In 1968, a few joints I gave away left me facing the possibility of decades in prison. More than half a century later, I walked into a legal dispensary and paid for cannabis at the counter.

My attorney peered at me from behind his imposing oak desk that night in January 1968 and told me what I faced: one felony charge that carried a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and four that could each earn me another 15 years behind bars.

I didn’t know much about the law, but I knew enough math to be terrified. Four times 15 equals 60, plus 10 is 70. I was 19 at the time, so I figured I might get out of prison at age 89.

An Unexpected Visit

Stretched out on my bed in my mother’s house one night about five months earlier, I was pondering options for my first semester at Suffolk County Community College on Long Island, New York, that fall. Should I take the courses that sounded like fun or the ones that my guidance counselor advised would be most helpful in getting me accepted into a four-year school? I was still vacillating when the phone rang.

When I picked up the receiver and said hello, I heard, “Hey, Jeff, it’s Noel!”

I recognized the name and voice of one of the most high-profile kids in my high school class.

“Sorry I’ve kind of been out of touch,” he said. “A lot going on.”

“Been out of touch”? I thought. We’d never really been in touch. We’d had a few quick conversations, and he’d written a couple of witty lines in my yearbook before graduation, but we weren’t friends and had never even seen each other outside of school.

“I’m in the neighborhood with a couple of guys,” Noel said, “and I thought maybe we could stop by and hang out.”

“Sure,” I said. Though surprised to hear from him, I was flattered by the attention of such a popular kid. Besides, I was getting tired of looking through the college course catalog.

Minutes later, Noel showed up at the front door, his friends in tow. He was wearing his standard granny glasses, blue jeans, and Army jacket. As usual, he looked as if he hadn’t shaved in a few days. His companions, whom he introduced as Billy and Larry, wore jeans and T-shirts and, like me, had shoulder-length hair. Larry had a string of beads around his neck, and Billy had a mustache and beard. They appeared to be a few years older than Noel, in their mid-20s, maybe. They smiled at my mother as they passed her on the way to my bedroom.

I asked how they knew one another, and they said they used to work together in an electronics store. Then I asked whether they’d like to hear some music. I put on Pink Floyd’s debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which had only been out for a couple of weeks.

“Wanna get high?” asked Noel. “I’ve got some out-of-sight grass.” He stuck a hand in his pocket but came up empty. “Uh-oh, I guess I left it at home. You got anything, man?”

In fact, I’d tried marijuana for the first time only a few weeks earlier, and a friend had given me a small baggie.

“I do,” I said.

I pulled it out from a hidden corner in a drawer of my desk, closed and locked my door, and lit incense to mask the smell. Noel produced rolling papers and proceeded to make a joint, which we passed around.

Less than an hour later, when the album had ended and we all had a nice buzz, Billy looked at his watch and then at Noel.

“Hey, man, we’d better get going.” Then he turned his eyes to me. “But that was some good weed. Got any you could sell me?”

“I don’t,” I said. “Sorry.”

Billy smiled, and they said goodbye and left.

“Who are they?” asked my mother a few minutes later.

“The guy with the Army jacket is Noel,” I explained. “I went to high school with him. The other two are friends of his.”

“There’s something I don’t like about them,” she said. “I can’t put my finger on it.”

Stopping By the Campus

About a week later, on August 20, I drove over to the campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where I often went to hang out and where I would later attend concerts by artists such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Doors. The university’s archives document the campus’s remarkable concert history during those years.

The Stony Brook campus had opened only five years earlier, in September 1962, with 780 students and was rapidly expanding. It was attracting thousands of long-haired students. Some formed a campus chapter of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society, burned draft cards, or picketed the draft board office in nearby Smithtown. Others passed out leaflets about the Vietnam War at local supermarkets.

The town’s residents weren’t happy about any of this. Until the school opened, Stony Brook had had a Norman Rockwell ambiance, with an anachronistic downtown, two museums, and half a dozen historical sites.

“This was a bigoted, conservative community,” university professor Paul A. Newlin told me for an article I wrote in 1975. “And before the school came here, let’s face it, this was really an idyllic place for the people who had something, who were upper middle class. The university changed all that. You could see the proliferation of shopping centers and that kind of thing. And people saw the university bringing more people into the area that they didn’t want. A lot of them thought the university was responsible for ruining the life they had back in 1955.”

“Many people didn’t want the school here in the first place, and then it started expanding all over,” another area resident told me. “The weird-looking people began going into the shops. I don’t think many people enjoyed that. There was a stigma against college students.”

Newspapers attacked the school for its alleged moral degradation, as did letter writers, one of whom wrote to the Long Island daily Newsday to speak up for “the rights of the student who was not accepted at the state university. He’s over in Vietnam now, and some pot smoker is taking his place.”

At the college on August 20, I took a seat on a couch in the student union and started reading In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, a book by humorist Jean Shepherd. I was a few pages into it when I looked up and saw Noel, Larry, and a guy I didn’t know standing before me.

“Fancy meeting you here!” said Noel as they sat down.

We made small talk, and then Larry’s friend, Joey, asked whether I had any grass I could sell.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m not selling, and I don’t have much, anyway.”

“Just a little?” Joey pleaded. “I’m really low, man.”

I smiled and gave him a couple of joints.

“No charge,” I said. “Have fun.”

I ran into Noel and his friends on four other occasions between then and late October, three times at Stony Brook and once at a fast-food joint called Space Burger. Each time they asked whether I could sell them any grass, and each time, I offered to give them a bit. A couple of times, when they insisted on paying, I accepted a few dollars.

5 A.M. Knock at the Door

I didn’t see them after October, and the holidays came and went. By then, I had smoked grass maybe a dozen times, but I was now mostly preoccupied with adjusting to college and doing my homework.

Then, on the morning of Jan. 17, 1968, when I was on winter break, a loud banging on our front door woke me at 5 a.m.

“Police!” a man shouted. “Open up!”

As I headed for the door in my pajamas, my heart beating fast, my mother came up behind me and said, “Don’t open it! It could be robbers pretending to be police.”

But she peered through a curtain, saw two radio cars and several uniformed cops with guns drawn, and unlocked the door.

“We have a warrant for the arrest of Jeffrey Burger and another warrant to search the residence,” announced one of the men as they poured into the house.

My mother, in a state of shock, offered them coffee, but they waved her away. Several cops ransacked my bedroom while others moved on to search the bedrooms of my 14-year-old brother and 11-year-old sister.

In my brother’s room, a detective pulled drawers from a dresser until he came upon approximately 60 metal Band-Aid boxes, at which point he yelled out to his colleagues, “I found it! I found it!” apparently thinking he’d discovered a drug stash.

