Policy, Decoded

Vote No On Weed? (May 17, 2026)

🎙️ Powered by THC Group [www.homegrown-group.com], Policy, Decoded steps back from the churn to unpack one policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and regulated markets. This week: the campaign to repeal cannabis legalization in Massachusetts, and how the argument against legal weed quietly changed. Six kids went to a Detroit hospital this spring after getting into edibles at their elementary school. They are fine. They bought nothing. The product came from a house. By November some version of that story will be in Massachusetts mailboxes, because the repeal campaign has figured out something the industry has not. The old argument against legal cannabis was moral, and it lost. The new one leads with emergency rooms, lab fraud, and untested gas-station product. Most of it is true. That is what makes it work. We grant the prohibition case its strongest form and show what actually follows: every failure it names is an argument for governing the market better, not ending it. We follow the 1.55 million dollars behind the signature drive, from a source that will not say who funds it. And we land where the campaign does not want voters to land, on what repeal actually does, which is not return Massachusetts to a time before cannabis but to a time before the rules. 🔗 https://www.homegrown-group.com/blog/vote-no-on-weed [https://www.homegrown-group.com/blog/vote-no-on-weed-massachusetts-repeal-05-17-2026] This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight. Sign up for Policy, Decoded: https://policy-decoded.beehiiv.com/

We Regulate Cannabis Like It Is Uranium (May 10, 2026)

🎙️ Powered by THC Group, Policy, Decoded is the Sunday briefing that steps back from the churn and unpacks one consequential policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and regulated markets. This week, we sit with a complaint a former cannabis commissioner used to make: we regulate cannabis like uranium. She did not mean it as a compliment. The framework is heavy, and the industry has not built what would let it operate inside the framework with credibility intact. On Monday in Illinois, a class action filed in federal court named four of the largest cannabis companies in the country, alleging that they had marketed their products as therapeutically beneficial without adequate evidence. The complaint runs more than three hundred pages on behalf of thirty plaintiffs across thirteen states. Other industries have done the work cannabis has not. The nuclear industry built the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations after Three Mile Island. The alcohol industry built the Portman Group. Cannabis has built trade associations and best-practices documents. Neither clears the threshold the road ahead requires. This episode walks through what such an institution would actually do, the sequencing fight that has to happen first, the working examples from other regulated industries, the failure modes that have brought down voluntary self-regulation in the past, the cost arithmetic, and the calendar that gives the institution-building project a deadline. November 12th. June 29th. Less time than the vapor industry had, and the vapor industry did not survive its window. The room where the institution gets built is currently empty. The question this episode closes on is when somebody is going to call the meeting. 🔗 Read the Editorial: https://www.homegrown-group.com/blog/regulate-cannabis-like-uranium This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight.

A Coalition Without A Caucus (May 3, 2026)

🎙️ Powered by THC Group [www.homegrown-group.com], Policy, Decoded is the Sunday briefing that steps back from the churn and unpacks one consequential policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and regulated markets. This week, we sit with the institutional paradox at the center of federal cannabis policy. In the most polarized era in modern American history, cannabis is one of the few national issues where the country has already formed a stable cross-partisan public majority. Both parties have left it waiting. Eleven days after the April 22nd rescheduling order, the same Republican Party that produced it spent the week trying to defund it on a party-line 8-6 subcommittee vote. The Democratic descheduling caucus has been arguing for two years that rescheduling does not go far enough. Two presidents from two parties have promised reform. Neither has finished the job. Meanwhile the country has gone ahead and built the regulatory infrastructure itself, mostly through ballot initiatives in some of the most conservative electorates in the country. This episode walks through who actually wants reform and why, the asymmetric internal fractures inside both parties, the institutional opposition that goes beyond simple political disagreement, the enforcement record that any serious cannabis reform owes a reckoning to, and the calendar that gives the orphan thesis a deadline. Twenty-four days to the Texas Senate runoff. Six months to the midterms. Twenty-one months to the Iowa caucuses. By then, somebody has to decide whether to claim this issue or keep deferring it for a third presidential cycle in a row. Cannabis is not an orphan. It takes a village. Our electeds are still catching up. 🔗 Read the Editorial: A Coalition Without A Caucus [https://www.homegrown-group.com/blog/coalition-without-caucus] This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight.

