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TerrAscend Corp. (TSX: TSND) (OTCQX: TSNDF) reported second-quarter net revenue of $67.1 million, up 2.4% sequentially and 3.3% year-over-year. In a normal industry those would be unremarkable numbers. In this one, on a week where Verano's operating income fell 88% and Green Thumb's fell by half, TerrAscend just posted its sixteenth consecutive quarter of positive operating cash flow and its twelfth consecutive quarter of positive free cash flow.

That streak is the story. Almost nobody else in cannabis can claim it.

Margins going the right direction

Gross margin reached 54.0%, up 120 basis points sequentially and 290 basis points year-over-year, from 51.1%. Gross profit of $36.3 million on revenue that grew 3.3% — that's margin expansion in the same quarter Verano's gross margin fell ten points and Green Thumb's fell five.

Executive Chairman Jason Wild attributed it to sequential revenue growth across New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania, with strength in both retail and wholesale. Notably, TerrAscend isn't leaning on wholesale to paper over retail weakness the way Jushi and Curaleaf are — both channels contributed.

Adjusted EBITDA was $17.7 million, or 26.3% of revenue, up 11% year-over-year from $16.0 million and $17.4 million last quarter. The margin ticked down 20bps sequentially but sits 170bps above the year-ago period.

The one blemish: G&A rose to $22.9 million, or 34.0% of revenue, from 32.8% last quarter and 32.3% a year ago. Overhead is growing faster than the top line — the same disease afflicting the entire cohort, just at a milder grade here.

The GAAP number needs context

Net loss from continuing operations widened to $10.1 million, from $6.8 million last quarter and $6.4 million a year ago. That looks bad next to expanding margins and rising EBITDA.

Note the gap between EBITDA of $14.8 million and adjusted EBITDA of $17.7 million — a $2.9 million spread, wider than last quarter's $0.1 million. Something non-operating landed this period, and the release doesn't itemize it. Given the quarter included a convertible debenture refinancing and a $10 million term loan paydown, financing-related charges are the likely culprit, but that's inference, not disclosure. Worth a question on the call.

Also worth remembering: all Michigan assets are classified as discontinued operations, with historical periods restated. TerrAscend has been shrinking deliberately for a year. These are the numbers from what remains, which is the correct way to read them.

The cash story is genuinely differentiated

Net cash from continuing operations was $7.4 million. Capex was $1.6 million — modest, aimed at cultivation and facility optimization. Free cash flow was $5.7 million.

Management frames those as a 12.5% operating cash flow yield and 9.9% free cash flow yield on a trailing twelve-month basis against market value at June 30. Take that with appropriate salt — yields calculated against a depressed market cap flatter themselves. But the underlying point holds: this business converts revenue to cash, consistently, without heroic assumptions.

Compare across the cohort. Green Thumb generated $29.0 million of operating cash flow on $306.7 million of revenue — a 9.5% conversion. TerrAscend converted 11.0% on a fifth the revenue. Verano converted 14.2%. TerrAscend isn't the best on that metric, but it's the only one that's done it sixteen quarters running.

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Balance sheet work, and it's real work

The quarter's financing activity was the most productive part of the print.

TerrAscend completed an oversubscribed convertible debenture financing for $21.8 million gross, using $11.1 million to retire existing higher-interest senior unsecured convertibles. The result: the vast majority of convertible maturities pushed to 2031, at a lower rate, with the remainder earmarked for M&A.

Separately, the company paid down $10.0 million of term loan principal, bringing year-to-date repayments to $15.5 million.

Cash ended at $42.0 million. That's thin against Green Thumb's $283.6 million — but TerrAscend isn't trying to fund a Virginia build. It refinanced its way out of a 2027-ish maturity wall and retired debt with operating cash. Boring, correct, and increasingly rare.

The uplisting play

Three moves point the same direction. A Special Meeting of Shareholders on August 24 to vote on a share consolidation — a prerequisite for a major US exchange listing. A new CFO, Eric Jackson, with two decades across retail, consumer and manufacturing. And CEO Ziad Ghanem appointed to the Board subsequent to quarter-end.

