A single four-gram delta-8 gummy can now expose its owner to a felony bracket that runs to twenty years, because Texas counts the whole edible toward its weight. An ounce of marijuana is still a misdemeanor. And the delta-9 gummies still on the shelf survive on a technicality that federal law is about to erase. Congress just moved that date to December 11, and Trump signed it Wednesday.

Nothing Texas officials did this summer created a new punishment for THC gummies. What changed is the part of the drug code a gummy falls under, and that part does its arithmetic on the whole product.

Three separate legal changes are involved. First, a state scheduling decision that took effect July 31 and covers manufactured THC isomers. Second, a disputed state rule from March 31 that targets THCA and smokable hemp. And third, the federal ban that redefines hemp altogether, which Congress just pushed back by a month.

Start with the weight

Delta-8, delta-10, THCP, THC-O and HHC are all different molecules we knew almost nothing about a decade ago, and all emerged as alternatives to delta-9 THC under the strange legislation created by the 2018 Farm Bill. On July 31 the state health department put its 2021 definition of tetrahydrocannabinols back on the books, and manufactured isomers fall under it. That lands them in Penalty Group 2, a tier that also holds MDMA, psilocybin, mescaline and PCP.

Delta-9 products are not in it.

Possession there is measured by aggregate weight, a phrase the statute defines to include adulterants and dilutants. For an edible, read plainly, the sugar counts. Under a gram is a state jail felony. One to four grams, third degree. Four grams up to 400, second degree, which runs two to twenty years.

If a gummy weighs four grams, and many standard-size gummies do, that single piece sits at the floor of the second-degree bracket. In theory, an old delta-8 gummy forgotten in a glove box could expose its owner to a charge carrying two to twenty years.

None of that means Texans are collecting twenty-year sentences over forgotten edibles. Twenty is the ceiling of a bracket, not a going rate, the offense requires knowing possession, and High Times found no publicly reported prosecution of an individual for delta-8 possession since the rule took effect. What it means is that Texas law now makes a far more serious charge available for one gummy than for an ounce of weed.

Austin police said in late July that they would treat delta-8 possession as a state jail felony, having said in May that it fell under the department’s misdemeanor marijuana policy. Asked how an officer is supposed to tell which isomer is in a gummy, they did not answer. In federal court in Galveston, lawyers for the state have argued that the businesses suing them face no concrete, imminent threat of enforcement.

The state is telling a federal judge there is nothing imminent while the police department in its capital city says the charge is a felony. Neither position is a reliable guide to what happens next.

What is banned, and what is not

Very little delta-8 comes out of the plant at the concentrations sold; manufacturers buy cheap CBD and convert it in a lab. The health department says the prohibition targets that manufactured material, not the trace quantities hemp produces naturally, and that any product advertised as delta-8, or testing above those quantities, can be pulled and handed to law enforcement.

It has not published a number separating one from the other. Full-spectrum hemp carries small amounts of delta-8 on its own, which leaves the line running somewhere nobody has drawn, and the Texas Supreme Court leaned on the state’s assurance that naturally occurring delta-8 would be tolerable when it decided the case in May. Tolerable went undefined there too.

THCA flower was pushed out by a different instrument. Rules in force since March 31 switched the measurement to total THC, meaning delta-9 plus 0.877 times THCA, the multiplier covering what burns off when heat turns one into the other. Flower at a tenth of a percent delta-9 and ten percent THCA works out to about 8.9 percent. Anything sold to get somebody high fails.

Those rules have been in and out of force all year. A Travis County judge blocked them in April and again on May 1; the Fifteenth Court of Appeals lifted the block on June 5 and declined to restore it on June 26. The industry filed a brief on August 14 asking the court to reinstate it. That motion is pending, and until it is decided the rule stands.

Why the delta-9 gummies are still legal

Texas stores can still sell hemp-derived delta-9 gummies, drinks and tinctures, because Texas defines hemp as a percentage of product weight and a gummy is mostly sugar. A manufacturer can increase a product’s total weight without increasing its THC proportionally, and that creates room to raise the dose while staying under the percentage limit.

Four grams comes to 4,000 milligrams, so at three-tenths of a percent that gummy can hold twelve milligrams of delta-9. Five grams gets you fifteen. Ten grams gets you thirty. Five to ten milligrams is commonly marketed as a standard adult serving, though effects vary enormously by tolerance. As the 35 state attorneys general who wrote to Congress on August 4 put it, an eight-ounce package could carry upward of 675 milligrams and stay compliant.

Which is why the July crackdown emptied the delta-8 shelf and left the delta-9 shelf alone.

Lukas Gilkey runs Hometown Hero, the Austin company whose lawsuit produced the ruling that made July 31 possible. Asked what came through it, he told High Times: “We focus primarily on delta 9 edibles and always have, so we only lost about 10% of our products.”

The Legislature never passed this ban

Texas lawmakers did not vote in 2026 to make delta-8 possession a felony. Dan Patrick made a near-total hemp ban his signature bill in 2025 and moved it through both chambers. Greg Abbott vetoed it on June 22, saying it would collapse in court, and called a special session to write regulation instead. That session went nowhere, and so did the one after it. By September he had stopped waiting and issued Executive Order GA-56, telling the health department, DPS and the Alcoholic Beverage Commission to work with the powers they already had.

The prohibition returned through an older administrative route. The health department had tried to schedule delta-8 back in 2021; hemp companies sued, won an injunction, and sold under it for nearly five years. On May 1 the Texas Supreme Court took that injunction apart, holding that the health commissioner could reject a federal scheduling change and that sovereign immunity barred the industry’s challenge to how she had gone about it. Justice Evan Young granted that the industry’s reading of the 2019 hemp law was “plausible and indeed rooted in the statutory text,” and turned it down anyway, on the view that a legislature does not quietly decriminalize a class of intoxicants without saying so out loud.

Operators have a blunter description. As Gilkey put it in Texas Cannabis Chronicles, the state “did a ban with their own regulatory scheme.”

A clause in the same statute closes off the exit. When the commissioner objects to a federal scheduling change, her decision is final unless altered by statute, and the court took that at face value. Under its reading, only the Legislature can override that particular decision, and the Legislature is not back in Austin until January 2027.

December 11, and the White House says no later

Section 781 of the Appropriations Act, which President Trump signed, redefines hemp by total THC and holds finished products to 0.4 milligrams per container. That figure is a flat quantity per package. It does not scale with the size of the jar, so a bigger gummy stops being a workaround.

Ten milligrams is twenty-five times the limit. A ten-count jar is 250 times. The U.S. Hemp Roundtable estimates the new definition would disqualify roughly 95 percent of hemp cannabinoid products now on the market, and that share includes the delta-9 aisle that came through July intact.

Operators are not braced for it. Retail is not either. In May, Target added hemp THC drinks to more than 300 stores across Florida, Texas and Illinois, six months out from the deadline. One operator, who asked not to be named, told High Times he had good confidence the ban would be stopped. The law itself is less reassuring.

Section 781 was already enacted. What moved this week is the calendar. The Senate approved a one-month delay on August 8, 90 to 6, after voting 61 to 32 to table an amendment that would have stripped it. The House passed the same bill on Tuesday, 370 to 48, over objections from Republicans who wanted the ban to land on schedule. Trump signed it on Wednesday, September 2.

The treatment splits. Products containing cannabinoids the cannabis plant cannot naturally produce lose federal hemp status on November 12 regardless, under a carve-out written into the delay. Everything else, including delta-8 made by converting CBD and the 0.4-milligram cap that ends the heavy-gummy workaround, waits until December 11. In Texas the federal date barely matters for delta-8, which is already a state felony.

The extra month is not a sign the ban is softening. James Braid, the White House director of legislative affairs, told Senate Republicans at a closed-door lunch last month that there would be no further delays beyond this one, according to Axios, NBC News and Punchbowl News, all citing people present. Braid is leaving the administration this month, and the White House has not issued that commitment as a formal policy statement.

Texas retailers who spent the spring rebuilding their shelves around delta-9 now have about fourteen weeks instead of ten.

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A four-person Johns Hopkins pilot study found that 25 mg of oral THC could produce altered-state profiles that qualitatively resembled those seen with 25 mg of psilocybin, particularly when consumed in a setting modeled on psychedelic research. The sample is far too small to establish cannabis as a psychedelic, but the findings add to earlier research suggesting that dose, context, and individual response can push THC experiences into unexpectedly psychedelic-like territory.

Cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms are not the same. They don’t work the same way in the brain, they don’t belong to the same pharmacological family and, generally speaking, they don’t feel the same either. But when the THC dose gets high enough, that line can start to feel a whole lot blurrier.

A new study from researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that 25 milligrams of oral THC can produce subjective experiences resembling those produced by 25 milligrams of psilocybin, the main psychoactive compound in psychedelic mushrooms, as reported by Marijuana Moment. In some cases, participants couldn’t even correctly identify which substance they had received.

Before we start declaring that weed has secretly been a psychedelic this whole time, though, there’s one very important piece of fine print: the study included just four people.

That’s it. Four.

The researchers themselves describe it as a pilot study and point out that the sample was so small that they couldn’t even run inferential statistical analyses. In other words, this is useful for spotting an interesting signal, not for making sweeping claims about how people in general respond to THC.

What makes that signal worth paying attention to is that it comes with a whole lot of scientific backstory.

Four People, THC, Psilocybin and a Room Built for Going Inward

The study, Updated August 27, 2026, in Psychopharmacology, included four healthy adults between the ages of 31 and 47. Across separate double-blind sessions, each received a placebo, 25 mg of psilocybin and 25 mg of THC. Two also received a 50 mg dose of THC.