Episode 34: Schedule III, Mostly

🎙️ Powered by THC Group, Policy, Decoded is the Sunday briefing that steps back from the churn and unpacks one consequential policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and regulated markets. This week, we look at federal cannabis rescheduling, and where the United States actually sits in a conversation the rest of the world has been having for decades. The April 22nd federal cannabis order arrived after fifty-five years of waiting. The Justice Department reclassified state-licensed medical marijuana to Schedule III, ended Section 280E for medical operators, and routed the broader question of adult-use rescheduling to a public hearing on June 29th. By any honest measure, it was the most consequential American cannabis day in fifty-five years. It was also, for the rest of the world, a Wednesday in April. This episode walks through what the world has been doing while the United States argued. Israel licensed medical cannabis in the early 1990s and isolated THC at the Weizmann Institute in 1964. Canada exported roughly 240 tonnes in 2025, with Germany absorbing 62 percent of Canadian flower exports. Germany scaled from 250,000 medical patients to roughly 900,000 in a year. Uruguay legalized at the federal level in 2013. The United Kingdom runs Europe's second-largest medical cannabis patient market entirely through private clinics. Poland built a 105,000-patient program from imports alone. Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, and four other Caribbean jurisdictions have built legal frameworks that recognize Rastafari sacramental cultivation rather than persecute it. We address the ground floor the international frame does not cover on its own. Federal prohibition was enforced in a country where cannabis use rates ran roughly even across racial lines but arrest rates did not. Those arrests reshaped families, neighborhoods, and downstream access to housing, custody, employment, and immigration status. Schedule III does not erase that record. The win is real. So is the perspective. The work that determines whether we belong in the room the rest of the world has built is the boring, technical, expensive work of quality, standards, and responsibility. None of that arrived in the order. All of it is on us to deliver. 🔗 https://www.homegrown-group.com/blog/schedule3 This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight. Sign up for Policy, Decoded: https://policy-decoded.beehiiv.com/ [https://policy-decoded.beehiiv.com/]

Episode 33: A Grown-Up Holiday For A Half-Grown Industry

🎙️ Powered by THC Group, Policy, Decoded is the Sunday briefing that steps back from the churn and unpacks one consequential policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and regulated markets. This week, we look at what 4/20 has become in 2026, and what the holiday reveals about an industry that is still growing up. 4/20 is now loud enough to reach you whether you are looking for it or not. In your email inbox, in your LinkedIn feed, on a billboard in the states that still allow them, in the sponsored slot at the top of every cannabis newsletter in the country. The content is not uniform, but the frequency is unmistakable. Depending on who you are, it shows up as something to eye-roll at, something to snicker at, or something to quietly take stock of. All three reactions are reasonable. All three are looking at the same moment. This episode walks through what those three reactions reveal about the cannabis industry in 2026. The advocate's eye-roll at a category that was invented to defy prohibition and now sells a $4.20 Snack Sack at Carl's Jr. The operator's snicker at a compliance regime so dense that the promotional calendar is the only real advertising tool the industry has. The former regulator's quiet reflection that the same apparatus the operator snickers at is what made the commercial fabric possible in the first place. Testing exists because the only way to prove a product is not contaminated is to test it. Security cameras exist because law enforcement needed a reason to stand down. Age-gating exists because limiting youth access was the political floor beneath everything else. The rules were the translation of the movement, not its opposite. We also walk through the week's evidence of partial maturity: a Massachusetts commission voting 3-1 to freeze new cultivation licenses days before its own dissolution, without a promulgated rule the industry can plan against. Pure Oasis, the first Black-owned adult-use dispensary in Boston, closing with $400,000 in back taxes and $2.2 million in vendor judgments. Rhode Island's license lottery frozen by a federal judge after applicants invested six figures each on a residency requirement the state should have resolved years earlier. A Virginia governor signing hospital access and parental rights protections on the same day she sent back amendments reinstating life-sentence felonies for cannabis transport. We address the ground floor the three reactions do not cover on their own: the people still in prison, the expungement work still unfinished, the communities policed hardest during prohibition and excluded hardest from licensure. A maturing industry does not get to skip the part where it reckons with the people who paid the price for the market that now exists. 4/20 is the one day a year that question is unavoidable. The cannabis industry in 2026 is already three industries sharing a label, walking three paths at once, holding three reactions in the same person on the same afternoon. Growing up is a verb. Being grown up is future-tense. The industry is in the verb right now. It has not arrived at the state. 🔗 https://www.homegrown-group.com/blog/half-grown [https://www.homegrown-group.com/blog/420-2026] This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight. Sign up for Policy, Decoded: https://policy-decoded.beehiiv.com/