We Legalized Weed… So Why Does It Still Feel Broken?

This article originally appeared in High Times’ Spring/Summer 2026 print edition. Get yours here.

Activists, investors, lawyers, growers and a plant scientist on what American cannabis legalization built, what it broke and where it goes from here.

The Megaphoner

Voices at the crossroads speak.

One minute this plant is a scraggly weed growing in the ditch by the side of a road or on the bank of a creek, the next it’s being sold to us as the new agricultural juggernaut—bigger than wheat, sexier than corn, the sixth largest cash crop in the U.S. and more dangerous than heroin (or so they say in Washington).

We know better. We know it’s truly a healing herb that has become a 30-plus-billion-dollar civic religion of smoke and mirrors, with happy shopkeepers peddling their version of joy to the masses.

Well, Americans can’t just love something. We have to mangle it, throttle it, slap warning labels all over it, treat it like toxic nuclear waste, and then regulate the shit out of it. We outlaw it and then beg for more. We can’t even agree on what to call it—cannabis, marijuana, weed, ganja, hemp—it’s the same plant but every name carries a different kind of baggage, a different flavor of paranoia, depending on who’s preaching the sermon and who’s twisting the logic.

We are now trapped in this what-the-fuck moment—reset, rearrange, reinvent, bolt something on here, trim something off there—trying to square the image of the mystical herb that binds communities and inspires art with the federal nightmare that says you’ll lose your house, your job, your kids, and maybe your mind if you light up a joint somewhere in Kansas or Indiana or Kentucky or Iowa.

And yet—of course yet—we keep building shaky empires out of it, throwing up a peace sign as is our nature, flipping it into a middle-digit salute aimed at the naysaying corporate bureaucrats who back us up even while backing out of getting too involved.

Because they know, and we know, there’s plenty of demand out there. There’s plenty of money to be made. If we could just get out of our own way.

The plant itself is half sacred Madonna, half cheap whore, seducing all with that unmistakable scent that smells like money in the making but still scares the straights who sniff out 100-year-old images of immoral acts being undertaken. We are still dealing with the left-behind hubris of greedy hustlers and their half-assed business plans that were the first wave of profiteers who ran in like hyenas converging on a zebra kill, made their money, wrecked the system, and left the true believers wandering around in the desert of broken dreams, mumbling to bankers and investors that all the carnage being created is just “growing pains.”

Sure. Tell that to the dispensary owner drowning in another quarter of red ink while Congress tries to figure out what to do next—reschedule? deschedule? arrest? release?—then leave the issue scorching on their back burner.

Still—still—the truth keeps clawing back through the haze. There is real value in this complicated leaf, something pure that no law, no regulator, no hypocritical preacher or doomsday predictor can destroy. Cannabis is a gift, a botanical sledgehammer designed to crack open the skull of consumers and let the light in.

But here we sit, nearly 30 years into the so-called legalization revolution, still stumbling, still second-guessing, still drawing lines in the sand while muttering shoulda, woulda, coulda.

For many, the brass ring of success in this still-emerging industry is out there, still glinting in the distance, shiny from the greased palms that grabbed it for a microsecond then let it slip away.

There are voices of reason. There are veterans in the fight who still have faith that the reliable machinery of the agriculture industry is moving this plant forward, grinding through gears, pumping brakes like crazy then accelerating at the same time, declaring that it’s just a matter of time before the bumpy road full of our self-created obstacles gets smoothed out.

What follows here is a collection of fact-finding, truth-telling voices of the industry. The front-liners are fighting the good fight. Advocates, thought leaders, industry watchers, investment managers, a grower, and a renowned plant scientist. All are fellow crunchy water ballooners with stretchy brains wrangling a new understanding.

And really… isn’t the goal of all this profound business and societal jostling about trying to make this existence a better trip for everybody?

The Never-Done Advocates

“The reality is, in large measure, we’ve won the hearts and minds of the American public.” — Keith Stroup, founder of the National Organization for the Reform of the Marijuana Laws (NORML)

“We misunderstood when we legalized state by state. We misunderstood that legalizing was not going to immediately replace the illicit market.” — Adam Smith, executive director of Marijuana Policy Project

Keith Stroup has been fighting the good fight against prohibition for over 50 years, facing incarceration and FBI investigations along the way. “When we started NORML in 1970, Gallup had just done their first poll asking the American public how they felt about marijuana legalization,” he said. “Before that, they didn’t even think it was an important enough question to include in their surveys. Only 12% of the American public supported what we were trying to do. Today, there are five or six national surveys that show roughly 70% support full legalization, and 88% support medical use. We’ve convinced the majority of them that prohibition is more harmful than marijuana. We’ve had to demonstrate firsthand that marijuana did not make you crazy, because back in the 70s, that’s what the majority of Americans thought.”

