For the past five years, Texas has lived in a strange legal limbo. The 2018 Farm Bill legalized hemp at the federal level, defining it as cannabis with 0.3% or less delta-9 THC by dry weight. Texas, like most states, wrote that definition into its own hemp program. Entrepreneurs took the opening and ran with it, building a multi-billion-dollar industry of delta-8, delta-10, THCA flower, and other hemp-derived cannabinoids that got people high without technically being "marijuana." The Texas Department of State Health Services tried to shut this down by rule in 2021, reclassifying those cannabinoids as Schedule I controlled substances. A court blocked it with an injunction. For five years, the shops stayed open.

According to the latest quarterly NuggMD/Marijuana Moment tracking poll, only 48 percent of marijuana consumers now approve or strongly approve of the Trump administration’s cannabis actions. That’s down from 73 percent last quarter. Thirteen percent disapprove, and a striking 40 percent have simply checked out into “no opinion” territory. When four in ten of your most engaged constituency shrugs at you, that’s not apathy. That’s disillusionment wearing apathy’s coat.

Senate Democrats just refiled a bill that does the thing rescheduling was never designed to do: end federal cannabis prohibition outright. Cory Booker, Chuck Schumer, and Ron Wyden reintroduced the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act on July 16, and while it will almost certainly die in a Republican-controlled House the same way its last two versions did, it's worth sitting with why this bill matters more than the rescheduling process everyone in Washington is currently fixated on.

I'm not a doctor and I'm not diagnosing Sharon Stone. I'm telling you that the simplest explanation on the table — a woman with a serious neurological history had a rough physiological month after stacking two withdrawals back to back — doesn't need a villain. It got one anyway, because "modern weed is poison" is a better headline than "recovery is complicated."

Cannabis cafe culture and consumption lounges are incredibly important for the industry. There are many reasons why. For one, it directly solves a problem relating to access. Lounges already close the gap and take consumption outside residences, public parks, hotel bathrooms, and cars into licensed spaces that are manned by professionals. It also helps that these spaces are properly ventilated.

For all the noise around CBD in the United States, from Farm Bill loopholes to state-by-state confusion, the conversation almost never lands on the thing that actually affects the person buying a bottle: can you trust what is in it? Across the Atlantic, that question has been answered better, and not through louder marketing. It happened through a culture that treats testing and transparency as the baseline rather than a bonus.

Americans have gotten comfortable. Forty-plus states have some form of legal cannabis on the books, dispensaries have started to look like Apple Stores, and an entire generation of consumers has grown up assuming weed is basically fine everywhere now. It is not fine everywhere now. It is barely fine in most of the country, and the second you cross an international border, or even a state line into the wrong state, you are stepping out of a bubble that the rest of the world never agreed to build with you.

wyOver the past few years, however, there has been a significant decline in opioid-related fatalities. There have been important tools that contributed to this: increased naloxone distribution, improved surveillance, and fentanyl test strips. But we aren’t giving enough credit to how cannabis legalization has also played a critical role in reducing opioid-related deaths.

A recent survey of nearly 1,000 employers, reported by the Wall Street Journal and covered by NORML, found that about half no longer screen job applicants for cannabis before hiring. The reason employers gave most often wasn’t a philosophical awakening about bodily autonomy — it was simpler and more honest than that: they wanted a bigger applicant pool. Turns out that when you disqualify a huge swath of otherwise-qualified candidates over something with zero bearing on job performance, you shrink your own hiring options. Who knew.