In 2021, Mexico's Supreme Court declared cannabis prohibition unconstitutional, setting the stage for full legalization. Then Congress proceeded to do absolutely nothing with that ruling for years. The legislative process stalled, got punted, stalled again. So what Mexico ended up with is a patchwork legal reality where your rights exist on paper but the infrastructure to exercise them barely exists at all.

The United States Army just quietly removed one of its longest-standing barriers to enlistment. Recruits with a marijuana-related conviction were previously required to undergo a two-year waiting period, seek a special Pentagon waiver, and pass a drug test. Those restrictions have now been dropped for anyone with a single conviction for possessing marijuana or marijuana-related paraphernalia.

The growth medium is typically agar-based — yes, the same substance used in microbiology to grow bacterial cultures — infused with a formulation derived from something called Murashige and Skoog (MS) salts, a nutrient mixture developed in the 1960s that has become the foundation of plant tissue culture worldwide. To this base, you add specific plant hormones: cytokinins to promote shoot proliferation, auxins to promote rooting, and various other compounds depending on what growth stage you are trying to achieve.

So when the Lancet team searched databases for RCTs treating mental disorders with cannabis as the primary treatment, they found a sparse pool — and then concluded the sparse pool means cannabis doesn't work. That conclusion is circular. You can't run a rigorous trial with plant material you can barely access, in the doses people actually use, then fault the plant for the absence of results.

Nixon was a law-and-order president who weaponized federal agencies against political enemies, escalated a war he inherited, used moral panic to consolidate power, and ran a domestic drug policy built more on politics than pharmacology. He resigned in disgrace. Trump in his second term is operating in an eerily similar register. The rhetoric around drugs — fentanyl, the border, cartel activity — has been maximalist and deliberately inflammatory.

While we’re right about inflammation, we’re looking at the wrong place: the root of the problem actually lies in the fascia, not isolated in the joints or muscles. We then considered treatment options that only addressed these parts of the body, offering localized pain relief. We thought that if we stretch or knead muscles enough, and strengthen them through regular exercise, we can reduce inflammation and pain.

The New York Times flipped on cannabis last month. We covered that. Filed it, sourced it, called it what it was — institutional cowardice dressed as public health journalism. Then this week, the Wall Street Journal ran its version. AOL pushed its version. The same week. Different mastheads, same message.

There are still some major roadblocks we have to overcome, such as the federal rescheduling of cannabis, and further education of physicians and doctors in cannabinoid therapeutics. Right now, many nurses and doctors still don’t feel confident enough to discuss cannabis with patients because of the lack of training. After all, cannabis wasn’t taught in school.

The engine is Gen Z. Analytics firm Headset found that over the past year of national cannabis sales, Gen Z spent 38% of their dollars on vapor pens and only 32.5% on flower — the exact inverse of Millennials, who put 40% into flower and 25.7% into vapes. Gen Z is also the first cannabis-consuming generation to prefer the cart over everything else as their primary format.

What it became is one of the most consequential cannabis-related cases the Supreme Court has ever heard — sitting at the crossroads of the Second Amendment, federal drug law, and the legal fiction that cannabis users are inherently dangerous people who can't be trusted with firearms.