The first box he opened contained wooden railway ties for my brother’s model train layout. The second had tiny railroad spikes to fasten the track to a table. Another had a couple of dozen “grain-of-wheat” light bulbs to use in tiny streetlights or inside buildings on the large model train layout behind the detective. After opening most of the Band-Aid boxes and finding nothing but toy train parts, the detective gave up. He came downstairs, told my mother the police were impounding my car as evidence, demanded a key, and drove it away. Then one of his companions said he’d give me five minutes to get dressed.

After I threw on some clothes, the cops cuffed my hands behind my back, led me outside, and drove me to a police station in nearby Hauppauge for booking. On the way, one of them laughed and said, “Time for a haircut.” Another said, “You’re some big dope dealer, aren’t you?”

In Hauppauge, to my astonishment, I saw several of my high school friends, plus people I knew from Stony Brook University and Suffolk County Community College. As I later learned, there were about three dozen of us. Stony Brook University’s archives put the number at 35, of whom 24 were students at the school. All were first offenders aged 16 to 22, and most were charged solely with the sale of marijuana or simply possession.

The majority were Stony Brook students; others, like me, were what a police spokesman called “transients.” In its 1968 coverage of the raid, Newsday quoted the spokesman directly: “They’re like parasites who live with students and hang out on campus to use dope and have fun and games with the girls.”

Virtually all of us had been nabbed with the assistance of Noel, who we later learned had himself been arrested many months earlier and threatened with extensive jail time if he didn’t help undercover agents make drug buys from his classmates and friends.

Two Hundred Cops, With Reporters in Tow

His cooperation had led to what contemporary coverage described as the nation’s largest campus crackdown on drug users up to that point. It had been carried out by 198 police officers, according to the university’s own timeline, who had attended a 3 a.m. briefing and worked from a 107-page plan book that included dossiers on each suspect with descriptions such as “he wears an American flag as a cape” and “he is a member of the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society].” A 47-page appendix contained maps and floor plans of the homes and dorms where the suspects lived. At the invitation of the police, reporters had attended the predawn briefing and accompanied officers on the raid.

Newsday‘s big front-page story, “Drug Raid Hits State U Dorms,” reported that federal and state agencies had participated in the action and that “undercover agents posing as hippies were able to buy dope at the school on their first day there.” Headlines of sidebars included “DA Plans Grand Jury Probe of Stony Brook” and “Raid Climaxed 4-Mo. Probe” but also “A Third Have Tried Pot: Dean” and “Students Say Why Not?” A New York Times article, “Students Decry Stony Brook Raid,” quoted one undergraduate as saying, “I think someday we’ll look back on this raid like our parents looked back on police raids of the Prohibition Era.”

While newspaper subscribers were digesting all these articles, I and several dozen other young people were being booked and fingerprinted in Hauppauge. Then we were ushered onto a police bus for the 45-minute drive east to Riverhead, the county seat, where we were jailed, about a dozen to a cell. Sleep-deprived and rattled, I sat in one of those cells for about four hours. Finally, a guard called my name and led me to a courtroom, where he told me to sit and wait for my name to be called for my arraignment.

I did as I was told and listened as the judge set bail for a man who’d been arrested for shooting a gun at his neighbors. Then I heard, “The State of New York versus Jeffrey Burger.”

A second later, a man seated behind me called out: “Stuart Namm, your honor, representing Mr. Burger.” I turned and saw my mother sitting beside him. She’d made some quick early-morning phone calls to request the attorney’s appearance. She had paid him a $1,500 fee and he arranged for my release on $2,000 bail, which she paid via a bail bondsman by using her house as collateral.

Facing Decades in Prison

I left the courthouse and met with Namm that same evening, which is when he explained that giving marijuana away was legally equivalent to selling it and said I faced up to 70 years in prison.

A few days later, I was summoned to the office of the dean at Suffolk County Community College. He told me that townspeople were up in arms about the drug use exposed by the raid and that it was not in his school’s best interest to be associated with the arrests. Consequently, he said, I could attend classes in the spring only during the evening, when my attendance would be less noticeable, or I could take a leave of absence. I opted for the leave.

Some weeks later, my mother got a call from Namm. He’d negotiated an agreement for the felony charges against me to be dropped in exchange for guilty pleas to misdemeanors for being a “youthful offender” on five dates. (This was possible because I was under 19 at the time of the crimes with which I was being charged.) I went to court shortly thereafter, said “guilty” five times, and received a sentence of three years of probation.

I considered myself lucky, not only because probation sounded much better than the prison term that I’d originally faced but because a few of the arrestees did do time. At least one didn’t even get out before trial because his parents refused to supply bail money.

A probation officer visited me monthly for a while, then confided to me that he was leaving the department to join a commune out west. In the fall, meanwhile, I was allowed back into daytime classes at Suffolk County Community College and, after finishing there, I transferred to the State University of New York at Albany, where I was assigned a new probation officer.

He met with me once, after which I was asked to complete and mail in a monthly questionnaire to attest to my good behavior. It included queries such as “Are you avoiding habits, places, or people which led you into difficulty?” and “Where do you spend your evenings?”

Then, on Nov. 13, 1970, I received a notice that read, “Effective this date…your probation is hereby terminated. Very truly yours, William H. Stalker, Chief Probation Officer.”

Half a Century Later

Flash forward more than half a century to 2023. Cannabis legalization was spreading nationwide, and the legal adult-use market in New Jersey, where I now live, was still relatively new.

At a dinner party at the house I share with my wife, I mentioned to a friend that I sometimes had trouble staying asleep through the night. She said she’d had the same problem and told me that she used cannabis gummies. She suggested trying a 5-milligram gummy marketed as indica and said she typically took half of one at bedtime.

I hadn’t used cannabis for many decades, but I decided to give her suggestion a try. After Googling “marijuana retailer near me,” I found two multistate chains with local stores, Ascend and RISE, and drove to the former. As I entered the parking lot, an attendant approached my vehicle. When I rolled down the window, he asked, “Medical or recreational?”

I said the latter because I didn’t have a medical marijuana ID, and he directed me to the parking area for recreational users. Inside the building’s lobby, I showed my driver’s license to prove I was over 21. I was in my 70s by then. Then I entered the retail facility, a large room with high ceilings.

It looked and felt a lot like an Apple Store. Rock music played, and big video screens displayed messages about ending marijuana prohibitions in states that still had laws on the books. Plexiglass cabinets held attractively displayed assortments of cannabis products, everything from packages of loose marijuana and rolled joints to gummies and paraphernalia. A row of touchscreens offered a convenient way to place orders.

A staffer guided me through the touchscreen process as I selected a package of pomegranate-flavored gummies. Then he pointed me to the checkout line, where several dozen people of all ages, none of whom looked remotely like the hippies of yore, waited to pick up their purchases.

When my turn came, a cashier handed me my candies in an attractive metal tin that had a sticker listing ingredients and a “best by” date. She placed the tin in a bag emblazoned with Ascend’s logo and told me the price was $32.16, including state and local cannabis tax.