Stroup said that he doesn’t fear the industry backlash that seems to be floating around today, mostly centered around questions about hemp products and new health and wellness studies from legitimate medical sources such as the New England Journal of Medicine.

Then there is the back and forth in Congress about rescheduling or descheduling or whatever is next on their agenda to reduce or end prohibition. All it has done is slow down legalization efforts. But they go on. “There’s only so far the politicians could go,” Stroup said. “You’re always going to have some hot-head anti-marijuana zealot who is going to spew forth hateful stuff, and say we ought to lock these people up. But they don’t represent many people now. Not a single state today has reversed their legalization or even their medical use legalization. Not a single one. We thought it might take 10 or 20 years to get our project (reforming marijuana laws) completed. Now it’s been 55 or 56 years, and we’ve still got a good bit of work to do.”

According to Adam Smith, legalization and the path of industry growth for cannabis has been a long and complicated story. “From the very beginning we have set up legalization in states in reaction to the disconnect between state and federal law,” he said. “That led us down a path of inefficient industries, of industries that can’t survive. Start with California in 1996 when they passed Proposition 215 (the Compassionate Use Act of 1996). Okay, they legalized medical and the state decided they didn’t want to get involved, right? So they left it all to the locals. California then legalizes adult use. But 60% of the state wasn’t allowing medical and so most of those counties didn’t allow adult use. So you have an industry like California, where in 60% of the state you can’t buy legally. The cost to be in the industry is so high and the regulations have been so onerous in many states that it becomes almost impossible to operate.”

The legalization movement got itself bogged down. “To me, the responsibility of the movement changed,” Smith said. “That was a noble cause and vitally important. But once we started doing that, a lot of things started picking up, and the industry kind of swallowed the movement. The industry had a bunch of money come in, and they had all these ideas on how this needs to work. Everybody in the state legislatures were setting up an industry. But the truth is that what we didn’t set up is a rational cannabis policy that is based on public health, public safety and public access. So the industry rose, and then the industry crashed.”

The movement couldn’t raise any money, billionaire donors moved on to psychedelics and other emerging industries, creating a new moment for the cannabis industry, Smith said. “We’re in sort of a quasi post-prohibition world, and there are issues that are not legal versus illegal now.

“The incentives on testing and the incentives on following the regs are really misaligned. The mess that it creates opens the door for pushback. And the pushback is against cannabis as it is, rather than a pushback against what the legal industry should be.”

The Money Movement Watchers

“The industry got ahead of itself. There was irrational exuberance about the future of cannabis, which couldn’t meet any of the predictions.” — Steve Schain, lawyer with Smart Counsel working on financial services, consumer finance litigation, banking law, and cannabis.

“People get excited. They love to see pretty plants. That often leads to an overbuild of capacity. In almost every single market we see just inevitably too much capacity relative to the demand, which leads to price compression, which leads to companies that have high cost structures going out of business. Every state is watching this happen over and over again on repeat. It’s kind of like an exercise of insanity.” — Morgan Paxhia, co-founder and managing partner at Poseidon Investment Management, one of the largest funds in the cannabis industry.

“I think the right point in time to begin discussing the state of cannabis is the end of the first quarter of 2021,” Steve Schain said. “That’s where, technically, everything was at its best, because the pandemic gave an artificial boost to cannabis. That’s when stocks traded the highest.”

There’s been as much of a 97% fall since then, he said, in something like exchange traded funds “and stuff like that.” What caused the drop? “I would say number one, we went from being one industry to several industries,” he said. “We used to call ourselves the industry, even though there’s a difference between startup, between standalones and multi-state operators. Now we’ve seen the entry of hemp-derived intoxicants, like delta 8, delta 6, delta 10, THCV, and that’s splintered because that’s caused internal fighting with each other.”

Take a look at any company right now, Schain prompted. “Look at all this stuff that’s going down the tubes because they borrowed, borrowed, borrowed without a thought about being able to repay the money or having a reserve. People said to me, essentially, when we were doing well, that they wanted to get all their money out in 18 months. And I was like, ‘You’re insane. There’s no way that’s going to happen.’ ‘Yeah, but I know a guy.’ ‘No, you don’t know a guy. You know a liar.’”