The THC came in two formats. Two participants received dronabinol, a synthetic version containing more than 99% THC, while the other two received a botanical cannabis distillate containing 89.9% THC along with small amounts of other cannabinoids.

The study’s set and setting looked a lot like the kind of setup many users might deliberately seek out, though it’s also standard territory for psychedelic clinical research. Participants spent each session lying on a couch, wearing eye shades, listening to a music playlist and accompanied throughout by two trained facilitators. They were also encouraged to turn their attention inward and stay present with whatever arose in their consciousness.

And that’s where the line between a cannabis high and a mushroom trip started to become a little less obvious.

The two participants who received 25 mg of dronabinol rated the experience as more similar to that of a classic psychedelic—and, in one case, to a dissociative as well—than to a cannabinoid. By contrast, the two participants who received 25 mg of cannabis distillate correctly identified the experience as most similar to cannabis.

Still, when researchers used scales specifically designed to measure altered states of consciousness and mystical-type experiences, the profiles produced by 25 mg of THC, whether synthetic or in distillate form, were qualitatively similar to those seen with 25 mg of psilocybin. The distillate was also rated as producing a stronger overall subjective effect than an equivalent amount of dronabinol.

Interestingly, bumping the dose up to 50 mg didn’t simply make everything “more psychedelic.” That dose produced a different kind of profile, leaning more sedative or dissociative in some cases.

Weed versus Mushrooms: Psilocybin and THC Are Not the Same

The study does not show that THC works in the brain the same way psilocybin does.

Psilocybin is classified as a classic psychedelic, and its effects are strongly tied to serotonin signaling, especially through the 5-HT2A receptor. THC, on the other hand, produces its primary effects through the endocannabinoid system, particularly CB1 receptors.

What the researchers are comparing is not the pharmacology itself. It’s something stranger: the phenomenology of the experience.

Put less academically, two drugs can take very different roads and still end up producing parts of the journey that feel surprisingly similar.

That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to everybody, either. The sample was tiny, all four participants were white and non-Hispanic, three had postgraduate education and none necessarily represented a typical cannabis consumer. The researchers explicitly acknowledge those limitations.

And again: four people are still four people.

So why pay attention? Because this isn’t the first time researchers have seen something like this.

Cannabis Science Has Repeatedly Wandered Into Psychedelic Territory Before

Back in 2018, also at Johns Hopkins, researchers Updated a case report involving a 30-year-old man who experienced visual and auditory hallucinations after inhaling vaporized cannabis containing 25 mg of THC in a controlled experiment.

It was an unusual reaction—unusual enough to warrant a case report—but it gave researchers a chance to compare his subjective scores with those seen in experiments involving hallucinogenic substances. They found that some aspects of the experience resembled those reported with drugs like psilocybin, even if the overall picture wasn’t identical.

Then, in 2021, researchers at the University at Albany looked at whether intense cannabis experiences could produce what is known as oceanic boundlessness, a concept used to measure dimensions of mystical experiences such as unity, transcendence and the dissolution of boundaries.

Participants retrospectively described their most intense THC experience. Between 17% and 19% reached levels consistent with what the authors called “breakthrough” experiences. That was well below the 59% reported in certain psilocybin clinical trials, but it showed that this kind of experience could happen with cannabis too.

In 2022, a more controlled study pushed things another step forward. Twenty-five infrequent cannabis users received placebo, 7.5 mg or 15 mg of oral THC.

THC produced dose-dependent changes across several dimensions of altered consciousness. Among other things, it increased a measure called insightfulness, related to the feeling of gaining new understanding, and also increased language entropy, a phenomenon the researchers noted had previously been observed with LSD.

None of those studies argued that cannabis and psychedelics were interchangeable.

But they were all brushing up against the same question.

In 2023, Johns Hopkins researchers essentially pulled those pieces together. In a literature review Updated online that year and later included in the January 2024 issue of Journal of Psychopharmacology, they examined the ability of cannabis—and THC in particular—to produce perceptual changes, mystical experiences and other phenomena usually associated with classic psychedelics like psilocybin.

Their conclusion was pretty specific: high-THC cannabis may be capable of producing psychedelic effects, but modern experiments may not have picked them up very often because of the doses being used and, especially, the set and setting.

The authors proposed almost exactly what this new study eventually did: giving people high doses of THC under the same kinds of conditions used in therapeutic psychedelic research.

And they had another idea that may be even more interesting: THC could potentially serve as an active comparator in psychedelic clinical trials.

One longstanding problem in these studies is something called functional unblinding. Technically, nobody is supposed to know who got the actual drug and who got placebo. But someone in the middle of a full-blown psychedelic experience can probably make a fairly educated guess that they didn’t get the sugar pill.

And the researcher sitting across from them may be able to guess too.

The authors of the new paper point out that placebos and other comparators used so far often fail for exactly that reason: psychedelic effects are simply too distinctive to easily hide what a participant received.

A dose of THC capable of producing an intense altered state through a different pharmacological mechanism could make the control condition much harder to guess.

For now, that remains a hypothesis. The researchers themselves stress that these four cases are nowhere near enough to establish THC as an ideal active comparator, and they’re calling for systematic studies involving more people and a wider range of doses.

So this finding probably shouldn’t be read as proof that “weed is a psychedelic.”

It does, however, add another clue that the subjective experience produced by THC may be far more variable—and far more dependent on context—than we usually assume.

Change the dose, the expectations, and the setting, and the question gets pretty interesting: How much can a cannabis experience really change?

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High Times started printing weed prices in 1974 so buyers would stop getting fleeced by people who knew the going rate. Trans-High Market Quotations is now a live index at index.hightimes.com, and we want your numbers next.

In the summer of 1974, High Times magazine, under the guidance of its very young editor-in-chief, Ed Dwyer, began printing weed prices submitted by anonymous field informants scattered all over the country. It was an act of rebellion, like the magazine itself. Trans-High Market Quotations also served the noble purpose of letting readers know a little about the quality and price of weed, helping show that marijuana was just another product that could be bought and sold like forks, T-shirts, cars or baby wipes. So what was the big deal if a young woman buying a quarter in Cleveland could see that her dealer had marked it up 100 percent over the going rate in Detroit?

The first issue of Trans-High Market Quotations, from High Times Magazine – Summer 1974

Trans-High Market Quotations came from mailed-in notes from readers and back-channel networks of the people actually doing the buying, and it ran for decades. It was analog crowdsourcing before the term existed, and it was, in the exact, useful and militant sense, a piece of consumer protection established in the vacuum prohibition had created.

That’s why we decided to bring it back. This time, it’s interactive. It runs on daily point-of-sale data from Hoodie Analytics, a cannabis market data and analytics firm, covering 12,000 licensed dispensaries across the country and backed by more than 4,000 direct POS integrations.

So, yeah, something’s changed.

You can now see what an eighth costs in your state, in the state next door and everywhere else with legal retail sales. It updates monthly and, of course, it’s free.

It lives at index.hightimes.com. Go click.

You Can Chip In (Please Do)

As you probably know, weed is not one legal product but 50 different legal frameworks laid across a country. Since April, marijuana held under a state medical license sits in Schedule III, along with FDA-approved products containing marijuana. Everything else, including every gram sold in an adult-use store, is still Schedule I while a federal hearing plays out over whether the rest of it follows.

That’s why the interstate commerce that keeps the price of a gallon of milk within pennies of itself across the map does not exist here. Every legal state is an island, and prices vary a lot.

You’ll notice that the tracker now looks like a tool for shoppers in the 24 states and Washington, D.C. with adult-use programs, and for medical patients in the states without them. It includes enough months of data to show year-over-year information, along with many other fun tools you can play with if you are into data.

But the population of weed consumers in America, and everywhere else in the world, is not represented by dispensary receipts alone, and it never has been. The most consequential piece of cannabis commerce on the planet is still the informal and illegal trade that touches billions of people, and it is precisely the part that legal-data platforms cannot capture.

That’s why we are calling on our community to send us purchase reports.

This is where all of you should step in. The case for price transparency in illegal markets is not complicated. Prohibition creates an information asymmetry between the person who knows the going rate and the person who doesn’t. That gap is the mechanism of exploitation, and every dollar it hides is a dollar transferred from the buyer with less information to the seller with more. Publishing prices closes that gap, just as High Times did in the 1970s. It’s an empowerment tool.

So, please, send us your anonymous purchase reports from illicit markets.

We would love to have information from Texas and, from there, Nicaragua, Argentina, Malaysia, Nigeria and everywhere else.

This is our first build, which the people at Hoodie were very generous in facilitating. They did not hesitate for a moment when we asked them to collaborate.

The next thing we plan to build is the rest of it: the countries where cannabis is illegal, the states where it is decriminalized but not sold openly, the semi-legal social clubs in Barcelona, the coffee shops in Amsterdam, and the delivery networks in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Bangkok and everywhere else where receipts do not exist.

If you bought weed recently, we want to know what you paid: where you bought it, how much you bought, in what form, and at what price. That’s it. The submission takes 30 seconds and joins thousands of others in an aggregated pool. We do not ask for your name, your email or your address, and we publish only aggregate figures, never an individual entry.

One thing worth saying out loud, because our readers are not all in Denver. In much of the world, buying weed still carries real criminal exposure. Use your judgment about where and how you file a report, and skip it if you have any doubt.

What emerges is a picture of the global cannabis market: a month-by-month record of what cannabis actually costs, which we never got to have.

So, if you live outside the U.S., please get ready. And if you are thinking of ways to collaborate, send an email to rolando@hightimes.com.

