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December 5, 2025
Built by a former cannabis regulator, Policy, Decoded helps operators read the policy terrain before it shifts beneath their feet.
Today’s edition sits inside the gap between what the science already supports and what federal law will admit, then follows the consequences through rescheduling limbo, Trump’s Justice Department signals, and the quiet ways banks, budgets, and supervisors are already pricing that risk. We also track how states lean on cannabis taxes to pave roads, how hemp and CBD rules tighten from Ohio to Portugal, and how both big chains and family shops are adjusting on the ground while Washington waits itself out.
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🧠 Science, schedules, and Trump’s delay
💵 Weed taxes, shaky budgets, and banking nerves
🌍 Hemp bans, global rules, and how real shops adapt
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Start here — the day’s most important development, decoded for impact.
📌 What Happened: Rescheduling has always been a political decision more than a research or scientific one. Thousands of cannabis studies pile up each year, and federal health officials leaned on that record when they recommended moving marijuana to Schedule 3, the Justice Department turned that recommendation into a proposed rule, and DEA has already run the mechanics of its process. The paperwork is complete enough that staff can brief the entire saga in a few sentences, yet the decision still sits squarely with President Trump while the scheduling call remains idle. Over the same period, his Justice Department has been comfortable signaling “rigorous” enforcement on federal land and in gun-adjacent cases, which sends a very different message than the one buried in the rescheduling docket. Regulators in Israel, Canada, and Europe have given cannabis a defined lane in drug, health, and research policy and treat it as one more regulated category in a crowded portfolio. U.S. agencies now borrow from those frameworks whenever they need something more detailed than the Controlled Substances Act, and the rest of the world has stopped waiting for American leadership on this topic.
💡 Why It Matters: “More research” once reflected a real constraint. Today it mostly functions as a way to slow the clock. There are still open questions at the margins, especially around long-term usage patterns and complex clinical populations, yet the core risk-and-benefit story has enough definition for government to act. Schedule 3 would leave state adult-use programs outside the federal framework, and at the same time it would ease tax pressure, reduce friction for serious clinical work, and give cautious banks a cleaner argument that cannabis sits closer to other regulated vices than to hard contraband. Until that move happens, ambiguity does useful work for institutions that prefer discretion, which is why you still cannot get an SBA loan or claim standard business deductions even after a state hands you a license. All the while, the same research that supposedly fails to justify rescheduling already shapes potency debates, labeling fights, youth-use talking points, and early product-liability theories, and every month without a formal decision locks in more state precedent and private practice that any eventual federal framework will inherit rather than rewrite.
🧠 THC Group Take: Rescheduling has always felt inevitable to me because it solves a process problem that Congress has never had the appetite to resolve in public. The live variable now is timing, and inside government the conversation has already shifted from whether cannabis gets a defined federal lane to how quickly that lane appears and how narrow it looks. That shift creates concrete assignments for leadership teams: capital structures need to assume an end to 280E and the arrival of cheaper, more conservative money that will ask harder questions about controls, documentation, and board oversight. Product and marketing choices need to hold up under a future examiner who treats Israeli, Canadian, and EU data as the baseline and reads ambiguity-based models, loose labeling, and jurisdiction shopping as warning signs. This is the moment to bake that future into day-to-day operations, including how you think about cross-border movement and supply. If interstate commerce keeps you up at night on price and margin, imported supply should keep you up longer, because Canadian GMP product is already built for global channels while much of the U.S. market is still catching up. The operators who close that gap now will be in the small group that can compete on quality when federal law finally lets Canadian inventory and domestic clinical trials pull from the same shelf.
Fast-moving headlines, flagged for what matters.