Look at New York to get an idea of how the industry is trying to structure itself. “The people running the programs are trying to do all kinds of things that are just ludicrous. It’s a bad idea. When you’re a bank, when you loan money, the bank has underwriting criteria, and the interest rate you’re charged and the decision on where to get money is based on your net worth. It may not be nice, but the bank is concerned about getting its money back and its interest, and that’s the way these things are run.”

In the end, there was the notion that cannabis was going to be this miracle investment because it was going to get people off opioids, Schain explained. “And that just wasn’t true. A lot of unfounded claims were made about CBD and about cannabis, health and wellness stuff, and people wanted to believe it. But it didn’t work. Most people I know who use cannabis as a medication got no benefit from it.”

What have we learned, and what can be fixed? “I believe in Adam Smith’s invisible hand of capitalism, supply meets demand,” he said. This was an economic concept promoted by Smith, suggesting that individuals pursuing their own profit will, through market forces like supply and demand, allocate resources efficiently and promote general welfare without the need for central planning or government intervention. “That’s not what happens here. You have 39 divergent state programs. You had irrational exuberance. You have a failure of any kind of regulatory oversight, coordinating the thing, and you have massive underfunding. So all that stuff coalesced to prevent forward progress.”

“The world ‘serial entrepreneur’ has a very different meaning to me than it did 10 years ago. It means you’re going to try and get in, put in as little money as possible, then get the fuck out. And that’s why the industry isn’t more successful. No one said I’m building this for my grandkids.”

Morgan Paxhia said that investors have been gun-shy since the pandemic. “That really hasn’t changed since then. So it’s been, what, five and a half years of just really little interest in cannabis from an investment perspective.”

There’s been too much debt. “It might look good initially from an underwriting perspective, but they were based on growth and profitability, and a lot of companies have not seen growth and profitability. They’ve seen a degradation and a decline of growth and that’s hurt their profitability. The operating leverage is wonderful when it’s working in your favor, and it’s horrible when it’s working in reverse. It’s really hard for these kind of fixed asset operations to curtail their cost structure.”

He said that it’s one thing to clean up your balance sheet if you have a business worth saving. “But the retail investor doesn’t care about fundamentals. They don’t care about operational efficiency. They don’t care about management, execution, or governance, or things that we care about. They just don’t. They are thinking they’re smart enough to get out before things go against them.

“Our whole discussion with our portfolio companies is to just build patiently, build profitably, and at some point, you will be paid for that,” Paxhia said. “But for now, we advise to just keep doing good work, and the rest will sort itself out.”

The Plant Pathfinders

“What I am seeing is that the state of the market in cannabis is actually becoming more normalized than it ever has been. We’re seeing the proliferation of hemp-derived products now, and we can have the conversation about regulation and testing and things, and the needs for those types of quality control measures that I think are critically important to the industry. But it’s the same plant, right? So I think that what that’s doing is it’s normalizing cannabis as an agricultural crop.” — Scott Vasterling, founder of Humboldt Family Farms

“There was a big rush in the early days to investigate plant diseases. There was a big increase in research. But I would say it’s stabilizing now.” — Zamir Punja, professor of plant biotechnology at Simon Fraser University.

Research by the Journal of the American Heart Association says that there are real health risks with cannabis, such as cardiac issues, etc. And that has caused backlash for some cannabis business owners because that research has been appearing in the mainstream media. “I honestly don’t see that there’s a backlash happening,” Scott Vasterling said. “I know that cannabis isn’t for everybody, the same way that some people might be allergic to certain fruits and vegetables, or to gluten. So I don’t think that there’s a huge health risk with cannabis. I think there are a lot of different ways that people can consume cannabis, but it’s the same way that anything consumed in excess could be challenging.”

He said that, as a result of Proposition 64 of 2016 (the Adult Use of Marijuana Act), a lot of people started growing large outdoor farms specifically for extract. “The public’s mindset in that time frame was, oh, well, if you’re growing outside, it must be for extracts. It’s a low-quality extraction. But no. We’ve been supplying up to 70% of the product across the United States for generations as high-quality craft, sun-grown product. So I think people are becoming more educated and more aware as time goes on about the effects and the energy that this plant has, and what the sun can do to this plant. It just can’t be replicated indoors. Innovation is getting better for indoor but it’s not the same.”