The Index

The interactive THMQ is the first release. It shows the weighted average price per gram and per eighth by state, updated monthly, sortable, sourced and open to inspection. You can zoom in at the state level, compare prices, and see national and regional averages.

In the coming months, it will add medical and recreational filters and other features.

Submit what you paid at index.hightimes.com/#/submit.

Check what your state is charging at index.hightimes.com.

Disclosure: the Trans-High Market Quotations index is built with point-of-sale data provided by Hoodie Analytics under an editorial partnership. No money changed hands in either direction, and Hoodie has no say over what High Times publishes.

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There are certain US Open traditions you can count on: matches ending sometime around breakfast, New York roaring in the background, somebody arguing with a chair umpire, plus the increasingly unmistakable smell of cannabis drifting toward the courts, like someone just cracked open Snoop Dogg’s laundry bag. 

This year, apparently, the cloud is back in force. 

British player Francesca “Fran” Jones described one recent day as “one of the worst” she had experienced when it came to cannabis smoke drifting onto the courts from Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, the sprawling public park surrounding the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.

Asked whether it affected her during a 6-4, 6-1 win over Laura Garland, Jones delivered exactly the kind of answer headline writers dream of: “Well, sometimes, you know … when I’m hallucinating! No, I had a wee giggle to myself, and then I was, like, ‘OK, back to the point.’”

To be clear, Jones was not claiming that secondhand weed smoke had actually made her hallucinate. She was joking. The smell, however, was apparently very real. And pretty damn noticeable. 

‘It Takes You Out of the Moment’

Katie Boulter was considerably less amused.

“Down in the park courts, you do smell it [cannabis] a lot,” the British player said, adding that multiple players have complained about specific courts. 

Boulter recalled playing on Court 17, one of the courts closest to the park and by now something of a recurring character in this story. “I’m trying to focus and then it takes you out of the moment when you really don’t need distractions,” she said. “So yeah, I wasn’t a huge fan of it.”

Jones, who grew up and developed as a tennis player in Barcelona, knows Court 17’s reputation well. She recalled asking the chair umpire about the smell during last year’s tournament. 

“I said to the guy [in the umpire’s chair], ‘Is this normal?’ Because I was on Court 17, and it’s next to the park. He’s like, ‘Yeah’. I was like, ‘Well, no wonder I’m playing pretty well.’”

Maybe that has a little something to do with the fact that, on the streets of Barcelona, the smell of cannabis and the culture around the plant are hardly unusual. 

This time, she was on Court 15 and still had a cheeky recommendation. 

“Seventeen is the closest to the park. That’s the place to be, so get over there!”

Harriet Dart wasn’t particularly bothered either. 

“[You smell it] more in the park area, when I was practising,” she said. “I mean, it’s New York. When you walk around, it’s everywhere, no? It is what it is. Same for everyone.”

Court 17 has a history

The whole weed-smell-around-the-US-Open thing is hardly news at this point. 

In 2022, Nick Kyrgios stopped play during a US Open match to ask the chair umpire whether spectators could be reminded not to smoke. He later explained that the issue was more than an annoyance for him because he has severe asthma. 

“When I’m running side to side and struggling to breathe already, it’s probably not something I want to be breathing in between points,” he said.

A year later, Maria Sakkari immediately recognized the smell during one of her matches.

“It was weed,” she said.

And then: “The smell, oh my gosh.” 

Still, Sakkari made clear she did not consider it a major factor in her performance. To her, it was simply another part of playing a tournament in the middle of New York: food, cigarettes, cannabis. There’s always something in the air, right? 

That same year produced what remains the gold standard of US Open weed-smell quotes.

Alexander Zverev said Court 17 “smells like Snoop Dogg’s living room.” Hard to top that. Honestly, fair enough. 

Casper Ruud later joined the list of players less than thrilled by the ambient perfume, at one point calling it “the worst thing about New York” and saying it was “quite annoying” to be exhausted during a match while somebody was smoking marijuana just meters away.

Novak Djokovic complained about it last year too.

“You can really smell the smell, it’s not like you can miss it,” he said. “Some people are more disturbed than others. I’m not a fan of the smell either, it stinks.”

He also acknowledged the practical reality: “It’s allowed here and you have to accept it.”

Djokovic, in fact, has been dealing with this particular tennis problem for more than a decade.

Back in 2015, during a tournament in Montreal, he complained about smelling cannabis near the court. 

“Someone is smoking marijuana, I can smell it, I’m getting dizzy,” he said.

Then came the punchline: “Yesterday in the doubles match, today again. Someone is really enjoying his life around the tennis court.”

Eleven years later, apparently somebody still is. 

Can the US Open Actually Do Anything About It?

The United States Tennis Association says smoking is prohibited on tournament grounds and that it works with the NYPD and the Parks Department to reduce smoking near the perimeter. 

The complication is geography.

The tennis center sits inside an enormous public park, and controlling whatever happens beyond the tournament’s fences is not exactly straightforward.

So the annual ritual continues: tennis happens inside, New York keeps happening outside, and every now and then the two meet somewhere around Court 17. 

This year, according to Jones, there’s just a little more smoke than usual. 

Cover photo created with AI.

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Part V of our coverage of the federal rescheduling case. Part IV covered the post-hearing briefs.

294 fixes across 2,533 pages is roughly one every nine pages, and most are spelling and speaker names. A handful did something else: they changed the meaning, sometimes to its opposite.

For six weeks, one version of the federal marijuana rescheduling record had a Tennessee investigator testifying that cannabis shipments were arriving with lab paperwork showing illegal levels of delta-9 THC.

What he said was the opposite. The paperwork claimed legal levels. That was his point: the certificates travel with the shipment, they say the product is compliant, and when the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s own lab tests it, the delta-9 comes back much higher. One missing syllable, on page 1823, and the sentence argued against itself.

That was one of 294 corrections Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek C. Julius ordered before the DEA published the full transcript of its eleven-day rescheduling hearing this week. The parties proposed them, the government included, and Julius signed the order on August 20.

Most are exactly what you would expect from live transcription. Misspelled surnames, speaker labels attached to the wrong lawyer dozens of times, “Torridon Law LLC” corrected to “Torridon Law PLLC” on the opening page of nearly every day. A few are just funny, and Marijuana Moment collected those when the order came out: “pubic” for “public,” “anal” for “analysis,” and two places where “nubs” should have read “nuggs.”

A small number are not clerical at all. In those, the record had a witness saying the opposite of what they said.

The Corrections That Changed the Meaning

The rescheduling itself, backwards. On day ten, page 2070, Pueblo emergency physician Karen Randall warned that moving marijuana would change how the public sees it. The transcript had her describing the move as going from “a CS-III to a III.” The corrected version reads “CS-I to a III.” In the official record of a hearing convened to decide whether marijuana leaves Schedule I, the direction of the move came out wrong.

A conflict of interest, admitted or omitted. On day three, page 830, a witness being questioned about a potential conflict said he would have to check his professional timeline to see whether it had been “inadvertently omitted” that he had one, adding that it was “certainly not through any conscious obfuscation.” The uncorrected transcript read “admitted.” One word, and the sentence describes the opposite situation.

Perception of harm, up or down. Randall again, on page 2135, describing how the perception of harm has “decreased dramatically” over the last decade, especially among children. The record had her saying it increased, which would have made the rest of her argument incoherent.

Pure or impure. On day five, page 1222, Bertha Madras walked the judge through the questions pharmacology asks of any drug. One of them is whether the substance is contaminated: “Is it impure, with microbes, with chemicals, with heavy metals, pesticides, insecticides.” The transcript had “pure.”

The distinction the witness was making. On day six, page 1482, Ed Wood of DUID Victim Voices explained why an unscientific per se THC limit convicts unimpaired drivers and acquits impaired ones, and that Colorado’s permissible-inference structure solves half of it. The uncorrected version collapsed his closing line into “with a per se law,” erasing the distinction his entire answer rested on. The correction restores it: “with a per se, permissible inference, law.”

Two more that Marijuana Moment flagged when the order came out belong in the same category. On page 284, a lawyer asked whether dispensary cannabis is tested “to make sure there’s no adulterants,” and the record dropped the “no.” And a line rendered as the statement “This is a medication.” turned out to be the question “This is a medication?”

Why It Matters, and How Much

Perspective is in order. Court reporters work fast, and 294 corrections across 2,533 pages come out to about one every nine pages, which is not a scandal. The parties proposed them, which is how the process is designed to work, and Julius ordered them under the regulation that governs it. Most of the reversals are obvious enough in context that a careful reader would have caught them. The system did its job. The record was corrected before Julius issues his recommendation.

What is worth sitting with is the six weeks in between. The tribunal emailed uncorrected daily transcripts to counsel and to some of the parties as the hearing ran, a fact that surfaced in open court when the government tried to strike a witness for having read them. Those were the pages available while the parties drafted the post-hearing briefs that would become their final arguments to Julius, and while reporters, this outlet included, covered the case.

In a proceeding this technical, the difference between legal and illegal, increased and decreased, admitted and omitted, pure and impure is the difference between a witness’s point and its opposite. That is the argument for a correction process, and it is also the argument for checking any quotation from this hearing against the version the DEA posted this week.

Julius will issue a recommended decision to DEA Administrator Terrance Cole. There is no date for it. Whatever he recommends, the record he decides from now says what the witnesses actually said.

How we reported this: High Times compared Judge Julius’ August 20 order correcting the transcript against the corrected transcripts of all eleven hearing days, which the DEA has posted publicly on its rescheduling docket page. Page numbers refer to the continuous pagination of the hearing record, which runs from 1 to 2,533. On the published version, corrections appear in red and deleted text is struck through.