Rep. Dina Titus is pressing the Trump Justice Department to explain why it quietly rescinded a Biden-era memo that told U.S. attorneys to be “extremely cautious” with federal marijuana cases. That 2024 guidance, tied to Biden’s mass pardons, required high-level approval and extra reporting for simple possession matters, including cases touching medical patients and federal gun restrictions, yet it was never publicly touted while he campaigned on cannabis reform. The Trump team canceled the policy in a September notice to U.S. attorneys, a move Wyoming’s top prosecutor then used to justify “rigorous” enforcement on federal lands. Titus now calls the shift a step backward that will deepen unfair prosecutions and wants the underlying memos and enforcement priorities out in the open. The response, or the stonewall, will tell you whether this DOJ treats marijuana on federal property as a low-yield nuisance or a convenient venue for visible, symbolic prosecutions. (Marijuana Moment)
Rep. David Joyce is pressing a slate of federal financial regulators on why so many state-legal marijuana businesses still struggle to secure basic banking and payments access under prohibition. In letters to the heads of the FDIC, OCC, Federal Reserve, NCUA, and FinCEN, he asks for updated data on how many institutions serve cannabis clients, what guidance examiners are giving in the field, and how rescheduling to Schedule III would change their risk calculus. Joyce, a longtime Republican sponsor of banking reform, also wants to know whether agencies see any conflicts between their current posture and the goals of the SAFER Banking Act that Congress keeps sidelining. The agencies’ responses will show whether federal supervisors are quietly comfortable with the status quo or feel pressure to normalize services ahead of any big legislative deal. If they punt, expect the industry to keep living in the same partial-access limbo where a few banks write their own playbook and everyone else watches from the sidewalk. (Marijuana Moment)
House Democrats are reintroducing the RESPECT Resolution, a cannabis equity blueprint that also asks President Trump to push global marijuana reform at the United Nations. Led by Reps. Troy Carter, Ilhan Omar, Lateefah Simon, and Dina Titus, the measure urges states and federal agencies to adopt “best practices” on expungement, capital access, labor standards, and participation by communities harmed by the drug war. The same party held the White House, Senate, and House without moving a legalization or equity package, so this reads more like a values marker than a governing agenda. Sponsors still use it to frame equity as a test for both Trump-era rescheduling and any future federal bill, including how much capital and control reach communities that carried the enforcement burden. Trump is unlikely to treat a nonbinding Democratic resolution as marching orders, but the document gives advocates a clean scorecard to wave in his direction and in front of whoever comes next. (Marijuana Moment)
California pulled in about $177 million in cannabis excise tax revenue from July through September, the highest quarterly haul in four years, after a temporary rate increase from 15% to 19%. Officials say third-quarter excise receipts ran roughly 20% higher than the prior quarter, and attribute the gain squarely to the higher rate rather than a sudden jump in underlying demand. That bump translated into about four extra dollars on a $100 purchase in Sonoma County, where per-person cannabis spending already sits near the top of the state charts. Lawmakers let the higher rate expire on October 1st and locked the excise tax back at 15% through 2028, arguing that the legal market cannot keep absorbing price hikes while the illicit market remains untaxed and open for business. (NorCal Public Media)
Michigan’s latest road-funding pitch leans hard on revenue streams that a new Citizens Research Council analysis says are anything but guaranteed. The report finds that roughly 70% of the “new” money expected for highways and bridges depends on volatile sources, including marijuana excise taxes and other non-core revenues that can swing with markets, voter sentiment, or future budget deals. That kind of dependence turns cannabis dollars into a structural risk instead of a bonus, since slower sales or a policy shift could open a pothole in the transportation budget overnight. It also hands future lawmakers a tempting target when they need to plug gaps somewhere else in the ledger. If Michigan keeps treating sin taxes as permanent pavement, the next revenue dip will show exactly where the asphalt gives way. (MLive)
Ohio’s fight over intoxicating hemp is stuck in a gray zone where a Franklin County injunction keeps sales alive while Gov. Mike DeWine’s office cannot say whether that pause has technically expired. DeWine’s order would have forced retailers to pull intoxicating hemp products in October or face fines, but three companies sued and won a temporary halt that has since been extended while the case moves ahead. The governor insists his action targets synthetic and high-THC hemp products he calls “simply dangerous,” and he leans heavily on the narrative that Issue 2 gave dispensaries a monopoly on cannabis sales. Business owners are now trying to keep stores open while lawmakers draft permanent rules that reconcile hemp, adult-use marijuana, and federal pressure to rein in delta-8 and similar products. Watch how long the courts let this limbo stand, because every extra month of open shelves makes it harder for the state to slam that door shut without paying an economic and political price. (WLWT)
Portugal’s Tax and Customs Authority has banned the sale of any CBD or THC in “tobacco-equivalent” products, shutting down the gray market for hemp cigarettes and CBD flower that shops had been selling as “collectibles.” An official Nov. 26 communication says cannabis-plant extracts and preparations, including CBD and THC, can only be sold under the country’s medicinal cannabis regime, which requires Infarmed marketing authorization. That position creates a zero-tolerance rule for CBD or THC in anything treated like a tobacco good, from pre-rolls to e-liquids, and is meant to harmonize how customs and tax officials handle imports and domestic stock. The decision closes off a path that might have led to a regulated low-THC flower channel similar to Belgium and Austria, where “cannabis-light” fits inside tobacco rules instead of narcotics law. It also pushes Portugal further from emerging EU efforts to normalize industrial hemp and low-THC products, and signals that Infarmed would rather erase gray zones than test a consumer CBD framework in public. (HempToday)
