withdrawal
Cannabis Testing Is Broken Across State Lines. State-Run Testing Is the Real Fix
State regulators are spending unnecessary time and money trying to police a private testing model that fails to protect consumers. From Maryland’s newly launched CSQ CLEAR audit pilot to New York’s shutdown of Lexachrom Analytical Laboratory, Michigan’s historic license revocations of Viridis Laboratories, and New Jersey putting out RFPs to audit its testing ecosystem, regulators […]
Maryland Targets Cannabis Lab Shopping with Multi-Lab Audit Program
Maryland regulators are taking direct aim at potency manipulation with a new state audit program designed to identify inflated THC numbers and enforce label accuracy. Starting this October, the Maryland Cannabis Administration (MCA) is launching a cross-testing pilot alongside Cannabis Safety & Quality (CSQ), an accredited third-party standards and certification body for the cannabis and […]
What the West Got Wrong About Drug Decriminalization: Lessons From Portugal and Oregon
What the West Got Wrong About Drugs Twenty-five years ago, Portugal did something that should have gotten its health minister laughed out of every G7 summit: it decided that a person caught with a small amount of heroin was a patient, not a criminal. This year marks the quarter-century anniversary of that decision, and the […]
The Corporatization of Psychedelics: FDA Fast-Tracking, Patents, and Pharma
Psychedelics Should Be Protected for the Sake of Humanity There’s a specific moment I want you to sit with. A Wall Street analyst is modeling peak annual sales for a pill made of LSD. Not “acid,” not a sacrament, not the compound that a Swiss chemist accidentally absorbed through his fingertips in 1943 and then […]
What Medical Cannabis Packaging Can Learn from Pharma
Medical cannabis companies developing a new product or redesigning packaging for an existing one may want to look beyond today’s cannabis packaging requirements and consider what could be required in the years ahead. Pharmaceutical packaging has spent decades addressing many of the same issues medical cannabis companies face, including child resistance, tamper evidence, and product […]
21 Million Marijuana Arrests: Why Cannabis Prohibition Failed in America
Twenty-One Million Arrests Later: The Plant Was Never the Problem the Law Said It Was I like round numbers about as much as I like being pulled over, so let me start with one that isn’t round: 21,366,700. That’s how many marijuana arrests American police reported between 1990 and 2025, according to FBI-derived figures compiled […]
What Food-Safety Teams Should Ask a Cannabinoid Supplier
The cannabinoid industry has historically focused heavily on manufacturing compliance: GMPs, certificates of analysis, potency testing, contaminant testing, traceability, and state licensing. Those systems are important, and Floraworks has invested significantly in them. But when you begin evaluating an ingredient through established food and dietary supplement frameworks, you realize that manufacturing compliance is really just […]
Can You Reconstruct Your Cannabis Inventory Without the State System?
For years, California’s licensed cannabis operators have tagged plants, scanned packages, reconciled inventory, and paid for the privilege, on the understanding that Sacramento was using the data to identify diversion. On August 4, an Orange County Superior Court judgment confirmed what many operators complained about for years: the system was not flagging irregularities as the […]
AI Apocalypse or Corporate Psyop? The Real Reason Tech Giants Are Hitting the Brakes
Ganja Theories: The AI Apocalypse, or Just Another Psyop On September 9, a 27-year-old named Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic and told the internet why on his way out the door. He’d spent three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, and his parting message was blunt: neither company is acting responsibly, both are […]
Miami SWAT Raid: Why Two Elderly Men Turned to Drug Trafficking for Retirement
Not Your Average Retirement Plan A SWAT team rolled up on a trailer in Allapattah last week expecting the kind of scene that makes the evening news for the right reasons: body armor, zip ties, a stash worth bragging about. What they got was two Cuban grandfathers, one pushing 90, running a corner operation out […]