016, tracked 4,516 people across 36 products from 23 brands, at doses between 1 and 10 milligrams of THC. Each participant logged seven days before touching any product, fourteen days on it, then answered an exit survey. Every person served as their own control, measured against their own pre-use baseline. The fieldwork ran in two waves across 2025, so the results are new rather than the research. The company published the full dataset free on its Real-World Data Exchange platform and prepared a findings summary exclusively for High Times, breaking out the numbers behind each measure.

On a participant’s ordinary day, before any of this started, the modeled probability that they would drink alcohol was 22.9%. On days they drank one of these beverages, it was 10.9%.

Two Measurements, One Direction

What gives that number weight is that it doesn’t come from asking anybody about it. It comes from what people logged, day by day, about what they actually drank, run through a model that compares each person to themselves.

The exit survey asked the question directly, and the answers point the same way. Two-thirds said they were consuming less alcohol. Fifty-six percent called the drinks a regular replacement for it. Those are people describing themselves, which is a weaker kind of evidence, but they line up with the behavioral measure instead of contradicting it.

The tightest number in that group is the health one. An 86.6% average with a floor of 80% across every single product means the belief holds no matter which drink somebody picked up. Worth being precise about what that measures: it’s what people think, not what is true. Nothing in this study tested whether these products are safer than alcohol.

The eleven-point gap between the health answer and the social one is the more interesting detail. People are more confident about what these drinks do to their body than about how showing up with one plays in a room.

Fifty Days Later

The obvious question about a two-week study is whether anything survives it. MoreBetter went back and asked.

Fifty days after the study period ended, the company surveyed participants from 18 of the 36 products about how their relationship with alcohol had changed. It got 1,420 responses. Setting aside the 249 who weren’t drinking alcohol before any of this began leaves 1,171 people who were. Those results are not on the public dashboard; MoreBetter provided them to High Times on the record.

Two things to hold onto there. A third of respondents reported no change at all, which is the honest headline alongside the 63%. And this is people recalling their own drinking seven weeks later, on a narrower base than the main dataset, which makes it softer evidence than the daily logs. It points the same direction anyway, and the gap between 63% and 2.4% is not a close call.

MoreBetter also says a portion of the original group has continued into a second and now a third cohort, the third of which is currently open, spanning 12 to 18 months between the first and the present one. The point is to see whether consumption patterns and substitution behavior hold up over that kind of stretch. Those results don’t exist yet.

What It Actually Feels Like

The experience these numbers describe is mild and short, which is the whole design premise of the category and now has some evidence under it.

Duration is the most consistent thing in the entire dataset. Thirty-six products, 23 brands, doses spanning a factor of ten, and every one of them landed between two and 2.9 hours. The standard deviation is 0.2 hours. Whatever else varies in this category, how long it lasts does not.

Feeling high is the opposite. It swings from 18.8% of use days to 81.5%, which is what a 1 to 10 milligram spread would predict, and it means the 53.3% average describes almost nobody’s actual product. Half the people buying in this category are not particularly trying to get high, and the products know it.

The onset figure needs an asterisk. Participants picked from bands rather than clocking themselves, so 26.9 minutes is a center of mass, not a stopwatch reading.

And the hangover number, which the industry will want to run with, is a share of use days rather than a share of people. There was no alcohol comparison group in this study, so it cannot be read as better or worse than a hangover from drinking. MoreBetter says so itself, in writing, which is not something most industry-funded research bothers to do.

The Productivity Number, Handled Carefully

Participants reported roughly 36 more minutes of productive time on product days than on their own non-product days, a jump from 5.64 hours to 6.24. That reached significance for 20 of the 36 products, and every significant result was positive.

The companion measure is messier and deserves the scrutiny. The probability of reporting a productive day rose 12.5 points on average, but that only held for 13 of 36 products, and one product moved 15 points in the other direction. The accurate version is that for about a third of the products tested, people were more likely to report a good day, and for one of them the reverse was true.

Both are estimates people made about their own hours, not measured output.

How to Read Any of This

This is observational, not a clinical trial. There is no placebo arm and no separate comparison group; the comparison is each participant against their own pre-use baseline, which is a real method with real limits. People chose to enroll and chose their product through what MoreBetter calls a semi-blinded process. Almost everything here is self-reported, including the alcohol logs behind the headline finding. This describes what a large group of people reported while drinking these products. It does not establish that the products caused any of it.

One caveat matters more than the rest, and it comes from MoreBetter rather than from us. When a finding is significant for 23 of 36 products, the headline average covers only those 23. Products that showed no significant change are left out of the average, not counted as zero. Quote the twelve-point drop without the coverage number and you have overstated it. That warning is printed in the company’s own summary, in bold.

Who Paid For It

MoreBetter says it funded the Infused Beverage Study primarily itself, with partial funding from the beverage brands whose products were tested, and that those brands had no influence over protocol design, data analysis or published findings.

