I got into a back-and-forth on X (ugh) yesterday with Dr. Bertha Madras, a researcher, former Bush and Trump appointee, and one of the voices who testified against rescheduling at the DEA hearings. Her argument: because Cultivated is a cannabis industry publication and runs cannabis industry ads, I'm a bought-and-paid-for shill.
Anything I write on The New York Times’ inaccurate cannabis reporting, is in her view compromised by my incentives.
A few quick facts before I get to the point. Cultivated doesn't shill for specific companies and doesn't do paid stock promotion. We're a trade publication the same way American Banker reports on and takes advertising from the financial industry. If I'm captured by industry, that would come as news to the cannabis companies I've reported on aggressively over the years.
And I'm not in this for the money, though I’d like to make more. It's cannabis, after all. I do this because I love it.
But that's not really what I want to talk about. The anti-rescheduling argument, stripped down, rests on a conflation: treating legalization and commercialization as the same thing.
In this view, the American and even Canadian cannabis industries are examples of unfettered capitalism pushing high-potency products on teenagers, and any negative study becomes proof that regulation itself has failed. That's wrong, and it's worth being precise about why.
Legalization is the decision to allow a regulated legal supply chain to exist. Commercialization is a design choice about what that market looks like: how much marketing is allowed, how potent products can be, how many retailers can operate, and who can own them. Those are separate variables. Conflating them lets critics point at billboards in Colorado and treat it as an indictment of legal cannabis as a concept, rather than an indictment of, say, Colorado's specific regulatory choices.
Germany's social club model and Quebec's tightly restricted marketing regime prove that point. Both are legal. Neither looks anything like Colorado or New York. Legalizing and regulating cannabis is not one-size-fits-all, no matter how much the anti-legalization side wants it to be.
Many of the failures critics point to, like the entrenched illicit market or the lack of solvent social equity operators, are failures of how specific systems were written and enforced. They're not endemic to cannabis.
I'll go further and name the obvious rebuttal here: skeptics will say American regulatory systems reliably get captured and watered down, pointing to alcohol, tobacco, and gambling as prior examples, so "just write better rules" is naive. That's a fair challenge.
But the answer isn't that the US needs to import Germany's nonprofit-run supply chain. It's that the specific levers already being used in some states, like potency-based taxation, advertising restrictions, and THC caps, are the tools worth discussing for ameliorating harm, rather than returning to prohibition.
Still, there's no decriminalization without some form of legalization. Supply has to come from somewhere. Cannabis isn't created via immaculate conception. The people proposing decriminalization without legal supply aren't describing anything that has ever existed.
Richard Hahn of the Niskanen Center mentioned on our show this week that his mentor, the late Mark Kleiman, favored a "grudging toleration" approach to cannabis regulation.
I'll be honest that my own instincts are more permissive than Kleiman's. I'm Canadian, but my sympathies lie with American dynamism: the entrepreneurial energy, the competition, the product innovation, the brand tie-ins that commercialization has produced.
Building a real, sustainable cannabis business is hard, and I have a lot of respect for the people doing it. I'd cite Kleiman here not as my own position, but as evidence that thoughtful, credentialed drug policy skeptics land somewhere well short of Madras’ argument for a return to prohibition.
Reasonable people can disagree about how much commercialization is too much. What's not reasonable is treating a return to prohibition, a position gaining ground in right-wing media, as a serious answer to what some see as the harms of legalization.
So here's the offer to the other side: let's meet in the middle. Regulation is good, and it works. We already do it for plenty of industries that aren't cannabis.