“Will that be cash or debit?” she asked.

I smiled at the cashier.

More than half a century earlier, a few joints had put me in handcuffs. My mother had put her house up as collateral for my bail. I had been pushed out of daytime college classes and left wondering whether I might spend decades behind bars.

Now marijuana was a regulated product I could purchase over a counter. The behavior that had once brought police to my mother’s front door at 5 a.m. had not somehow become more innocent with the passage of time. What changed was the machinery surrounding it.

In 1968, there were undercover agents, warrants, nearly 200 police officers, jail cells, felony charges, bail, and probation. In 2023, there were touchscreens, taxes, product labels, a checkout line, and a cashier asking how I wanted to pay.

I felt vindicated by the changed laws, and I wished my mother had lived to see this day.

But the transformation remains incomplete. Laws still vary widely from one jurisdiction to another, and the arrests never stopped. State and local police recorded 200,960 arrests for marijuana possession in 2025 alone, roughly one every three minutes, in a country where legal cannabis stores now operate openly in half the states.

As I walked out of the dispensary with my gummies, I thought about how much suffering decades of marijuana prohibition had caused, and how strange it was that an act once treated as evidence of serious criminality could now be processed like any other retail purchase.

Imagine how much trouble could have been avoided if marijuana buyers over the past half century had been confronted with “Cash or debit?” rather than “Police! Open up!”

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He watched it happen from a window on the 24th floor, then spent the next decade not knowing what it had done to him. Todd Harrison on the morning, the friend he never got that last drink with, and where the weed came in.

It’s been twenty-five years since first responders showed us what true heroes look like.

25 years. That’s a quarter-century since September the 11th, 2001.

A lot has happened since then; multiple misguided wars, financial bubbles and busts, political polarity, a devolution of social mood, the evolution of managed markets, an abundance of digital coins, artificial intelligence, quantum mechanics and of course, tribalized agendas across the societal spectrum and global landscape.

It hasn’t been easy but at times it’s been rewarding despite or perhaps because of the failures, lessons and disappointments that have littered our journey. The complexities of life across two and a half decades, reduced to a snapshot on this day of reflection.

I’ve learned a few things, most notably my capacity to absorb an immense amount of pain and pressure and emerge altered on the other side. There’s a lesson in that; a hard-won lesson that has sustained me since.

“If I could get through that…” I can surely muscle through other disappointments and setbacks.

They say that experiences define our reality and that’s true, but it’s the perception of those experiences that really moves the needle. What we did. How we reacted. How we changed. And how we incorporated that into our life, and the lives of our children.

I’m not going to say I’ve got it figured out because I don’t. I’m entirely more pleasant on the page than in person, I still struggle to manage my moods, I’m still startled by loud noises, I still cringe when I see airplanes fly behind skyscrapers, and my personal circle is particularly tight, almost restrictively so.

But I also believe that hardships, no matter the source or depth, forge character, and that character defines us as people.

Someone once said, “self-growth can only be found outside your comfort zone,” and I suppose there’s truth in that.

I don’t know what the next twenty-five years will bring—I’ll be 81—but if the past is a prologue, there will be two sides to that ride.

There are things we can read in a book and lessons we must learn for ourselves and if the greatest wisdom is born as a function of pain, it’s incumbent upon us to find our sources of strength that will sustain us through the inevitable darkness.

Because there is no good without bad, no highs without lows; no winning without loss.

It was a beautiful, crisp September morning as I looked up from my WSJ to watch the sunrise over the East River. It was a mindful moment, a pause to reflect on the beauty of the world and my place in life.

That was the first thing I remember about 9/11, how sharp the horizon was as dawn illuminated lower Manhattan.

I had hundreds of trading positions and millions of dollars in risk waiting downtown but none of that mattered as my driver navigated the FDR and I soaked in the scene.

I was the president of a $400 million hedge fund and as bearish as we were on the macro landscape, we were positioned very long heading into that fateful day.

As I settled into my turret and downed my second cup of joe, Nokia pre-announced a negative quarter and the stock shot 5% higher.

That was our signal the market was washed out, proof positive traders were caught short and scrambling to cover. We pressed our bet, buying SPY and QQQ hand over fist, twisting the knife into the bears that had overstayed their welcome.

The first boom shook our office walls, causing everyone to stop what they were doing.

“What the hell was that?” One of the analysts yelled “The World Trade Center’s on fire!” as we turned to see flames raging and black smoke billowing into the clear blue sky.

At 40 Fulton Street, we were a few blocks away from the towers and on the 24th floor, we had a bird’s eye view. The mainstream media had yet to pick up the story, which only added to the confusion as we watched it unfold in real-time.

I turned to share the news on TheStreet.com, posting commentary at 8:47 A.M:

“A bomb has exploded in the WTC… may God have mercy on those innocent souls.”

As the initial shock began to fade and the futures swung wildly in 10-20 handle clips, we made some sales; but when reports emerged that a commuter plane had crashed, we scooped that inventory back as our eyes fixated on the scene outside.

I’ve since learned that the reason I couldn’t look away was that my mind had no way to process the information; that, no matter how hard I tried to mentally digest what my eyes were seeing, there was no place to “file” images of human beings holding hands and jumping off the World Trade Center.

It’s an image I can’t shake to this day, bodies falling through a maze of confetti like ants from a tree. It’s a sight that I wish I never saw.

We huddled by our window with our mouths open as somebody repeated “Oh, my God!” behind us.

An airplane approached from the distance and circled behind the second tower, entering it from behind.

In slow motion, the ka-BOOM again shook the foundation of our building as the fireball exploded directly toward us.

I thought, “This is how I’m going to die” as we gathered our staff and rushed them out the door and down the stairwell.

I raced back to my turret before leaving and quickly wrote “We’re evacuating our building…” and sent it to my editors, unsure if they would get it.

The Duck and Cover

Once outside, we instinctively ran toward the Seaport. I remember thinking that worst case, we could dive into the East River and take our chances there.

I overheard someone say that the Pentagon was attacked. The Pentagon? Wasn’t that air space protected? With no cell or internet service, there was no way to access any information; we were cut off from the world.

My mind raced as I thought about friends who worked in the towers and resisted the urge to run to find them. We knew we were under attack, but little else, with all of us packed together like cattle in lower Manhattan.

The crumbling began with a whisper and grew to a growl as the first tower imploded; we scrambled, scattering our team among the thousands of people as the smoke and debris began to billow through the streets.

I don’t know how my partner and I found each other but we somehow connected and ran north along the river. I watched the water to our right as a precaution; it was an option I wanted to keep open as we broke into a sprint.