The cannabis industry has followed some of the other traditional emerging industry dynamics—boom, bust, then a sort of settling down. “What we’re seeing is a level of collaboration between good operators and good business people starting to work together to move the industry forward,” Vasterling said. “There’s no longer this hustling mindset and history of hustling one another, because people need to build good, positive relationships in order to move the industry forward. We’re seeing farmers work together, sharing genetics. We’re starting to see businesses that aren’t being competitive with one another. There’s less of that in-fighting we saw with the green rush. We are starting to get some breathing room, in my opinion, and I think we’re really seeing some nice collaborative projects come out of it.”

Plant scientist Zamir Punja said that they are still “going at it full swing” in terms of the hop latent viroid, first recorded in 2019–2020, which has caused significant concern among growers. A study authored by Punja reported that the commonly used practice of the vegetative propagation of cannabis plants from cuttings derived from stock (mother) plants is known to spread a number of pathogens. “Other [cannabis plant pathogens] have sort of plateaued. Viruses have been the biggest ones. But we haven’t seen any new viruses, surprisingly. So maybe we’re in this lull phase, hopefully in terms of diseases, because how many more diseases can you find?”

A lot of the big growers are doing their own plant science now, he said, using in-house facilities. “I’ve helped them do that, because in the long run, it’s way cheaper, and they can get immediate results. The smaller ones are still shopping around as always.”

The Thought Leaders

“I don’t know that I see a backlash. I see the inevitable maturation of a complex, federally illegal industry that finally has years under its belt so we can actually learn what this really looks like.” — Ricardo Baca, two-time TEDx speaker, founder and CEO of Grasslands, a cannabis journalism and public relations company

“I think we’re in an environment where, because of our past successes, many people among the public are no longer as engaged in this issue as they once were. They think that legalization at this point is just sort of a fait accompli, that it’s just going to kind of happen on its own, not understanding that social and political changes really only happen when there’s advocates who are consistently and diligently advocating for those changes.” — Paul Armentano, deputy director of NORML

The industry didn’t have real data on much of anything back when Ricardo Baca first started reporting on the industry in 2013 as the first cannabis columnist for any mainstream publication—in this case, the Denver Post. “In fact, it was painful,” he said. “That was my main call. I said to please get us data.”

Organizations such as the annual “Monitoring the Future” study—conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in partnership with the University of Michigan—finally gave him reliable data on teen use of all substances, including cannabis, supported by additional insights from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the cannabis analytics firm BDSA.

“They were the first to get real, concrete data that was rooted in the industry, that gave us an idea of, okay, what does this first-of-its-kind marketplace actually look like?” What we’re ultimately seeing, he said, is more and more data being collected, which is helping the industry ultimately learn the good and the bad. “We are also seeing some very incomplete early-stage research that’s being taken too seriously right now,” he said. “You have really valuable medical research coming out about the efficacy of cannabis, but also about the risks, which are real, because this plant is not without its risks. But then on the flip side, we have the time and lived experience inside these regulated markets, within a hell of a tumultuous 12 years in Colorado, and nine years in California. We can now say, ‘Okay, how is legalization working?’”

That lived experience, and that data, and “that hardship of this federally illegal industry that’s still being forced into a state-by-state infrastructure” means the industry is struggling. “It is hard, it is not straightforward, and the hits keep on coming, given that the Farm Bill is now pushing cannabis against itself with what Politico called a civil war between cannabis and hemp.”

The backlash that some media outlets perceive as new has already been there, he said, in the form of early-stage research with small sample sizes. “We really need deeper studies. We need larger sample sizes to understand if what is being claimed real or not?”

There are many other conflicts demonstrating an abject failure of the regulatory apparatus, Baca said. “In some situations, it’s not really their fault, because they’ve literally never even thought about regulating this before. Because that is a federal job, and the federal agencies have completely shirked their responsibilities because of federal illegality,” he said. “So we have ended up with a lot of these cluster fucks and quagmires.”

Paul Armentano said that now is the time industry leaders and advocates need to actually double down on activism because the industry is facing pushback. “There’s a vacuum and there are not as many people any longer working as advocates or diligently making that push for advocacy,” he said. “You see a push back. You see our political opponents regroup, they pivot, they are strategizing, and they get a foot in the door.”

That’s happening now for a number of reasons. “There is typically this sense among mainstream federal politicians that even if this is an issue that is of interest to them, it’s not a priority. So you’re always going to hear how can we prioritize cannabis policy reform when we have to deal with inflation, when we have to deal with, well, fill in the blank. There’s always something else that is going to be higher up in the pecking order than marijuana policy reform, and I think that’s been the case when it comes to administrations, and it’s certainly the case when it comes to Congress.”