Missouri lawmakers are already stocking the 2026 session calendar with a mix of cannabis and psychedelics bills that range from early release for marijuana convictions to crackdowns on public use and marketing. The package includes bipartisan resentencing measures, new protections for medical marijuana patients in housing and family court, and potency and labeling work aimed at intoxicating cannabinoids. Legislators are also testing how far they can push psilocybin and other psychedelic therapies inside a conservative-leaning state that has already normalized adult-use cannabis. Hemp shows up in the background, with bills that try to pull industrial use, feed, and psychoactive products into a more coherent framework. One constitutional proposal mirrors the “single market” idea that would treat hemp and marijuana under a unified regulatory roof, which pulls the ballot fight into the legislature’s hands. Committee assignments and early hearing dates will show whether Missouri intends to clean up the map or simply add more noise. (Marijuana Moment)
Former Jersey Health Minister Karen Wilson is pushing a 2026–29 budget amendment that would bar medical cannabis cultivators from tapping an agricultural loans fund worth roughly $6.3 million. She argues that growing cannabis for medical use is a high-risk, commercially driven business and that taxpayer-backed capital should prioritize core public and environmental health projects instead. Her report describes cannabis cultivation as closer to pharmaceutical manufacturing than traditional farming and warns that treating it like tomatoes or cut flowers is a convenient political story to justify subsidy. The fight turns on whether Jersey treats cannabis as an export crop that fits inside mainstream farm policy or as a controlled drug industry expected to finance itself. However the Assembly lands, the decision will sketch a hierarchy of which sectors receive cheap public credit and which ones get sent back to private lenders. (MMJDaily; Jersey Evening Post)
A Montana marijuana dispensary, Heirloom Remedies, and its owner have been ordered to pay about $313,000 in damages and penalties after a federal judge found they lied to secure Covid-era disaster loans. The government’s False Claims Act suit said the owner misrepresented eligibility for Economic Injury Disaster Loan funds, then failed to even show up and answer the complaint. A default judgment from the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana locked in the penalty, which includes treble damages and civil fines for the misstatements. The case reminds lenders and investors that federal fraud tools travel easily into this industry, even when the underlying business sits in a legal gray zone. The next round of scrutiny is likely to fall on how many other plant-touching firms leaned on the same programs and paperwork during the pandemic scramble. (Bloomberg Law)
Professor Rosemarie Belle Antoine, Principal of UWI St Augustine and former chair of the CARICOM marijuana commission, is urging Caribbean governments to build cannabis frameworks that correct historic injustices instead of stopping at medical exports. Speaking at Antigua and Barbuda’s first stakeholder dialogue, she pointed to a familiar pattern where multinational pharmaceutical firms trade millions in “legal” medical marijuana while indigenous farmers and pioneers still face arrest. Antoine argued that CARICOM leaders originally moved toward reform on social justice and human rights grounds, and that any serious industry blueprint must foreground those goals instead of treating them as side notes. She also called for regional collaboration, including a cannabis trading bloc and a unified voice in global treaty debates, to push back on UN-era rules that still choke banking and trade. If governments ignore that advice, the Caribbean runs the risk of swapping one plantation model for another, just with cleaner branding and more polished conference decks. (Antigua Observer)
Ascend Wellness CEO Sam Brill spent a day shopping his New Jersey dispensaries in disguise, giving staff no hint that the boss was the “first-time customer” asking awkward product questions. The visit, chronicled by CB1 Capital’s Todd Harrison, reads like a real-world audit of site selection, customer flow, and front-line culture in a chain that now stretches across seven states. Brill’s team passed the vibe check, from thoughtful product suggestions to a loyalty program that treats regulars like high-value cardholders, complete with a “Legends” tier for top customers. The piece doubles as soft branding for Ascend’s Ozone and High Wired lines and as a reminder that operational discipline and staff morale are still the moat for multi-state operators trying to stand out in crowded markets. (High Times)
Treehouse Cannabis owner Seth Marks uses a Rockland County Business Journal “Your Voices” column to describe how Nyack’s first licensed dispensary has become a family-built neighborhood fixture instead of a novelty shop. He leans on details that matter in the trenches, from 800-SKU inventory and early hours to same-day tracked delivery across Rockland, Orange, and Westchester, plus a loyalty program that actually discounts product instead of just collecting emails. Marks frames additional Rockland dispensaries as a sign of normalization rather than threat, arguing that more doors signal healthier zoning, calmer politics, and regulators who finally see cannabis as a legitimate local industry. The essay doubles as a quiet rebuttal to “they’ll never survive” predictions that greeted New York’s rollout and a reminder that the businesses winning share are the ones treating cannabis like any other small-town retail mainstay, with roots in the community and decisions made around the kitchen table, not in a PE deck. (Rockland County Business Journal)
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From the hearing room to the comment section — we’re watching it all.
🎄 Tilray Brands is out with a 2025 cannabis holiday gift guide for Canadian shoppers, pitching THC beverages, chocolates, and pre-rolls as stocking stuffers and party favors. It treats December’s half-billion dollar cannabis sales month as a settled cultural season, which quietly confirms that at least one major LP believes weed has earned a standing invite to the office party table. (Yahoo Finance)
🧑🎓 A Brown University study highlighted on FOX 5 Atlanta says many Gen Z adults now lean toward cannabis instead of alcohol, especially in social settings. Researchers point to perceptions of lower hangover risk, easier next-day functioning, and a belief that weed fits better with mental health and “wellness” language than binge drinking. The shift shows up in survey work and campus culture, where pre-rolls and gummies share space with mocktails instead of vodka shots and beer towers. For anyone planning the next decade of retail, the more important story is how this cohort quietly rewrites what a “normal” night out looks like. (FOX 5 Atlanta)
🤮 “Scromiting” is having a national news week, with ER doctors describing cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome as a real, brutal condition for a subset of heavy, mostly young cannabis users. The same headlines will also become a favorite prop for prohibitionists who skip the part where alcohol, sugar, and ultra-processed food quietly send far more people into long-term illness and early death. (Discover; JAMA Network)