We flagged down a taxi, which was occupied by a young woman who was hysterical and confused. My partner offered the cab driver $500 to take us away from the chaos while I tried to calm this stranger, who was now hyperventilating.

Between sobs, she told me that her boyfriend worked in an office that was high up in the towers and as I looked out the back window and saw that one was already gone, I was at a loss for words.

How could I ease her pain?

What was happening to our country?

Was this really happening at all?

I eventually found my way to my home on 57th Street navigating the lines that had already formed at convenience stores. People were hoarding bottled water, canned food, flashlights and other necessities.

I had none of that and I didn’t care. I just wanted to find my family, my friends, myself.

I needed to understand what happened to establish a framework of relativity, a place where I could begin to assess and digest what had just happened.

A half-hour after I arrived home, my mother crashed through the door and squeezed me tighter than I’ve ever been held.

Close friends began to gather at my apartment. Five at first, then 10, then 20. It was the other side of disaster, a dose of humanity in a sea of horror, a refuge of love in a maze of confusion.

I found myself at my desk, looking for a semblance of normalcy and a familiar setting. Instinctively, I began to write the column below, which was published that evening on TheStreet.com.

The Day the World Changed

By Todd Harrison

09/11/2001 8:33 p.m. EDT

Numbness. Shock. Anger. Sadness.

As I sit here with family and friends, awaiting calls that may never come, I am drawn to my keyboard — and I’m not quite sure why.

Perhaps it’s an attempt to somehow release the tremendous sadness locked inside me.

Maybe I hope that sharing my grief will stop these images… stop the shaking.

It’s 10 hours after the fact, and I still feel the “boom” that shook our trading room.

I can still see the bodies falling from the first struck tower, one after another, as we gathered by the window in shock and confusion.

I can still hear the screams in my office “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” as the second plane hit … and the image of that fireball rolling toward us will forever be etched in my mind.

I often write that “this too shall pass,” but I will never be the same. Maybe that’s a selfish thought, as thousands of people won’t have the opportunity to put this behind them.

Each time my phone rings and I hear the voice of a friend who I feared was lost, I break into tears.

Every time I get a call from someone who “just wanted to make sure I’m still here,” I’m reminded of how lucky I am to share relationships, memories, and a past.

I know many of you read my column to make money, but do yourself a favor and surround yourself with loved ones this evening.

Some of the wealthiest people I know don’t have two dimes to rub together, and a few of them will never see their children, parents, or friends again.

More than anything else, I wish I’d kept my date to share a drink with my good friend Bill Meehan at Cantor Fitz.

I was tired, opting to grab a good night’s sleep rather than down a couple of apple martinis with my sage friend.

I’m sitting by my phone, brother, waiting for your call.

Drinks are on me.

Picking up the Pieces

Friends who shared similar experiences all dealt with their grief differently.

Some left our business entirely, opting to enjoy a life where bells didn’t bookend days.

Some got married and others divorced as the specter of death made them rethink life.

Some fell into drug / alcohol addictions hoping self-medication would dull their pain.

We each did what we could. We all did what we had to.

My personal path was reflexive and subconscious, guided by motivations I didn’t fully understand at the time. I spent one more year as the President of Cramer, Berkowitz, which lost our offices in the attack, before stepping down and shifting course.

Most people thought I was crazy to relinquish such a high profile, lucrative position and maybe I was. I wanted to do more with my life and create an existence where self-worth wasn’t dictated by P&L. Trading, for all it’s many benefits, can also ring hollow.

When people ask me when I started in cannabis, I tell them that it was after Sept. 11, 2001. That was the catalyst, although I didn’t realize it for almost a decade. I knew that something powerful shifted within me that day but never knew what PTSD was or how it would manifest.

I began to suffer from depression, even if it took some time to see it. I worked non-stop and the few times I took a break, I locked the door, turned off the phone, closed the blinds and climbed into bed.

I didn’t see friends or seek the comfort of family; I just wanted to be alone.

I also smoked a fair amount of weed, which I told Dr. Julie Holland during one of our sessions. I started seeing Julie after 9/11 and unbeknownst to me at the time, she was an expert on cannabis.

So when I mentioned that I felt guilty because of my cannabis consumption, she told me about the science behind the endocannabinoid system.

Thus began my journey down a rabbit hole for the intellectually curious. I’m talking about all of it: the 30K yr history (10K as medicine), how it was weaponized as an immigration tool and the science, which boggles the mind at this early stage.

I’ll say this, too: Julie was right. Despite all that propaganda about how this is your brain on drugs and I learned it from watching you, Dad, cannabis has been used as a remedy for cultures/ societies for as long as there have been cultures/ societies.

But this isn’t about that; just some context amidst the remembrance.

May peace be with you and #NeverForget.

Research Studies

Have a safe journey, please enjoy responsibly.

This article originally appeared in the Cannabis Confidential newsletter. You can subscribe here.

If you’d like to help Mission [Green] change federal cannabis policies, please click here.

CB1 has positions in/ advises some of the companies mentioned and nothing contained herein should be considered advice.

Cover image made with Canva

This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Mugwumps’ Mistake”

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

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

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

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

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

Now hold that against what happened in Arlington this summer.

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

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

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

The Treaty Argument, Fifty-Seven Years Early

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

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

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

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

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

What the Laws Were Actually Doing

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

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

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

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

Rescheduling is movement. It is not freedom.

A Blueprint Nobody Followed

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

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

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

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

The Rest of the Issue

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

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

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

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

Who Made It

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

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

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

The Part That Should Bother You

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

That is not quite the lesson.

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

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

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

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

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

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The state says flower, pre-rolls and vapes were already prohibited. Hemp retailers say years of limited enforcement allowed a market to develop that is now being removed.

Lance Alyas says other hemp retailers in Hawaii have contacted him privately since he sued the state over its hemp rules, but few are willing to discuss the dispute publicly.

“I can’t tell you how many have reached out to me throughout this process expressing shock at my willingness to sue and then take this on in the media as well,” Alyas, owner of Oahu Dispensary and Provisions, told High Times.

He says enforcement visits have contributed to that reluctance. Alyas described Department of Health inspectors as “old marshals and sheriffs from a western movie” who were “brash, abrasive, stern, and domineering.”

Alyas operates four stores on Oahu. He and another hemp retailer, Kyler Falces-Cachola, are suing Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez and Department of Health Director Kenneth Fink in federal court, challenging several parts of the state’s hemp regulatory system.

The lawsuit comes as the Department of Health and Attorney General have begun statewide enforcement against retailers selling noncompliant products, including hemp flower, THCA flower, pre-rolls and vapes.

Alyas says officials visited two of his stores simultaneously, photographed products and explained which items could no longer be sold.

“They gave us a warning about the products that are not able to be sold, so we had to take them off our shelves to make sure we’re going to the court with clean hands,” he said.