Mainstream media “seems to now be skewing more toward alarmist headlines”, he said when it comes to cannabis, due in part to the changing dynamics of reporting. “More sensational reporting, and clickbait is more of an issue. So I think there are fewer reporters out there, certainly fewer senior reporters out there. And no one covers cannabis as a beat.”

The Retailer Interpreters

“You look at the land grabs that transpired earlier, from all the big MSOs and these debt loads and things like that. To get basically fiscally sound I think it’s going to be a very transitional period for our industry going forward.” — John Mueller, co-founder and CEO of Greenlight Dispensary, a vertically-integrated, multi-state retail operation, and co-founder and CEO of Acres Cannabis

“You show me a cannabis market that wasn’t bumpy and all fucked up, and I’ll tell you either you weren’t involved, or your knowledge is from looking at it from the outside and from social media, or you’re delusional, or you are out of business. It’s just challenge after challenge.” — Suehiko Ono, partner at Cogent Law firm and founding member of Sun Grown Cannabis Alliance, an alliance of Massachusetts adult use cultivators.

John Mueller is on a roll. He said that by sales volume, Greenlight Dispensary is the largest retail cannabis operation in the country. “In three to five years, a franchise network across the country is one of my main goals,” he said. “We’re out acquiring a lot of troubled assets right now. So we see expanding our footprint to go further across the country, and in limited license states, and then let that play out.”

In Nebraska, Mueller funded a campaign that garnered 71% approval by voters for recreational cannabis. “Everybody believes in medical cannabis,” he said. “But the question is, in the state statutes, are you allowed to put rules and regulations around the attorney general, who now doesn’t want that cannabis in the state. He’s mad at the 71% of the voters that basically approved of it. So the state could come in and basically gut all the work that’s been done there, and then lawsuits go back and forth and all the other stuff.”

In Missouri, Mueller was able to put strict guidelines for cannabis business development into the state’s constitution. “You need a two-thirds majority in the legislature, which is never going to transpire, to basically gut the whole program. The only thing that a bunch of legislators who are anti-cannabis have presented are bills. If you can control it at a constitutional level, and keep the legislators out of it because everybody’s got different agendas, and focus on the will of the people and all the polling, everything else is pretty simple. That’s the key,” he said. “But each state is so different about how they’ve structured their programs, that the process we used in Missouri is hard to duplicate.”

What about the mission for cannabis in Washington? “Everybody would have lost a bet 10 years ago or 20 years ago thinking about where we are today,” he said. “We’ve had some regressions, and depending on what happens in DC, one announcement from Trump could make everybody’s stock double. But it could be another head fake. I think everybody’s a little jaded.”

Suehiko Ono talked about the retail store proximity issue in New York—where regulators misinterpreted the distance requirements of a school from the perimeter of a dispensary, thus voiding a number of dispensary licenses—which was a classic example of regulators not understanding the details of the job. “But you know, that’s like a Tuesday. Something new happens,” Ono said. “That’s what this industry is. There’s 462 stores open in New York right now. There are $6-8 billion worth of retail sales transactions that happen in New York every year. The market is there, and theoretically you have the state helping to wrangle it in and put it within this license framework. But you got so many interests, and so many consultants and experts, and everybody has an opinion,” he said.

What the state requires of retailers is certain licensing requirements created to protect the consumer, Ono said, which is not what’s happening right now. “What they’re doing ultimately is adding on all of these costs that basically no other business in the world has to contend with. When you’re a startup, and you’re trying to model these things, and out of either disbelief or lack of experience or whatever, or you don’t even model it, you don’t put in the financial burdens of such things as 280e and compliance, and things like track and trace systems that some state regulators don’t understand. But even worse, they want to over-regulate. What that does is harm the operators and the consumers because there’s a huge cost.”

There is no common ground or baseline for parties to come together and understand based on some external test, or something that everyone can agree on, about what reality looks like. “Like ‘Here’s some models that help us to really kind of start to get a handle on this. But don’t get too arrogant because we really don’t know what the fuck is going on.’

“It’s just a debacle of state agencies,” he said. “And its differences between the agencies, and who knows what other politics that happen between the agencies, and disagreement on particular interpretation of some pedantic nuance of how they’re going to interpret the law. Because, I guess, they’re still afraid, they’re still about protecting the children. Like the weed is going to jump out and murder them.”