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Built by a former cannabis regulator, Policy, Decoded helps operators read the policy terrain before it shifts beneath their feet.
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Monday through Friday, you get The Briefing: short, high-signal updates on the policy moves that matter. Sunday morning is the long-form take, written to read alongside your coffee and available in podcast form on Spotify.
This week's Sunday editorial lands four days after the most consequential federal cannabis order in fifty-five years. If you work anywhere near this industry, you have already seen the take pile up. In your inbox from your law firm. In your LinkedIn feed from every trade association you have ever joined. On a press release from every operator with a state medical license. In the sponsored slot at the top of this newsletter and twenty others like it.
The order is loud enough to reach you whether you are looking for it or not. Depending on where you read it from, one of two things happens. From inside the United States, the April 22nd rescheduling order is the most consequential federal cannabis action in half a century. From anywhere else, it is a country, late, knocking on the door of a room the rest of the world has been working in for decades. Both readings are correct. The harder question is which reading the United States is going to live with.
This week's editorial walks through what the international cannabis economy already looks like and what kind of participant the United States is about to be in it. We survey the jurisdictions that have been doing this work without us: Israel since the 1990s, Canada since 2018, Germany scaling from 250,000 medical patients to 900,000 in thirteen months, Uruguay since 2013, the UK quietly running Europe's second-largest medical patient market, Poland building a 105,000-patient market entirely from imports, the Netherlands only just now legalizing the supply chain behind its famously legal coffee shops, and the Caribbean countries that built legal frameworks to recognize Rastafari sacramental use rather than persecute it. We name the FDA wall the order did not, and could not, address. We surface the patient who is a chronic-pain patient in one country and a felon in another. And we sit with the domestic reckoning the order does not erase: the enforcement record that disproportionately harmed Black families and neighborhoods for decades, and the work of facing it that no rescheduling order can do for us.
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