No inventory was confiscated, Alyas said, but officials warned about possible seizures, embargoes, fines, enforcement and arrest if prohibited products remained for sale.

The state says nothing new was banned

The Hawaii Department of Health says the current enforcement should not be understood as a new ban.

“The 2025 changes to Hawaiʻi’s hemp law created a registration system for hemp retailers and distributors, it did not newly prohibit hemp flower, pre-rolls, vaping products, or concentrates. Those restrictions predate the registration requirement.”

Hawaii Department of Health, to High Times

Act 14, adopted in 2020, prohibited the sale of hemp leaf or floral material intended to be smoked or inhaled and cannabinoid products intended for aerosolized respiratory delivery. It also established penalties of up to $10,000 for each separate offense.

The 2025 legislation, Act 269, created a registry for manufactured hemp product retailers and distributors and expanded the state’s ability to inspect businesses, seize noncompliant products and pursue violations.

Licensed medical cannabis operators had been pressing for stronger enforcement before Act 269. Noa Botanicals CEO Karlyn Laulusa lobbied House Consumer Protection and Commerce Committee Chair Scot Matayoshi and other lawmakers, arguing that licensed dispensaries were losing business to unregulated hemp retailers. According to Honolulu Civil Beat, Alyas later obtained correspondence between Laulusa and Matayoshi through a public-records request. He characterizes Hawaiʻi’s eight medical cannabis licensees as “the Hateful Eight.”

Noa Botanicals, Aloha Green Apothecary and Cure Oahu all supported the new rules during the legislative process.

The situation reflects a recurring feature of cannabis markets: written law and enforcement do not always move together.

A prohibition that is rarely enforced can coexist with an open market for years, allowing stores, suppliers and consumer demand to develop around it. Increased enforcement can then change the market without the underlying prohibition itself being new. The conduct was tolerated long enough to build businesses around it. Now the prohibition is being enforced.

Ninety percent of the revenue, gone

For Alyas, the change has been substantial.

He says his company lost about 90% of its revenue and roughly 25% of its workforce after removing the affected products. He has kept current employees at the same pay and hours but says the company cannot continue for long under present conditions.

The legal dispute

Alyas and fellow hemp retailer Kyler Falces-Cachola are plaintiffs in Alyas et al. v. Lopez et al., Case No. 1:26-cv-00035-JAO-WRP, before the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaiʻi. The defendants are Hawaiʻi Attorney General Anne E. Lopez and Department of Health Director Kenneth S. Fink, M.D., both sued in their official capacities.

Alyas is now waiting for U.S. District Judge Jill A. Otake to rule on two pending motions: the retailers’ request for a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement while the case proceeds, and the state’s motion to dismiss the amended complaint. After hearing arguments on both on July 2, Otake took them under advisement and said she would issue a written order.

“If we don’t get a judge’s decision soon, we will have to close down probably within two or three weeks,” he said.

DOH acknowledges that businesses may be affected and confirms that there is currently no pathway allowing retailers to continue selling the prohibited categories.

“The Hawaiʻi Department of Health recognizes that removing certain hemp products from sale can have an impact on businesses,” the department told High Times.

That position is consistent with what Andrew Goff, head of DOH’s Office of Medical Cannabis Control and Regulation, said shortly before enforcement began. “You had time to change your inventory or pivot from whatever industry you want to go into,” Goff told Hawaii News Now in June, adding that the state had provided businesses sufficient time to adjust.

Under current DOH rules and guidance, retailers can continue selling compliant CBD products and certain topicals, tinctures, softgels, gummies, tablets, capsules, powders and beverages, subject to product-specific THC limits, testing, packaging and labeling requirements.

“At present, Hawaiʻi law does not provide an alternative pathway for hemp retailers to continue selling prohibited products,” DOH said. “DOH can, however, provide education and technical assistance to help businesses understand the existing law and prepare for future law changes.”

Alyas says those categories cannot sustain his stores.

“Our business is a majority, 90% of sales, of these types of product,” he said, referring to flower, pre-rolls and other products removed from sale. “We cannot sustain selling only these products. That’s currently what we’re doing now, only selling the topical, and soft gels, etc., and this is killing us.”

“People want smokable, not topical, that they can get online.”

Where the demand goes

The enforcement also changes how adults can access cannabis in Hawaii. Adult-use marijuana remains illegal, sitting outside the regulated market, while cannabis is available through the state’s medical dispensary system.

The possibility that some hemp retailers would close was also addressed publicly before enforcement began. State Rep. Scot Matayoshi, chair of the House Consumer Protection and Commerce Committee, also defended the policy in June. “If putting these people out of business means getting these products off the streets … then they should be out of business,” he told Hawaii News Now, referring to products he said were reaching minors and circumventing other state laws.

A 2025 economic analysis commissioned by DOH estimated Hawaii’s total cannabis market across medical, gray and illicit sources at between $16.5 million and $32 million per month. Legal medical dispensaries generated about $5.3 million monthly.

Removing hemp flower and other intoxicating products from retail therefore reduces one channel through which adults outside the medical program have been obtaining cannabis.

Some of that demand could move toward medical dispensaries, while adults who do not qualify for or participate in the medical program have fewer regulated options, and some of that demand could move to the illicit market.

The delayed federal hemp ban and Hawaii

The future of the same products remains under debate at the federal level.

The 2018 Farm Bill defined hemp using a limit of 0.3% delta-9 THC on a dry-weight basis. That created room for products containing considerably more THCA while remaining below the federal delta-9 threshold.

Two flower samples provided by Alyas illustrate the difference. One contained 0.2104% delta-9 THC but 28.329% THCA, producing 25.055% total THC after applying the standard conversion formula. Another contained 0.169% delta-9 THC and 16.804% THCA, producing 14.906% total THC.

Congress changed that framework in Public Law 119-37 in November 2025. The new definition uses total THC, expressly including THCA, and places additional restrictions on finished hemp-derived cannabinoid products. Those provisions were scheduled to take effect November 12, 2026. On September 2, President Trump signed a funding bill that delays most of them until December 11. A carve-out leaves the November 12 date in place for products containing cannabinoids that cannot be naturally produced by the plant, which does not include THCA flower.

The additional month is intended to give Congress more time to consider a longer-term regulatory framework for hemp-derived cannabinoid products. Bills already introduced in Congress propose alternatives ranging from longer implementation delays to new rules for particular hemp products.

Alyas believes naturally occurring THCA flower and pre-rolls could remain part of that market if federal lawmakers eventually choose regulation instead of prohibition.

Hawaii’s rules do not currently make that distinction for smokable hemp. Flower and pre-rolls remain prohibited regardless of their labeled delta-9 THC or THCA content, leaving retailers such as Alyas dependent on the narrower range of manufactured hemp products permitted by the state.

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

By Will Hammann, Maryland Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story was first published by Maryland Matters.

