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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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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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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