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Researchers gave people 5 mg of inhaled THC and rated the high at 34 out of 100. They doubled it to 10 mg. The high went to 39.

Cannabis’ most plentiful and active ingredient, the cannabinoid molecule Delta 9 THC, first isolated in 1964 by legendary Israeli chemists Raphael Mechoulam and Yehiel Gaoni, creates a beautiful, intoxicating experience for most consumers.

But as more consumers get access to it, the plant’s complicated chemistry results in human efficacy complications inside the brain where THC affects the body’s endocannabinoid system.

What that effect is to different people, why it happens the way it does, who enjoys the sensation and who doesn’t is still a moving target for researchers while cannabis product developers push their best-selling product: anything with higher potency THC.

The Cannabis Landscape Today

Amidst all the state and federal kerfuffling about cannabis that at times seems solvable, but continues nonetheless, cannabis today feels safer. It feels better understood. It’s become an accepted part of the cash crop landscape.

A handful of multi-million-square-foot grows prove it’s positioned for mass sales. One of the largest, Glass House, began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in June.

And revenue streams demonstrate solid consumer demand.

In 2025 alone, according to the Marijuana Policy Project, legalized states collectively generated more than $4.57 billion in cannabis tax revenue from adult-use sales, which is the most revenue generated by cannabis sales in a single year.

But cannabis is caught in a standoff. Science is making progress but doesn’t have all the answers about cannabis because legal and societal pressures won’t clearly enable a deeper dive.

THC, the stuff that gives a consumer that positive stoner glow, and the go-to measure of a cannabis product that consumers still prefer to use, has come under more scrutiny as more products with greater levels of THC hit the market.

THC potency has become an increasingly polarizing issue: THC potency creates emergency room visits – sure, because of underage use. THC potency causes mental health problems – well, those consumers already had issues. THC potency creates addiction – but addiction is a chronic brain and behavioral disorder, you know, like the 27 million alcohol addicts in the U.S. consuming a substance that’s somehow not on the DEA controlled substance list.

So what is Delta 9 THC – a goddess, a demon, or a market blockbuster? Turns out it’s a dodgy misunderstood often overbred molecule working in an arrangement of other cannabinoids that science needs to properly figure out.

The Potency Problem

Studies and statistics show that somewhere in the range of 30-40% of cannabis consumers buy their product based on THC potency.

The concentration of THC in cannabis has increased steadily over the past 25 years in the United States and elsewhere, according to a March, 2025 article in the American Journal of Psychiatry. “Before 2000, the average potency of herbal cannabis seized in the United States was <5% THC, whereas the average potency of herbal cannabis is now ∼20% in most state-regulated nonmedical retail markets.”

Over the last ten years, there has been a significant rise in extremely high-potency cannabis products, such as infused flower with up to 60 % THC (such as moonrocks), and solvent-based concentrates that have as much as 99% THC (such as THCa diamonds).

THC is one of the more than 500 compounds in cannabis, with 125 being cannabinoids. And while many cannabinoids have been discovered over the years, beginning in the mid-1960s using various chemical and chromatography processes, with some getting more attention lately—chief among them CBD, CBG, Delta 8 THC, THCA—it’s the Delta 9 THC, the main cannabinoid constituent of the plant, that has come back into the discussion loop.

What we now know is that the effect of cannabis is not all about the Delta 9 THC chemical molecule.

According to Duncan Mackie, the director of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics at Bud & Mary’s, formerly MedPharm, a medical and adult use cannabis cultivation and research facility, a consumer just inhaling dry raw ignited flower is experiencing a whole lot of other things in that flower that are going to have effects beyond THC. “There’s terpenes, taste, flavor, the whole entire holistic view of the plant,” he told High Times. “So I think that we’ve seen at least with flower users a move away from just THC potency.”

Mackie’s recent research is about the effects of CBD and other non-psychotropic cannabinoids in potentially treating neuroinflammation-associated neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, and Huntington’s disease. “We’ve seen CBG, we’ve seen CBC, we’ve seen all these minor cannabinoids become of interest for their different effects,” Mackie said.

Years ago, breeders began breeding for higher THC once the active compounds in the plant were identified, Mackie said. “Because then we could analyze it and say, oh yeah, this is at X amount, if we cross these, we get an extra increase,” he said. Doing that affected other cannabinoids. “From a genetic standpoint, we silenced a lot of these early genes that would have made really diverse cannabinoids. CBC is an example. It was a gene that was silenced at one point and then unsilenced through breeding. I think that if we started from scratch today, the smart breeders would prioritize a diverse panel of cannabinoids. But you would always have somebody chasing the highest THC.”

“From a genetic standpoint, we silenced a lot of these early genes that would have made really diverse cannabinoids.”

Duncan Mackie, director of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics, Bud & Mary’s

If a cannabis product has five times or 10 times the amount of one molecule such as THC, with only trace amounts of CBG and CBC in the plant, the brain receptors “are going to just be occupied by THC,” he said. “It’s a well-known factor that if you’re 10, 15, or 20 times one molecule versus another, that one molecule that’s 20-times is going to just obliterate the receptors in the brain. There’s not even a chance for the other compounds to interact with the receptors and give you an effect.”

Another researcher working on the chemical composition and effects of cannabis is Ryan Vandrey, an experimental psychologist at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In the process of increasing THC concentration and decreasing the concentration of CBD, it’s a little unclear where a certain percent THC is going to functionally change in a reliable and meaningful way, he said. “People usually have a target dose of THC to achieve their kind of preferred level of drug effect,” Vandrey said. “Now, as you increase the percent of THC concentration up and up and up, maybe the successive titration becomes a little more challenging and more difficult for the user. So it makes it a little more challenging to fine-tune the dose, and you might overshoot your dose a little bit and then the consequence of the reduced CBD and other phytochemicals remains a little bit unclear.”

CBD may affect how a certain concentration of THC affects the consumer. “The science on whether CBD mitigates some of the adverse effects of THC when the drug is inhaled is a little bit mixed,” Vandrey said.

For example, he said, if you get a really high dose of THC, it can induce anxiety. CBD by itself can reduce anxiety in some individuals. “There’s a thought that the higher concentrations of CBD might help reduce the anxiogenic effects of inhaled THC. So that’s one potential functional consequence of these increasing concentrations of THC – you don’t get much meaningful CBD in those products anymore.”

Current testing of retail inhalable cannabis products show that CBD concentrations are very low, he said, and that’s really a function of how THC and CBD are produced by the plant. “It’s the same mechanism in the plant that produces both THC and CBD. So when you breed these plants to overexpress THC, a reduction of CBD is a natural consequence of that process. Your THC is going to drown out the signal for other chemicals.”

THC and the Role of Other Compounds

Emerging research points to other compounds in the plant, such as esters or thiols or aldehydes, that modulate the effects of THC while providing other benefits. Esters are being studied for nausea and anxiety; aldehydes are being investigated for antibacterial and antifungal medical potential.

Russ Hudson is the director of research at the Phyto Science Research Group in Texas, and a cannabis phytochemical researcher. “A very common terpene in almost all cannabis strains is beta myrcene,” he told High Times. “This is a very potent sedative on its own. Another very common terpene is humulene. This is the number one constituent of hops. It’s what makes beer and other alcohol made from hops very sedative. There are many cannabis strains that have myrcene and humulene in high concentration, which means that it’s going to make you sleepy. And for the average smoker, that’s just going to feel like they’re really stoned. A lot of that feeling isn’t happening because of THC at all.”

A strain listed as having high THC or low THC doesn’t really tell the consumer much, he said. Take Marinol, for example. It’s a synthetic form of THC introduced and approved by the FDA in 1985. “There was nothing else but THC in it,” Hudson said. “What happened is people did not have a good time when they took that medication. They felt racy, they felt anxiety, they felt paranoia. So I view looking at THC numbers as being a very incomplete part of the picture.”

Capping the THC Level: ‘It will be folly.’

Regulators are rushing to develop better ways of controlling levels of THC. A bill in California now working through the legislative process, AB2532, would put a 10 mg cap on THC content per container on beverages. Opponents say that policy would have “severe and immediate unintended consequences” that “far outweigh any purported public health benefit,” adding that the policy would “wipe out over 93% of the legal beverage market overnight.”

Vermont and Connecticut have THC caps for flower—30 % and 35% respectively. Most other states where recreational cannabis is sold limit THC content in edibles.

Hudson said that he thinks that THC caps like this are going to continue. “But the problem is that for instance with alcohol, you’re just talking about alcohol. You’re not talking about all these secondary metabolites and all that crap like in cannabis. It’s clearly known what alcohol does. With cannabis, you have too many unknowns. While I do think regulators are going to try that at first, it will be a folly. What will inevitably happen is cannabis is going to be treated like botanical medicines.”

There are only a few botanical medicines approved by the FDA, he said, and even the FDA knows with these products you cannot talk about one molecule. “That is not how botanical products work,” Hudson said. “You have to know the chemical profile. You have to do chemical fingerprinting, and eventually we will get there. The truth is that organic chemistry is hard. It’s notoriously one of the most difficult subjects on earth. Lawmakers have a very specific skill set and method of organization of their thinking, and often they just can’t quite get it. Even talking about how to calculate THC percentage, you lose them very quickly. So lawmakers will often go with whatever the last state did.”

“Even talking about how to calculate THC percentage, you lose them very quickly. So lawmakers will often go with whatever the last state did.”