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A drug company spent nearly eight years fighting the DEA to make cannabis medicine the hard way. Now that everyone else is getting an easier path, it’s in court trying to undo the whole thing, a move that could send cannabis back to Schedule I for the entire industry.

MMJ International Holdings spent nearly eight years and millions of dollars fighting the DEA for the right to grow cannabis. It sued the agency. Its CEO called the delays “obstruction in uniform.” Now that the federal government has created a new, easier path for state-licensed cannabis businesses, MMJ is in court challenging the rescheduling.

For nearly a decade, it was the kind of company cannabis reformers could point to as a victim of the DEA. It did everything the federal government said to do. It filed drug applications with the FDA, won an Orphan Drug Designation, stood up a DEA-licensed lab, and asked the agency for permission to grow cannabis for clinical trials. Then it waited. And waited. Its application has been pending since December 2018.

The company was furious about it, loudly and for years. Its CEO, Duane Boise, did not mince words about the agency’s conduct. Now that same company is in federal court trying to reverse the rescheduling of marijuana, the first major federal marijuana reform in half a century. If it wins, cannabis could revert to Schedule I, the punishing 280E tax bill could return, and every state operator that just applied for federal relief could be left holding a voided application.

The company that spent the better part of a decade trying to get through the front door is now asking a court to decide whether everyone else should have to use it, too.

The Hard Road

To be fair to MMJ, and the story does not work unless you are, its grievance is real. The company, through its subsidiaries MMJ BioPharma Cultivation and MMJ BioPharma Labs, has chased FDA approval for cannabinoid medicines aimed at Huntington’s disease and multiple sclerosis since 2015. It holds FDA Investigational New Drug (IND) applications and FDA Orphan Drug Designation, and its lab carries a DEA Schedule I analytical registration. This is the expensive, slow, by-the-book pharmaceutical route the federal government has long told cannabis companies was the only legitimate one.

And the DEA stonewalled it. MMJ BioPharma Cultivation applied in December 2018 to become a federally authorized bulk manufacturer of cannabis for those trials. The DEA opened its pre-registration investigation in 2021 and inspected the facility that October. Then nothing. As Cannabis Business Times reported, MMJ sued the agency in 2024 over the delays, accusing it of obstructing legitimate research and running what the company called a “kangaroo court.” MMJ even challenged the constitutionality of the DEA’s in-house judges, and the Justice Department later conceded that the removal protections shielding those judges violate the separation of powers, though that concession did not resolve MMJ’s own stalled application.

On that record, MMJ had a point. A company that did everything right sat in limbo for years while the agency that demanded the rigor refused to act on it.

The Turn

Then the ground shifted. In April 2026, the Trump administration rescheduled state-licensed medical cannabis to Schedule III and opened an expedited DEA registration path for state operators. While MMJ kept pursuing FDA-approved cannabinoid medicines, state-licensed cannabis businesses were suddenly getting federal relief through a faster route, no INDs required.

So, MMJ joined the other side. It is now one of the petitioners in the consolidated challenge to the rescheduling order before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. As Business of Cannabis reported, MMJ filed alongside an addiction recovery clinic, a victims’ group and two doctors, naming President Trump, the Justice Department, the DEA, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and DEA Administrator Terrance Cole as defendants. The petitioners are not asking for a tweak. They want the court to stay the order and vacate it entirely.

Read what that means in plain terms. A stay freezes the reform. Vacatur erases it. Cannabis would revert to Schedule I, the 280E tax penalty that costs operators an effective rate far above ordinary businesses would come roaring back, and the DEA applications state companies are racing to file would rest on a legal foundation the court had just voided. A win for MMJ could become a major setback for the state-licensed industry.

The Argument, And the Witnesses

MMJ frames this as principle, not spite. Asked directly whether a company that fought to enter the federal system is now trying to block reform for everyone else, Boise rejected the premise. “That question assumes rescheduling is about helping an industry. It isn’t,” he told High Times. “We don’t oppose legitimate medicine, we oppose lowering the scientific standard for what gets called medicine.” The broader industry, he argued, “has spent years bastardizing the word ‘medicine’” by marketing state products as medical without the reproducible formulations, stability testing and clinical trials the FDA pathway demands. “MMJ chose the harder path because patients deserve medicines backed by science, not marketing.”

That distinction sits at the heart of the dispute, and so does the word itself. MMJ uses “medicine” in its pharmaceutical sense, in reference to products that have completed the FDA approval process. Much of the state-licensed cannabis industry, by contrast, has never argued that dispensary flower is equivalent to an FDA-approved pharmaceutical. It argues the two serve different purposes under different regulatory systems. So, the fight is less about whether pharmaceutical standards matter than whether state medical cannabis should have to become a pharmaceutical product before federal law can acknowledge it at all.

The company’s core claim is a regulatory double standard: it argues the government cannot extend Schedule III benefits to state operators who skipped the FDA pathway while companies that spent years and millions following it remain stuck in limbo. Its filings raise constitutional, statutory and treaty objections, including the argument that the rescheduling order creates a “hybrid schedule” Congress never authorized. On the consequences, a stay that would freeze the relief the whole industry is counting on, Boise was unmoved. If the court finds the order unlawful, he said, “any consequences for tax treatment, registrations, or existing business models would be the legal result of correcting an invalid agency action, not the objective of MMJ’s lawsuit. Our case is about restoring the rule of law, not restoring Schedule I for its own sake.”

To carry the message, MMJ has put forward people with federal pedigrees. In a June 17 announcement, it pointed to Jorge Jimenez, a retired DEA supervisory diversion investigator who once served as a section chief at DEA headquarters overseeing registrations, and Dr. Elio Mariani, a pharmaceutical scientist with decades in drug development. Their pitch is that opposition to rescheduling is not all ideology, that some of it comes from people who built the federal drug approval system. Also cited in the broader opposition is Dr. Bertha Madras, the Harvard Medical School professor and longtime cannabis skeptic who served on President Trump’s 2017 opioid commission, a figure with her own decades-long record on drug policy, not a witness MMJ brought forward.

The Ladder Problem

Here is the tension the company cannot fully escape. For years, MMJ argued that the DEA was the villain, that it ignored science, defied the rule of law and kept medicine from sick patients. Now it is asking a federal court whether anyone else should be allowed to enter through a different door. MMJ says it is a matter of scientific standards and equal treatment. Critics see a company trying to keep everyone else out of a system it spent years trying to enter.

You can read MMJ’s move two ways, and the company would insist on the first. One, it is a consistent demand that the government hold everyone to the same scientific standard, even if that means slowing the whole thing down. Two, it is a company that did the hard work, got beaten by the bureaucracy, and now wants to make sure nobody else gets the prize it was denied. The filings are about standards. The effect, if they succeed, is to pull the ladder up behind it.