Twenty-three brands participated: BRĒZ, Cantrip, Nowadays, Uncle Arnie’s, Willie’s Remedy+, Woodstock, Medterra, Rebel Rabbit, Snoop Dogg’s Iconic Tonics, Herbal Oasis, Cornbread Hemp, Stiiizy, 1906, Sober(ish), Wims!, Hippie Water, Squared, Hightail, Kava Haven, 23rd State, Drippy, Good Feels and Rexis Biotech.

None of that makes the data bad, and the company reports 17 peer-reviewed publications across 12 university research partnerships behind it. It does mean some of the companies that helped pay for the study sell the products the study is being used to defend, and anyone citing these numbers in a policy fight should say so. Nothing is broken out by brand, so no figure here belongs to any individual participant.

The Products in This Study Are About to Stop Being Legal

Section 781 of Public Law 119-37 caps finished hemp products at 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container, applied to the whole package rather than a serving. It takes effect November 12.

The products in this study run from 1 to 10 milligrams per serving. The weakest one carries more than twice the legal ceiling for an entire container.

None of the 36 would survive it.

That date is still moving. The Senate has passed a stopgap that would push most of the new restrictions to December 11, and the House hasn’t taken it up. Until it does, November 12 is the law. We’ve been tracking the whole fight here.

Some brands have already made their bet. Cann pulled the THC out of part of its lineup, while B-Real and Rachel Wolfson launched into the same market with full-dose product. One side is reformulating for the rule on the books. The other is betting Congress changes it first. NielsenIQ data cited by MoreBetter puts the category at $239 million in tracked retail sales over the 52 weeks ending June 27, up 135% year over year, which is what the 0.4 milligram number is aimed at and why the fight has pulled in everyone from trade groups to Rosario Dawson.

Every figure in this article, and the several dozen measures that didn’t make it in, are free at rwdexchange.com/community. Verify a phone number or email, enter the code, then open Community Insights and the Infused Beverage Performance Data dashboard. No cost, no trial period, no card. Everything is filterable by seltzer, soda, sparkling beverage, functional tonic, and spirits, shots and mixers, and MoreBetter asks that anyone using the figures credit the source.

The data arrived after the vote.

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Introduction: Nicotine, a stimulant found in various tobacco and vaping products, has long been a subject of controversy and debate. While many individuals strive to quit nicotine use due to health concerns and societal pressure, the reality is that some may find it challenging, if not impossible, to break free from its grasp. In this blog, we’ll delve into the complex reasons why some people may never quit nicotine and explore the implications of this enduring dependence.

The Nature of Nicotine Addiction: Nicotine addiction is a multifaceted phenomenon influenced by a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors. At its core, nicotine exerts powerful effects on the brain, triggering the release of dopamine and other neurotransmitters associated with pleasure and reward. Over time, repeated exposure to nicotine can lead to neuroadaptations in the brain’s reward circuitry, making it increasingly difficult for individuals to resist cravings and maintain abstinence.

Moreover, the ritualistic and social aspects of nicotine use play a significant role in reinforcing addiction. For many, smoking or vaping becomes intertwined with daily routines, social interactions, and coping mechanisms, further solidifying its hold on their lives. Breaking free from these ingrained habits can be a daunting challenge, requiring not only sheer willpower but also comprehensive support and resources.

The Role of Harm Reduction: While the ideal scenario may involve complete nicotine cessation, the reality is that for some individuals, quitting nicotine altogether may not be a feasible or desirable goal. Recognizing this, harm reduction strategies have emerged as a pragmatic approach to addressing nicotine dependence while minimizing associated risks. From nicotine replacement therapies to vaping as a less harmful alternative to smoking, harm reduction acknowledges that reducing harm is a more achievable and realistic objective for some individuals.

In fact, public health authorities such as Public Health England have recognized vaping as a valuable tool in harm reduction, citing evidence that vaping is 95% safer than smoking traditional cigarettes. By providing nicotine without the harmful byproducts of combustion, vaping offers smokers a potentially less harmful way to satisfy their nicotine cravings while reducing their exposure to toxic chemicals.

Understanding Individual Choice: Ultimately, the decision to quit nicotine is deeply personal and influenced by a myriad of factors unique to each individual. While some may successfully quit cold turkey or with the help of cessation aids, others may find themselves navigating a more circuitous path, characterized by periods of abstinence, relapse, and experimentation with harm reduction strategies.

It’s crucial to approach nicotine dependence with empathy and understanding, recognizing that each person’s journey towards health and well-being is inherently complex and nonlinear. By offering a range of support options tailored to individual needs and preferences, we can empower individuals to make informed choices about their nicotine use and strive towards healthier outcomes.

Conclusion: In conclusion, the prospect of quitting nicotine can be daunting for many individuals, shaped by a multitude of biological, psychological, and social factors. While some may succeed in breaking free from nicotine dependence, others may find themselves grappling with its allure indefinitely. By embracing harm reduction principles and fostering a compassionate understanding of individual experiences, we can support individuals in their quest for healthier lives, regardless of where they may be on their journey with nicotine.

Disclosure: The views expressed in this blog post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of any organization, institution, or entity with which the author may be affiliated. These views are based on the author’s personal knowledge, research, and understanding of the topic at hand. Readers are encouraged to form their own opinions and conduct further research to make informed decisions.

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