Russ Hudson, director of research, Phyto Science Research Group

Lawmakers don’t want to get into the liability of calculations that then inform consumer purchases for cannabis, such as THC percentages. “Nobody’s done this before, so it does look like the United States is going to be left with figuring this out,” Hudson said. “How do we calculate THC? What does that mean? And then how do we account for the other things?”

If a strain has 30% THC and its number one terpene constituent is myrcene, and its number one sesquiterpene constituent is humulene, that’s a potently sedative strain that could have really serious medical uses for some folks, he said. “But it could have serious liabilities for other folks. So I think there is a level of fear that lawmakers just don’t want to go to. And so far nobody has really gotten it right.”

THC Marketing and the Schedule III Question

That complicated chemical composition of the plant is something a majority of people don’t pay much attention to, Vandrey said, and that comes back to the intent of the user in consuming cannabis. “If the intent is to get intoxicated and to get high, then THC is rightfully the focus,” he said. “I believe that that’s why the market drifted in this direction. THC is unquestionably the driving force in intoxication and the reinforcing and rewarding effects of cannabis use as a recreational drug. From a marketing standpoint, having the flower with the highest THC concentration is a marketing tool, and that’s driven a lot of this.”

“If the intent is to get intoxicated and to get high, then THC is rightfully the focus.”

Ryan Vandrey, experimental psychologist, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

That marketing attracts the heavy, hardcore daily consumer, which parallels the alcohol consumption patterns of people, Vandrey said. “So the heaviest consumers tend to kind of steer towards higher alcohol concentration products. It’s really no different for cannabis in that way. Heavier consumption can result in neurobiological adaptation in the user. Your CB1 receptors in your brain get downregulated, and therefore you need to continually increase the amount of THC you consume to get your targeted drug effect. The consequence of that is that when you don’t use THC, you go through withdrawal, and it’s a perpetual cycle of chasing the desirable effects and avoiding the adverse effects of withdrawal. That can escalate in users over time.”

There’s evidence that higher potency products like concentrates with 80-90 percent THC in them can speed that process up, or can exacerbate that process. “When you look at cannabis users, the folks that are using the really high THC concentrates at higher amounts tend to have more symptoms of cannabis dependence and more severe cannabis withdrawal,” Vandrey said.

Issues about cannabis products have been a top agenda item for Jonathan Caulkins, a professor of operations research and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Caulkins says that there are two things driving the marketing and sales of higher THC products. The first is the core problem for companies in the cannabis space, which is the free fall of prices. “The product just isn’t that hard to make, and there’s a lot of competition,” he told High Times. “Prices go down, prices go up, which is actually related to the price per milligram of THC, to be clear. There’s the premium of trying to differentiate your product to get away from that intense price competition, and folks do all sorts of things to try to make their products different and worthy of a customer paying more for their product than the competitors. There’s an amazing variety of flavors we go through in the menu, and it also includes making claims about cannabinoids other than THC. So some of this broadening of the discussion to other components of the product, I think, is driven by companies attempting to differentiate and say, ‘Hey. This is what’s different about our product. Therefore, you should pay more than the minimum price for a given THC.’ And I do think that this is playing to a very willing audience.”

There is a percentage of consumers who think of their consumption of cannabis as a part of their identity, he said. “That creates sort of a willing audience for trying to make the product be a more complicated thing.”

Cannabis is already partway there. In April, the Justice Department placed FDA-approved marijuana products and cannabis sold under a state medical license into Schedule III, while leaving everything else, adult-use included, in Schedule I. Whether the rest of the market follows is still open, and the April order is under challenge in the D.C. Circuit. If it does, there are a host of issues that the complicated plant presents to researchers and regulators. “If we’re going to treat it like every other Schedule III drug, you have to sell a consistent dose that is well labeled, regardless of what that dose is,” Caulkins said. “It could be 7% THC it could be 17%. But it’s just not okay for any other seller of any other FDA-approved drug to have such terrible quality control.”

For example, when you buy an aspirin, there is a certain number of milligrams of that molecule in each pill, with quality control production following a very tight tolerance, he said. “If it does go as Schedule III, and the FDA treats it the way it does every other Schedule III substance, that will really shake up the industry because the industry does not meet the quality control standards that the FDA demands. It would totally upend the industry.”

THC and a Cannabis Addiction Explainer

Just mentioning “cannabis addiction” can cause an uproar among both cannabis proponents and opponents. In an interview Updated in the Harvard University Gazette, Kevin Hill, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Division of Addiction Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said that there is a lot known about both the benefits and the risks of cannabis use, “although I would say that the rate and scale of research has not kept pace with the interest,” he said. “But our increased knowledge pales in comparison to the intense public interest. So one of the issues we often encounter is a growing divide between what the science says and what public perception is.

“At the end of the day, a lot of what people hear about cannabis is either incomplete or flat-out wrong because both sides are promoting polar opposite views of cannabis.”

The greatest example is when you talk about the addictive nature of cannabis, he said. “You can become addicted to cannabis, though most people don’t. Yet invariably, when people hear about what I do, they say, ‘Oh, you’re an addiction psychiatrist? Well, cannabis is not physically addictive; it’s psychological.’ So there are fallacies about cannabis. And they continue because people are invested in trying to get people to vote one way or another on issues like medical cannabis or legalization of recreational cannabis. That is a major problem. Every single day we have patients come in who are interested in using cannabis as a medication or they’re using it recreationally or are interested in cannabidiol, and they have beliefs about cannabis that they’ve held for years that aren’t true. And that becomes a major barrier. It’s hard to dispel those beliefs in the office.”

That is just a taste of the far-ranging discussions about THC potency and its role in addiction. More pro-con evidence is piling up, and more data on both sides is giving researchers a better understanding of THC potency and its potential as an addictive substance.

Amir Englund is a researcher in cannabinoid psychopharmacology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. He studied the effects some of the prevalent cannabinoids—THC, CBD and THCV—have in healthy human volunteers. He reported on the cognitive, psychological, and neurophysiological effects both in THC isolation and when combined with other cannabinoids.

His research showed that there was almost a fourfold increase in the average potency of cannabis in Denmark during a 23-year study period. “It went from near 8% all the way to north of 30,” he told High Times. “At the time of the analysis (2022), it was the strongest hash in Europe. We found that when this big increase happened, it was also followed by an increase in people showing up to hospitals with either addiction problems or cannabis-induced psychosis.”

The study tracked those increases at the population level, which cannot establish that one caused the other. “But it’s really complicated data. The interesting thing when the rates of these outcomes become less frequent, we don’t really know why. One reason can be that because of this increase in potency, people don’t really like it, and they kind of switch to other products perhaps, and the incidence of these outcomes becomes rarer.

“What we have with legal cannabis markets, as well as the illegal ones, is that the marketing is often heavily geared towards the really heavy users, the people who use a lot or the people who have a problem with it, which could potentially be an addiction. They’re the ones who are using about 80% of all the high THC products, and they make up sometimes just 10% of all the people who use cannabis.

“That’s why often you see markets geared towards that small user base as opposed to the broader whole population of cannabis users.”

Englund said that he and other colleagues did a meta-analysis of studies on cannabis consumption involving giving THC to healthy people who were mainly infrequent users. “The cannabis consumption allowed was once a week or less. So they had very little tolerance.” They wanted to see what the most common effects people experience from THC, based on the dose people got.

“What we saw was, let’s say, how high people got from inhaling THC of five milligrams compared to placebo,” Englund said. “We subtracted the placebo effect. So even when people inhale a placebo joint, you get a little bit of a high from just the belief that you’re using cannabis, although there’s no THC. We subtracted that and found that the average rating of how high people got was about 34 out of a 100-point scale. When you doubled the amount, from five to 10 milligrams, you only came up to 39 on the scale. So 100% more cannabis only gave you 15% more high. We found this sort of dose-response plateauing, where it goes up first at the low amounts, gets you high, and then it kind of stops getting you high.”

So more THC is not necessarily going to give you more bang for your buck, he said, but it’s still causing an effect on the brain and your CB1 receptors.

The more you hit the CB1 receptor with THC, the more the endocannabinoid system will respond to it. “What happens is a downregulation,” he said. “It’s where the brain withdraws the receptor, so you have fewer available to you. To compensate for that, you need to keep increasing the amount to get to where you’re going, and eventually you kind of get to a place where you’re not really getting that much from it.”

Englund said that after two days of staying off cannabis, these receptors started coming back. “The brain and the cannabinoid system is a very fluid system,” he explained. “If you put a lot of THC in there, it will respond and sort of take receptors away. Then if you give it a break, they kind of come back. So I think the whole thing about potency and stronger products, because it’s geared towards these really heavy users, creates a bit of a negative circle where people are taking more THC than they actually need. The likelihood of negative things from cannabis use, like potentially addiction and potentially psychotic experiences and psychotic syndromes, can be partially explained by the fact that people don’t have as many of their cannabinoid receptors available to them anymore.”

The End of the THC Chase

Growers are in the process of evolving their understanding of the plant and the subsequent marketing of the product.

The role of Delta 9 THC as the main active ingredient in the plant is being redefined.

In a study at Wageningen University Updated in the April 2026 issue of Plant Biotechnology Journal, researchers discovered more about the chemical profile of the plant, and how today’s cannabis is the result of an evolved ability to make compounds such as THC, CBD and CBC.

In a nutshell, researchers identified some of the molecular switches that determine what cannabinoid a plant makes from the same starting material.

The most provocative implication is that cannabis breeding might eventually become less about breeding a plant and more about engineering a metabolic factory. Today’s breeder might say: “I want a plant that produces 20% THC.” A future medicinal-cannabis breeder might instead say: “I want a plant whose flowers consistently produce this particular constellation of cannabinoids.” The relevant trait might not even be THC concentration. It could be something like CBD + CBG + CBC + a particular minor cannabinoid + very low THC.