Boise rejects the second reading outright. “This isn’t about denying anyone relief. It’s about ensuring that everyone who wants to market products as medicine plays by the same scientific rules,” he said. “Equal treatment doesn’t mean lowering the standard, it means applying the same standard to everyone.”

He also pushed back on the idea that simply granting MMJ its long-stalled DEA license would make the lawsuit go away. The application, filed in 2018, is still pending, and resolving it “would certainly address one part of the harm MMJ has experienced,” he said, but “even if MMJ received its DEA registration tomorrow, the legal questions before the Court would remain.”

That distinction matters. By MMJ’s own account, simply receiving its long-delayed registration would not end the dispute. The company is not only asking to enter the federal system itself. It is asking the court to throw out the easier path the rest of the industry just started using.

The stakes are not abstract, and they are close. The petitioners asked the D.C. Circuit to freeze the rescheduling order while the case plays out. That fight runs parallel to a separate DEA hearing on rescheduling that begins June 29, and there is no fixed deadline for either to resolve. If the court grants a stay, the relief the industry has been counting on, the tax break, the registration path, the first real federal thaw in half a century, stalls while the lawyers argue. There is an irony in that. The company that spent years condemning the DEA for making it wait is now asking a court to make everyone else wait, too.

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From his first joint overlooking San Francisco to “happy smoke” in Vietnam, backyard plants in Inglewood, postal routes, Amsterdam coffeeshops and today’s legal dispensaries, Vernell “Papa Snoop” Varnado has lived through nearly every era of modern American cannabis culture.

Vernell Varnado remembers the date he arrived in California.

“August 28, 1966,” he says.

He had left Mississippi for San Francisco, trading the small Southern town where he grew up for a city on the verge of becoming the center of a cultural upheaval. The Human Be-In was still months away, the Summer of Love had not yet been named, and Haight-Ashbury had not fully entered the national imagination. Muhammad Ali was the world heavyweight champion, and the Berlin Wall was five years old.

Varnado did not know much about cannabis at the time. Until some friends picked him up one night.

“They took me across the Golden Gate Bridge,” Varnado recalls.

Someone had cannabis packed inside one of the red-topped matchboxes commonly used to hold flower at the time. A box cost $10. The choices included Acapulco Gold and Panama Red.

“That’s really the best weed I ever had, man, to be honest with you,” he says.

The instruction was simple: take two hits and pass. The weed was strong enough that nobody needed to hold onto the joint.

“You take two hits, and if you’ve got two or three guys in the room, you pass it to the next guy,” Varnado says. “You were blessed, man.”

Varnado is better known to much of the world as “Papa Snoop,” the father of Snoop Dogg. But when he tells the story of his life, celebrity is rarely the organizing principle.

Cannabis is a more consistent thread.

It was there in San Francisco before the Summer of Love. It was waiting in Southeast Asia when Varnado arrived in Vietnam. It followed him through military service, homeownership, postal work, Detroit, Amsterdam, retirement, and the rise of the regulated dispensary economy.

He has watched cannabis move from matchboxes exchanged between friends to branded jars displayed beneath bright retail lights. He has seen it treated as contraband, soldiers’ comfort, backyard agriculture, counterculture, medicine and investment opportunity.

Yet the way Varnado judges cannabis has barely changed. He does not begin with THC percentages, laboratory results or terpene profiles. He remembers how the flower smelled, how little of it people needed, and how it made them feel.

‘Happy Smoke’ in Vietnam

Varnado arrived in Vietnam in June 1968.

The men already stationed there had a name for newly arrived soldiers: FNGs, or “fucking new guys.”

Before long, Varnado and the other newcomers were asking the soldiers preparing to leave where they could find cannabis. They were directed to a local woman he remembers as “Mommy-san.”

The soldiers found her and bought a large bag of cannabis for $15 in colorful South Vietnamese piastres. It was not an insignificant amount of money in 1968, but the bag was large enough to keep the squad smoking for a month.

The soldiers came from different parts of the United States, New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and cities across the South and West. They carried different cultures, accents and habits with them, but many found common ground in cannabis. Far from home, the plant offered a shared ritual and a few hours of laughter.

In Vietnam, Varnado says, cannabis was called “happy smoke.”

“It ended up being so high, I forgot I was in Vietnam. That’s how high it was.”

Vernell “Papa Snoop” Varnado

“Vietnam was a drug war,” he says. “Everybody was getting high.” He says some soldiers from the East Coast favored heroin or cocaine. Men from the South were more likely to drink. Soldiers from the West Coast tended toward cannabis, pills or psychedelics.

“My preference was weed,” he says.

Rolling papers were not always available, so Varnado improvised with what the environment provided. Vietnam had bamboo, and the men turned it into homemade bongs.

“The guys who had been there for a while, they made their own bongs,” Varnado says.

He also remembers soldiers using gas masks to concentrate smoke, a cousin of the shotgun scene Oliver Stone would put on screen years later in Platoon.

“You put the gas mask on and tighten it up,” he says. “The guy blows smoke through the vents. All of a sudden, you can’t see your face. You take it off, and you’re blasted.”

“Once you got wounded, you could smoke all the time,” he says.

Varnado was wounded three times during his single tour.

And among all his memories of Vietnam, one cultivar remains distinct: Cambodian Red.

“Cambodian Red is the best weed I’ve had there,” Varnado says.

None of these memories are expressed in percentages. He does not know, or care, how the flower would have scored on a modern potency label. He remembers the experience.

“Cambodian Red,” he says. “That’s the only thing I miss about Vietnam.”

Coming Home

Varnado returned to the United States in June 1969 and spent roughly six more months stationed at Fort Bliss in Texas, near the Mexican border. On weekends, he and other soldiers crossed into Juárez.

“We smoked a lot of weed in Juárez,” he says. “Back then, there wasn’t any drug testing.”

Cannabis remained part of his life after the military, but the country around him was changing. The counterculture that had been concentrated in places like San Francisco was spreading, and use was becoming more visible even as arrests and enforcement continued.

Varnado did what many veterans and working-class Americans of his generation were expected to do after returning home. He found stable employment, established a household and bought property.

In 1975, he purchased his first home in Inglewood, California, for $32,500.

And then he planted cannabis in the backyard.

His father had run a landscaping business for 48 years, and Varnado grew up learning how to work with plants.

“I’ve got a green thumb,” he says. Back then there were no branded nutrient schedules, climate-control systems or cultivation dashboards. He planted directly in the soil, added fertilizer and made sure the plants got enough California sun.

“My weed was bomb. I didn’t have to buy any weed.”

Vernell “Papa Snoop” Varnado

Today, he no longer grows. “My thing now is just buy enough for me and keep stuff at home,” he says. “I use it for my own personal use.”

The Mailman

Before touring the world with his son, appearing in films or building his own public platform, Vernell Varnado carried mail.