“Nobody’s going to be chasing THC anymore,” Hudson said. “As a baseline metric, maybe they want to keep it at 10%. But what’s already happening is a lot of the growers that I consult with now want to know what chemical profiles are.”

One of the companies he consults with has built an algorithm to determine the phytochemical content of the plant—what would make it good versus just average, or what would make it bad for a particular individual user. “What’s happening already is that breeders and geneticists and cultivators are trying to figure out what chemical profiles are actually valuable and why, and then they’re going back to the drawing board to make phenotypes and do selections that express those in different ways.”

Hudson said that cannabis can be manipulated past the genetic level to get the desired phytochemical content. “That’s already happening now. Soon we’ll stop talking about stupid things like calling strains names like Dog Shit or AK 47. We’ll be talking in more chemical terms.”

Hudson thinks the future of cannabis purchases won’t be about how much THC is in a certain strain. “Consumers will be walking into a dispensary saying things like, ‘I don’t care what you call it, because that’s mostly a lie anyway. I need a chemical profile that is high in limonene and beta caryophyllene’ or what have you,” Hudson said. “That’s eventually where we’re going to go. Myself and many of the scientists and researchers that I work with are having these conversations every day. It’s going to happen like that, unless, of course, we go back to the dark ages, which I think is always a possibility.”

Hudson and colleagues are building a chemical fidelity matching engine, he said, which will give consumers the ability to go to the dispensary, search by chemical content, and learn what that chemical content is.

This plays right into their hands of being able to “dork out” on the thing that cannabis consumers already love—science and chemistry. “A lot of people have scolded me and said, ‘Hey, why can’t you just let cannabis be magic?’ My response is the science is the magic. That’s where it is. If you want to be a magician, you can be. The secret is what’s in this elixir.”

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Before becoming Dana Scully and spending years investigating unexplained phenomena on The X-Files, Gillian Anderson found herself in a teenage episode that could easily have ended up in one of those files.

The actress recounted that, as a teenager, she was arrested after breaking into her school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at night. As she recently revealed, she was under the influence of crystal meth. The story appeared in episode 412 of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, which aired on August 17, 2026. In the episode, Anderson reflected on a period of her teenage years she had previously described as quite chaotic. The arrest wasn’t entirely unknown to the public; what she did add this time was the detail of what she had taken.

And no, that isn’t the only drug experience from those years Anderson has recently talked about: while promoting her new movie, the actress recalled a terrible experience with marijuana and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that, she says, virtually kept her away from horror movies for decades.

Methamphetamine, High School, and a Failed Escape Attempt

The conversation with Conan O’Brien began with a rather prophetic detail: in high school, Anderson’s classmates had voted her “most likely to be arrested.” “And then you made good on that,” O’Brien remarked. Anderson confirmed it.

She said she and some others went to the school in the early hours of the morning with a peculiar plan: to glue the locks shut so the building couldn’t be opened the next day. O’Brien called the prank “aggressive.” Anderson replied that… yes. Basically, “that was kind of me at that time.”

It was her punk phase. Anderson wore pointed boots with buckles and a particularly thin sole, which had some decidedly unglamorous consequences when a guard began chasing her through downtown Grand Rapids and she stepped on a nail. Anderson said that was what stopped her and added that, had that not happened, she probably would have managed to escape.

Then came the revelation. “Let’s just say I was doing a little crystal meth at the time…” Anderson said on the podcast. She added that she was in a great mood and managed to get the charge reduced from breaking and entering to trespassing—from a charge related to forcibly entering a property without authorization to a lesser charge of unauthorized entry. 

The night just kept getting worse… Anderson said that her boyfriend at the time—whom she described as “considerably older”—went back to his apartment and continued smoking and drinking while she was in custody.

O’Brien summed up the situation: in jail, with a nail in her foot, and high on meth. “Yes,” was all Anderson could say. “Iconic,” hundreds of Instagram commenters wrote.

Weed, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and a Bad Trip That Lasted for Years

Meth isn’t the only substance that came up in the stories Anderson recently shared as she reminisced about her teenage years.

During an interview with Extra alongside Hannah Einbinder to promote their new movie Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Anderson said that one of her earliest experiences with horror movies happened after she had smoked some particularly potent weed. The movie was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

“I saw it… after some very strong pot and it was not a fun experience,” she recalled. According to Anderson, she has hardly watched any horror movies since then.

In a separate interview with The Wall Street Journal, she offered more context. She said that, as a teenager, she had a really bad trip smoking weed at someone else’s house while they were watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; she felt as though she were trapped in a place she couldn’t leave, and that the experience ended up shaping her relationship with the genre for much of her life.

This period of her life isn’t entirely new to the public either. In a profile published by The New Yorker in 2024, the actress spoke of her teenage years as a period of rebellion and attention-seeking. She recalled that there was “a lot of alcohol” and “a lot of drugs” in her life back then and said she wasn’t proud of some of her destructive behaviors.

At age 21, as she recounted in that same interview, she stopped drinking and drastically changed her lifestyle. 

From ‘Most Likely to Be Arrested’ to Playing an FBI Agent

Anderson’s teenage arrest had already been reported before her conversation with Conan. Complex, citing a 1997 interview later unearthed by The Telegraph, notes that Anderson had said she didn’t receive a fine but did have to perform community service after the incident. The new detail revealed in 2026 is, therefore, much more specific: Anderson now says she used methamphetamine that night.

The contrast with what came next is quite striking. Anderson studied acting at DePaul University’s Theatre School, and a few years after her punk-rock teenage years, she landed the role that would change her career. In 1993, she made her debut as Dana Scully, the ultra-rational doctor and FBI agent on The X-Files, a role that made her an international star.

Today, with the benefit of hindsight, Gillian Anderson recounts those stories about drugs and rebellion more as portraits of an earlier version of herself than as exploits to be celebrated. In fact, she had already acknowledged that some of that teenage behavior was destructive and that she wasn’t proud of it.

But there’s a biographical irony that’s hard to beat: the punk teenager voted “most likely to be arrested”—who ended up in custody after a chase, a nail, and hard drugs—went on to play, just a few years later, one of television’s most famous federal agents. Ironic, isn’t it? Or rather: iconic.

Cover photo: Alex Archambault, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons // Radspunk, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Alex Lifeson quit cannabis at 72 while preparing for Rush’s return to the road, saying he wanted better focus, discipline, memory, and mental sharpness. After decades of openly enjoying weed, he says the change has been unexpectedly positive—even if he initially hoped it wouldn’t be.

At 72, after decades of having a pretty open relationship with weed, Alex Lifeson decided to quit. It wasn’t a sudden moral awakening or a newfound problem with cannabis. The Rush guitarist simply wanted his brain—and his playing—as sharp as possible, according to Rolling Stone.

The decision came while Lifeson was preparing for Fifty Something, Rush’s first tour since 2015 and the band’s long-awaited return to the road following the death of legendary drummer Neil Peart in 2020. Lifeson is touring alongside longtime bandmate Geddy Lee and German drummer Anika Nilles, who took on one of rock music’s most daunting roles.

And, as he put it, getting ready meant taking a hard look at some long-standing habits.

“I thought, this is interfering with the way my brain should be working, and the kind of focus and discipline that all of a sudden I really wanted to have in my life,” Lifeson told Rolling Stone in a recent interview.

So he cleared out his stash.

Lifeson Says Quitting Weed Improved His Memory 

This wasn’t exactly a casual tolerance break.

In the interview, Lifeson said he went through his home collecting jars of weed, pipes and other smoking gear and tossing everything into a garbage bag. When he came across a container of pre-rolls in his studio, he briefly considered keeping them before deciding that it would defeat the purpose. By the end, he said, the bag was full of pipes, bongs and weed. 

That’s notable considering Lifeson has never exactly been shy about his affection for cannabis. In previous interviews, he has described weed as part of his creative process, particularly in the studio, while acknowledging that being high didn’t always make him the most technically precise player.

But this time, the equation was different. Returning to Rush after more than a decade away from touring meant rebuilding stamina, relearning material, sharpening muscle memory, and mentally preparing to play some notoriously demanding music night after night.

And Lifeson says he noticed a difference.

“I’m so much clearer. I don’t procrastinate like I used to. My memory is so much better,” he said. “It’s all the stuff that they tell you about cannabis. I never believed it.”

The funniest part might be that he apparently wasn’t hoping sobriety would stick.

“It’s really been a positive experience,” Lifeson said. “I didn’t expect it, and I was hoping it wouldn’t be.”

Fair enough.

About That ‘30 Days’ THC Claim

Lifeson also said that “THC stays in your system for typically 30 days,” explaining that once he reached the end of that first month, he started thinking bigger.

“Oh my God, maybe I’ll just try it for two years then, for the whole tour,” he recalled.

That 30-day figure, however, is better understood as a rough reference rather than a biological countdown clock.

How long THC or its metabolites remain detectable depends on a long list of factors, including frequency of use, dose, metabolism, body composition, the type of test used, and the test’s detection threshold. Research shows substantial variation, particularly between occasional and frequent users.

So Lifeson’s timeline shouldn’t be treated as medical guidance. What matters here is what he noticed after several weeks without weed: better focus, less procrastination and, in his view, a sharper memory.

Rush Is Back, but Nobody Is Pretending It’s 1981

The timing makes the whole lifestyle change more interesting. Rush kicked off Fifty Something in June 2026 at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, the same venue where Lee, Lifeson and Peart played their final concert together in 2015.