He began working for the United States Postal Service at a time when a government job could change the course of a Black family’s life. Private employers still closed many doors to Black men, and well-paying urban jobs were increasingly moving beyond the neighborhoods where they were permitted or able to live.

The Post Office offered something comparatively rare: hiring through civil-service examinations, dependable wages, benefits and a potential route into the middle class. A stable, documented income could also make it easier to qualify for loans and purchase a home, even as discriminatory lending and housing practices continued to restrict where many Black families could live.

By 1967, the postmaster general was describing the Post Office Department as the country’s leading employer of Black workers in twelve major cities. In Detroit, Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles, Black employees made up 70 to 80 percent of the postal workforce.

“When I first came to the post office, I was making $3.25 an hour,” he says. “Minimum wage was $1.10. In my first apartment, I was paying $110 a month for rent.”

The work gave him a route, a uniform and a place in the daily life of a neighborhood. Once a mail carrier had an established route, Varnado says, everybody knew him.

“Once I left the post office, I was out there by myself,” he says. “All I did was deliver my mail, make sure everybody got their mail on time.”

His route included people who sold cannabis.

“A lot of guys on my route were weed dealers. I would stop by and smoke with them after I finished my route.”

Vernell “Papa Snoop” Varnado

“As long as you delivered your mail and people weren’t calling in saying, ‘The mailman is late,’” he says.

Varnado’s postal memories are not all about cannabis. They include friendships, girlfriends, long walks, and more than a few women who, he says with a laugh, appreciated a mailman with a steady paycheck. Beneath the stories sits a portrait of a form of working life that has become increasingly difficult to imagine.

He could work a stable job, rent an apartment, purchase a house and build a future without extraordinary wealth.

“You could leave one job and go to another job,” he says. “Jobs were all over the place.”

The Inglewood house he bought for $32,500, he says, would now be worth roughly $850,000.

“To me, it doesn’t make sense,” Varnado says.

Years later, he bought a home in Georgia with a basement, three bedrooms, a three-car garage and two acres of land for $186,000. That is what he measures opportunity against.

To him, a legal cannabis industry should create the kind of stable jobs that let ordinary people buy homes, raise families and build a future.

When he visits dispensaries today, he sees young employees working in a business open seven days a week.

“They’re all young people,” he says. “They make decent money because people come to those dispensaries every single day. It’s nonstop.”

Weed Before the Numbers

The cannabis sold in modern dispensaries is measured, tested, named and divided into product categories that would have been unrecognizable when Varnado first crossed the Golden Gate Bridge.

He has visited contemporary grow facilities and seen the lighting systems, the fans, the stacked pots, air filters, HVAC units and schedules used to supply the legal market. And yet he is not particularly impressed by the abundance of names.

“Birthday Cake, orange this, orange that,” he says. “I’ve never seen so many different names for weed in my life.”

The names change. Prices change. Potency levels rise and fall. Varnado returns to a simpler judgment.

“We called it skunk back in the day,” he says. “You know good weed by the way it smells.”

After retiring from the Postal Service in 1996, while traveling with Snoop, he walked into a coffeeshop in Amsterdam’s Red Light District. The menu listed a name he had not seen in decades: Panama Red.

“That’s the first thing I bought,” he says.

“I smoked it, and it was the same thing I smoked back in 1966. I wish they could bring it back.”

Vernell “Papa Snoop” Varnado

Legal Weed

Varnado now lives in Arizona, where adult-use cannabis is legal. He sees legalization as one of the most consequential changes in the plant’s modern history, particularly for older consumers.

“People don’t have to duck and hide and worry about getting pulled over,” he says.

When he visits Arizona dispensaries, he notices how many customers are his age. Some use cannabis for relaxation. Others seek relief from medical conditions. Some have moved away from alcohol.

The common experience, Varnado says, is the ability to enter a store and purchase cannabis without fear.

“One of the best feelings in the world is getting up in the morning and saying, ‘Hey, man, I’m going to buy some weed.’ I can buy it with no problem. I can buy as much as I want with no problem.”

Vernell “Papa Snoop” Varnado

He smokes every day, although not at the pace he attributes to his son.

“I don’t smoke like my son,” Varnado says. “They smoke 24/7, 365.”

The people who once bought matchboxes of imported flower, smoked through the counterculture years and risked arrest under prohibition are now walking into licensed stores as senior citizens.

“We love it, man,” Varnado says. “We’ve got money. We ain’t broke. The weed is cheap, and it’s good.”

Good, however, is not the same as unforgettable. He still wants Panama Red.

Three Generations

Varnado’s grandchildren call him, check on him and keep him connected to the world around them. Several have entered cannabis or cannabis-adjacent businesses of their own. He speaks about them with more pride than he expresses about any personal venture.

“I’ve got the best grandkids in the world,” he says. “I took all of them to school on how to make money and what to do with it.”

He emphasized homeownership, business ownership and long-term financial security. His grandchildren, he says, run their own businesses. “Rather than pushing a clock, they’re all homeowners.”

“I let them know where I came from,” Varnado says. “All my dad’s people had their own businesses in Mississippi during the civil rights movement.”

For Varnado, that history established expectations. His grandchildren were supposed to understand that entrepreneurship, discipline and self-determination were part of the family before celebrity arrived.

“They have young minds,” he says. “I’m constantly getting educated.”

‘That’s His Platform’

Varnado has been beside Snoop for more than three decades, watching him grow from a young Long Beach rapper into a global icon. Yet he rarely appeared in public.

“I’ve been with Snoop through his whole career since ’92,” Varnado says. “People never see me.”

“I’m not the type of father that looks for the spotlight,” he says. “That’s his platform.”

Now, at 76, Varnado is stepping into one of his own. He has appeared in films, including All Eyez on Me, is pursuing additional acting projects, and regularly takes speaking engagements and public events.

“When you become famous, you pay a price for it,” he says. “Everybody wants to be around you.”

If success comes, he already knows what he’ll do.

“If I become famous, I’m going to film my movie, take my ass home, close my doors, go on my back porch, carve me a piece of meat, and smoke some weed.”

The Memory of Good Weed

“Don’t forget to put Panama Red in there,” he says before we hang up.

People his age will recognize the name immediately, he explains. Acapulco Gold. Cambodian Red. Younger readers may not know any of them at all.

That’s the point. Sixty years of cannabis history sit between that matchbox on the far side of the Golden Gate Bridge and the dispensary he walks into on a Tuesday in Arizona. He can buy as much as he wants now, legally, and he still cannot buy the thing he remembers.

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

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

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

This Felt Like an Opportunity Made for Us

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

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

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

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

Roadblock After Roadblock

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

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

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

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

Congratulations, Now Give It Back

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

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

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

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

All of This Just To Sell Some Weed

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

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

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

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

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

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