The new version of the band has an understandably delicate task. Lee and Lifeson are returning to music that shaped most of their lives without pretending that one of the three people at its heart isn’t gone. The tour is already stretching well beyond North America, with South American and European dates scheduled into 2027.

For Lifeson, getting ready for that chapter apparently meant more than plugging his guitar back in. It meant figuring out which parts of his old routine still worked for him at 72—and which ones didn’t.

There’s no anti-weed manifesto in his comments, and he doesn’t seem particularly interested in turning his own experience into advice for anyone else. If anything, his comments are more personal than prescriptive.

After spending much of his life enjoying cannabis, Alex Lifeson tried life without it and was mildly annoyed to discover he kind of loves it too.

Cover photo: Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Sun-grown cannabis, living soil, and the growers building a regenerative future while federal money flows everywhere but their fields

This past June, President Trump signed an executive order expanding a pilot program the USDA had already funded, routed through conservation programs like EQIP and the Conservation Stewardship Program, which pays farmers for building soil health. Across row crops and rangeland, regenerative agriculture has moved from a fringe idea to the fastest-growing banner in farming.

Almost none of that money will reach a marijuana farm.

Because the plant remains federally illegal, state-licensed cannabis growers cannot draw federal conservation dollars, cannot be certified USDA organic, and do not appear anywhere in the executive order’s plans. Hemp is the exception that proves the problem: since the 2018 Farm Bill, hemp producers have been eligible for USDA organic certification and for the same conservation programs the order expands. Same plant, same soil, same practices. What decides whether a farm can access federal help is a THC threshold.

The crop with arguably the most to gain from a soil-first turn is the one Washington still won’t name.

So the work is happening without Washington, carried by third-party certifiers and the small farms that seek them out.

The order came wrapped in the language of the Make America Healthy Again campaign, and it landed in the middle of something that is genuinely growing worldwide. Jacob Policzer, chair of the board at the cannabis certifier Sun & Earth and director of science and strategy at The Cannabis Conservancy in Denver, keeps an eye on the broader numbers. “It does seem to be growing about 15% annually,” he says. “One of the things I saw that was really inspiring, and kind of what we’re seeing on the ground as well, is something like 86% of young farmers entering agriculture are practicing regenerative farming, and that’s really where we’re seeing a lot more optimism and growth in this.”

Making the Change Visible

Sun & Earth exists to translate what happens in a field into something a shopper can recognize on a shelf. “As a whole, we make regenerative farming visible to the consumer through our certification,” Policzer says. “Certification is a way that goes along the supply chain, and ultimately is a label, a seal of approval, so to speak, that the consumer can recognize and understand that this product has been grown using these practices.”

I was curious about the mechanics, so Policzer walked me through it: “The farms will reach out to us, either through phone calls or on our website, then they fill out an application, a farm plan, essentially detailing all of their practices, their soil inputs. That’ll get reviewed, we’ll ask questions, and then if all that looks good, they get introduced to an inspector who schedules the inspection, goes on site, spends two to three hours, and does an entire walkthrough of the farm.”

Sun & Earth grades on two tiers, and the top tier turns on what a farm does with its own dirt. “We have gold standards as well as green standards,” Policzer says. “So we kind of poke at what we feel is extremely important as far as regenerative agriculture, when it comes to on-farm soil fertility. We do a calculation on how much NPK the farm used, how much they generated on site, how much they purchased offsite, really encouraging on-site composting, local resource use, all of that.” Two conditions are non-negotiable. “For our regenerative certification, it has to be sun-grown in native soil. Living soil and native soil are like the two biggest factors.”

Policzer draws the line between conventional and regenerative farming as a question of debt. “When you’re farming conventionally, especially in monocrop, you’re really borrowing from the soil,” he says. “You’re using the nutrients, the microbial activity, all of that, and that’s ultimately leading to needing an increase in what usually is a synthetic nutrient, which every year we’re seeing becoming increasingly more expensive, and you have to add more and more. What we’re seeing with regenerative is that you’re giving back to nature. You’re increasing the biomass, the soil structure, and a lot of retention, so ideally you’re reducing your need for off-farm inputs.”

That is an ecological argument, but in a warming climate, it is fast becoming a matter of necessity. “For regenerative practices, they’re seeing an 80 to 90% crop survival rate using 70 to 80% of the water requirements versus conventional,” Policzer says. “So ideally it’s boosting the resiliency of the farmers, which then translates into improving the conditions in rural economies, which, especially in the United States, are mostly impoverished or economically disadvantaged.”

But the standard doesn’t stop at the soil line. Certifiers like Sun & Earth also watch for ethical cultivation practices, particularly worker rights. “Making sure the farms are paid fair wages or a living wage, having the resources to have good housing, ideally healthcare, education, all that, that’s where our small farms really struggle,” Policzer says.

And unlike USDA Organic, a costly certification better suited to corporate-scale operations, Sun & Earth targets small farmers and manufacturers. “Our typical certified farm is a small family farm, usually a mom-and-pop kind of operation,” Policzer says. “In California they’re usually legacy growers who have entered the market, stalwarts of the community and in the cannabis culture, who have been doing this for 20-plus years. They’re honoring this legacy.”

Two Ways of Joining the Change

The two words most often used for the work these sustainable farmers do, regenerative agriculture and agroecology, are not exactly interchangeable.

Agroecology is the older and more demanding of the two. It emerged as a discipline in the 1940s, and its original and still predominant practitioners are Indigenous peoples and peasant smallholders. It applies the science of ecology to farming, designing fields that mimic natural ecosystems, favoring intercropping, traditional seeds, and biological pest control over purchased inputs, but it refuses to stop at the fence line. Agroecology treats a farm as a social and political system as much as a biological one, and it comes bundled with claims about land tenure, seed sovereignty, fair markets, and who gets to make a living from the ground. In a way, it is more a set of principles linking ethics, human labor, and nature.

Regenerative agriculture is younger, looser, and easier to adopt. There is no fixed definition, but in practice, it names a family of soil-first practices, cover cropping, no-till, rotational grazing, composting, and keeping living roots in the ground year-round, all aimed at rebuilding organic matter, water retention, and biological life underground. Its great strength is that it is measurable: soil carbon, water infiltration, and microbial activity can be tracked and compared season over season.

But what gets regenerated, or recovered, in regenerative farming? Three things, mainly. The first is the soil, the literal rebuilding of a living medium that a century of extraction has degraded, treating the ground as an asset to compound rather than a mine to empty. The health of the soil is measured in the life working below ground, life that, instead of being fought off, is promoted, analyzed, and balanced. The second is the human intellect that the work demands. Industrial farming outsourced and protocolized thinking, getting farmers to apply a pre-established, input-dependent formula: use the recommended rate, spray on schedule, repeat. Regenerative farming puts the knowledge back in the farmer’s hands because you cannot manage a living system with chemicals alone. Technical teams and workers need to spend far more time on the ground, analyzing and searching for dynamic solutions to the ever-changing landscape of seasonal crops. They need to learn how to better read their own fields. It is a full-time job that requires proximity. That is why regenerative farming also promotes a third kind of recovery, the repopulation of the farmland. It is the link between a person and the particular piece of earth they tend, and behind it, the far older understanding that agriculture was a cultural and ecological craft long before it was an industrial process.

Recovering the soil, recovering the intellect, recovering the tie to nature.

The Right Way to Do Things

Sunset Lake is one of four Vermont farms Sun & Earth has certified. It sits near Lake Champlain on land that used to be dairy pasture, grows entirely outdoors, and came to cannabis through the family that has run the dairy for generations. Rev Baker, who handles the farm’s marketing, has a degree in philosophy and worked for 16 years in craft beer and fine wine. “I had to dry out and stop drinking, and so I actually used cannabis to quit drinking and transitioned into this industry,” he says.

The owner of the farm, Baker’s boss, grew up around the cows, and sees the new crop as a way to keep the next generation on the land. “He views what we do here as a way to get young Vermonters excited about farming again,” Baker says, “because it’s really hard to say, ‘Hey, there’s this tech company that has all these cool bells and whistles,’ or you can ride a tractor around and harvest corn. But growing cannabis and growing hemp, it’s kind of fun and exciting. So it’s a way to get some people excited about agriculture.”

Baker himself came up a city kid, but eventually answered the siren call of nature. “For us, regenerative agriculture is: we want to leave the soil and the farm better than when we started,” he says. Here is what that looks like in practice.

They compost manure from the family dairy with spent grain from a brewery down the road and work the result into the field as fertilizer, so organic matter and biology return to the soil instead of being trucked off as waste. The field itself is kept on a multi-year crop rotation, with sections pulled out of cannabis each season and rested. During those fallow periods, the resting ground is planted with cover crops, a mix of grasses and legumes sown not to be harvested for sale but to feed the soil, a practice sometimes called green manure. The legumes matter for a specific reason: in partnership with rhizobia bacteria in their root nodules, they perform biological nitrogen fixation, pulling nitrogen out of the air and depositing it in the soil in a form plants can use, which cuts the need for purchased synthetic fertilizer. The grasses, meanwhile, keep living roots in the ground year-round, feeding the microbes that build soil structure. When the cover crop is cut, it is hayed and sent back to the dairy as feed. Waste from one operation becomes an input for the next, a principle of circularity, and the fertility stays local: the circular economy as a literal circle of fields, animals, and a brewery inside a few square miles.

The Vermont soil they are building this into is not easy ground. It is sandy and quick-draining, which guards against root rot but holds neither water nor nutrients well, over a base with a fair amount of clay. Cover cropping does double duty here, because tilling the residue back in before planting adds carbon to a soil that would otherwise stay thin. At transplant, the farm also practices mycorrhizal inoculation, dosing the young roots with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. These fungi have partnered with plant roots for more than 400 million years. The plant feeds them sugars from photosynthesis; in return, their thread-like hyphae extend the effective root system many times over, scavenging phosphorus, nitrogen, and water the plant could never reach on its own, and ferrying them back. They also buffer the plant against drought and secrete glomalin, a sticky glycoprotein that glues soil particles into stable aggregates, the crumb structure that lets the ground hold both water and air. A conventional program of soluble fertilizer and fungicide tends to make this partnership redundant and then kill it off. A regenerative one is largely the discipline of keeping it alive.

Everything here is grown outdoors in native soil, with no indoor capacity at all.

Pest and disease control follow the same logic, under the umbrella term integrated pest management, or IPM, and at Sunset Lake it leans entirely on biological control. The farm’s main insect threat is the European corn borer, which tunnels into the open stalks of corn, hemp, and cannabis alike. Against it, they release Trichogramma, a parasitoid wasp so small it is nearly invisible, which lays its eggs inside the borer’s eggs so the pest is destroyed before it can hatch. For soft-bodied pests like aphids and spider mites they rely on predatory insects, such as the green lacewing larvae, which they release, and native ladybugs, which they recruit and keep on-site through companion planting, seeding red clover between the rows as an insectary strip that feeds the beetles between aphid meals. Disease is handled by cultural controls first, wide plant spacing and canopy pruning to move air through the crop and cut the humidity that fungal pathogens need. Where that is not enough, they use a foliar spray of potassium bicarbonate to shift the pH of the leaf surface against fungal growth, and microbial slurries that colonize the plant and outcompete pathogens like Botrytis for space, a strategy called competitive exclusion. Nothing on the field is trying to sterilize it; the whole system is built to tip the ecology in the crop’s favor.

Ancient Plant, Young Movement

“Stoicism in the true sense, not ‘broicism’ like it gets done on TikTok, but real stoicism, is about this: if you ignore reality and don’t understand how things work, it’s going to come back to bite you,” Baker says. “So if you farm in a way that you’re just focused on getting the most value per square inch, you’re going to destroy the soil, and then your business is going to collapse, and then the earth is going to collapse. If you understand how the ecosystem works naturally and how you can interact with that, you can still get a valuable product out of it without destroying it. That’s really the core of sustainability.”

“Otherwise you’re left holding a handful of sand.”

Rev Baker, Sunset Lake

Cannabis was a soil-and-sun plant for thousands of years before it was anything else. The windowless warehouse is a recent child of prohibition, and no state-licensed cannabis producer can touch the federal machinery now expanding for everyone else.

“Because of the federal legalization issues, we can’t get federal funding. We’re a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so we’re really limited to private organizations, institutional funding, private investors, and then state funding,” Policzer says of his organization.

The economics are punishing without help, and they are pushing growers out. “We have a decent portion of farms that are surrendering their licenses or deferring their cultivation or shrinking their sizes while they get off-farm jobs, just because the economics are really difficult,” Policzer says. “If you’re looking at $250, $350, $400 a pound, that’s barely break even.”

Certification itself can compound the problem when it prices out the people it should serve. “If the pricing is so high, you exclude these small farmers from participating, and then you create a system where only people who can pay become certified,” Baker warns. “The goal should be to include as many farms as possible.”

The larger fix is the freedom to move product at all. “Farmgate is something that would really revolutionize the cannabis industry from our perspective,” Policzer says, referring to the right of a farm to sell directly to visitors on site, the way a vineyard does.

It would also help make the conversation about quality standards more transparent. “A lot of consumers still think that, because of the regulations around it, cannabis is already organic and that it’s all there, when in fact it’s not,” Policzer says.

The executive order Trump signed in June will pay corn and soybean growers to do a gentler version of what Sunset Lake already does with brewery grain and dairy manure. But the farms doing this work in cannabis are asking for far less than a check. They want to be allowed to sell what they grow, across a state line, or off the back porch, the way a vineyard does. And they want the rest of us to see that a legal cannabis market built on windowless rooms and grid electricity, drawn up under prohibition, is a choice rather than a necessity.

The plant grew in soil under the sun for millennia before it grew under lights. Give the growers the freedom to put it back there, and the most wasteful corner of the industry will shrink on its own. In the long run, the alternative is a handful of sand.

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Headlines around the world tied a captain’s positive marijuana test to a terrifying midair plunge. He wasn’t the one flying. The first officer was at the controls, and Airbus says the aircraft registered pressure losses across all three hydraulic systems and that key flight controls stopped responding for four seconds. Every one of those headlines was technically true. Together, they told a story the investigation hasn’t established.

You have probably seen some version of this story by now. An Air India jet flying from Phuket to Delhi dropped roughly 300 feet in cruise, injured 24 people, and its captain later tested positive for marijuana.

Both of those things are true.

Here is what a great many of those headlines left out. The captain who tested positive was not the pilot flying the airplane when it happened. According to his own account to investigators, first reported by Hindustan Times, he was not in his seat. He was standing behind the first officer, and when the aircraft moved, it threw him to the cockpit floor.

The first officer was the one at the controls.

What Happened at 36,000 Feet

Air India flight AI2379, an Airbus A320neo registered VT-EXO, left Phuket on the morning of August 4 with 137 passengers and eight crew members. At around 9:33 a.m. India time, cruising near 36,160 feet over the Odisha coast, the aircraft lost roughly 300 feet of altitude. Twenty passengers and four cabin crew members were hurt. The plane stayed airborne for about another hour and a half and landed safely in Delhi.

Air India first described the event as turbulence. It later dropped that description and called it a sudden loss of altitude. Indian authorities classified it as a serious incident, and the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau is investigating with technical help from Airbus and France’s BEA.

The aircraft’s Centralised Fault Display System log, reviewed by Hindustan Times, recorded nine warning messages inside a single minute at around 9:32 a.m. Low pressure in the Green, Blue and Yellow hydraulic systems. Low reservoir levels in Yellow and Blue. An autopilot disconnect. An elevator flight-control fault.

An A320 has three independent hydraulic systems for a reason. They are what move the surfaces that point the airplane up, down and sideways. All three registered pressure loss in quick succession. The Airbus analysis, described by The Tribune, puts it down to the second: one system failed just before 9:32:44 a.m., the other two failed at 9:32:45, and all three came back seven seconds later.

Inside the cockpit

The first officer is flying the aircraft. The captain, acting as pilot monitoring, is standing behind the first officer’s seat after a trip to the washroom, discussing the air conditioning system.

9:32:44 a.m. IST. One hydraulic system fails. One second later, the other two go. Nine warnings hit in under a minute. The autopilot disconnects.

The aircraft pitches upward. For roughly four seconds, per Airbus, the elevators and ailerons are unusable.

The first officer applies full nose-down input. Airbus says there is “no direct response” from the flight-control surfaces.

Seven seconds after the first failure, all three systems are back. The aircraft drops roughly 300 feet. The captain is thrown to the cockpit floor.

That sequence comes from Airbus’s own preliminary assessment, written in response to a request from Air India and reviewed by Reuters. The manufacturer has not determined why the hydraulic pressure dropped. It has asked the airline to test the hydraulic systems and the sensors that monitor them, to pull some of those sensors for inspection, and to check the aircraft for structural damage, because the jet took forces beyond its specified limits during the drop. It also wants maintenance records covering the previous month and fuller accounts from both pilots.

Reuters also reported, plainly, that no link has been established between the captain’s test result and the loss of altitude.

Everything the Captain Is Facing

None of the above is a defense of Sudeep Vashistha, and this piece is not going to pretend otherwise.

A post-flight screening returned a non-negative result. A confirmatory test came back positive for cannabis. Investigators questioned him for over an hour. He told them he had been struggling to sleep for some time because of personal circumstances, that he had not slept well during the Phuket layover, and that he was taking medication prescribed by his family doctor for the problem. He also told them he had slept for 30 to 35 minutes during the flight itself.

Both pilots have been pulled from the flying roster pending the outcome of the investigation. Air India began mandatory psychoactive substance screening for its entire pilot workforce on August 13, across the mainline carrier and Air India Express, going further than what the Directorate General of Civil Aviation currently requires.

Whether a captain running on very little sleep, taking medication whose disclosure status remains unclear, and with cannabis metabolites in his system should have been in that cockpit at all is a serious question. Investigators have every reason to ask it. Air India has every reason to answer it.

It is a different question from what made the airplane drop.

Technically True Is Not the Same as True

Look at how the story got packaged. A plane dropped 300 feet. A pilot tested positive for marijuana. Put those two sentences next to each other, in that order, under one headline, and the reader does the rest of the work without being asked.

Nobody had to write the word “caused.” The arrangement said it.

Imagine a car crashes and the owner is drunk. Now imagine he was in the passenger seat and his sober brother was driving. “Car Owner Was Drunk When Vehicle Crashed” is a true sentence. It is also a sentence that leaves a reader believing something the reporter knows is not the case.

There is a second thing worth saying, and it is the point cannabis consumers have been making for decades in every context from job applications to custody hearings. A positive result for cannabis metabolites establishes exposure. It does not establish when, and it does not establish impairment at any particular moment. That is a real limitation of the test and it is well understood.

But that argument is not even necessary here, which is what makes this case unusual. You do not have to litigate toxicology. You only have to ask who was holding the controls.

Maybe Sudeep Vashistha had no business anywhere near that cockpit on August 4. Investigators will decide that, and they should. Maybe his test result will end up mattering to the final report.

But if a positive marijuana test was important enough to put in the headline, who was actually flying the airplane was important enough to mention.

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