Wild framed the balance sheet work as preparation for uplisting as regulatory momentum builds. Every operator is saying a version of this — Verano did a 1-for-5 reverse split, Vireo is rolling up, SNDL is restructuring Parallel. The difference is that TerrAscend arrives with clean cash flow rather than a story.

The share count is the obstacle: roughly 383 million basic shares outstanding, comprising 309 million common, 11 million preferred as-converted and 63 million exchangeable, plus 23 million warrants at a $4.18 weighted average strike. Hence the consolidation vote. Note also that during the first half the company repurchased 578,500 shares at a weighted average of $0.67 — against warrants struck at $4.18. That spread tells you everything about where this stock has been.

Retail is performing

The operating detail is better than the revenue growth suggests.

In New Jersey, all three Apothecarium stores rank in the state's top 25, two improving sequentially. In Maryland, Cumberland and Salisbury rank top 10, and TerrAscend improved to the number 4 position at 6.0% market share, helped by the Tyson 2.0 launch plus growth in vapes, prerolls and edibles. In Pennsylvania, five of six Apothecarium stores rank top 15.

And the company signed an option to acquire Aunt Mary's in Flemington, New Jersey — a dispensary generating over $10.0 million in annualized revenue, expected to be immediately accretive on both EBITDA and free cash flow. That would be TerrAscend's fifth New Jersey location.

Buying a single high-performing store with a clear accretion case, funded partly from a refinancing, is a rather different capital allocation philosophy than $48.3 million of buybacks or $208 million of stock-funded roll-up.

The read

TerrAscend is the smallest operator reporting this cycle and the one making the fewest mistakes. Margins up, EBITDA up 11%, sixteen straight quarters of operating cash flow, maturities pushed to 2031, and a disciplined tuck-in acquisition.

The GAAP loss widened and G&A is creeping. But in a week where the large caps grew revenue while destroying operating income, the company that grew 3.3% and expanded margin looks considerably smarter than it did on Monday.

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$CRLBF ( ▲ 9.57% ) Bounce Back Quarter

Cresco Labs (CSE: CL) (OTCQX: CRLBF) posted Q2 revenue of $173 million, up 15% sequentially, with adjusted EBITDA of $40 million — a 20% sequential gain — at a 22.8% margin. Net income was $15 million. In a week defined by operators growing revenue while destroying operating income, that combination stands out.

Margins held up too. Gross profit of $87 million, with adjusted gross margin at 51.6% — better than Curaleaf's 50%, Verano's 46% and Green Thumb's 45%.

SG&A is where the asterisk lives. Reported $63 million, or 36.5% of revenue, versus adjusted SG&A of $55 million, or 32.0%. The $8 million gap is attributed to one-time costs tied to M&A, uplisting preparedness and federal reform. Fair enough — but every operator in the sector is spending on uplisting right now, and at some point recurring preparation stops being non-recurring.

The operational detail is the strongest part. In Pennsylvania, Cresco completed its first full quarter running nine acquired dispensaries and lifted their gross profit dollars 11% before rebranding a single store. In Ohio, new Sunnyside locations rank among the state's highest-performing openings. Kentucky shipped first branded product in June.

Then the awkward line: CFO Sharon Schuler is stepping down, with SVP and Corporate Controller Mark Stortz serving as interim while a search runs. Losing your CFO mid-uplisting-preparation is not ideal timing, however amicably framed.

The balance sheet explains the urgency: $67 million of cash against a $311 million senior secured term loan and a $19 million mortgage, with 506.8 million shares fully converted.

Charlie Bachtell says Cresco is ready. The operations agree. The cap table and the vacant CFO chair are the harder part.

$LEEEF ( ▼ 7.12% ) Hitting Its Stride

LEEF Brands (CSE: LEEF) (OTCQB: LEEEF) posted Q2 net revenue of $7.3 million, down 16% from $8.7 million. Normally that's the headline. Here it's the least interesting number in the release.

Gross profit rose 62% to $2.4 million, with gross margin nearly doubling to 33% from 17% — achieved on lower volumes, during a temporary biomass gap between the 2025 and 2026 Salisbury Canyon Ranch harvests. Net loss narrowed to $1.3 million from $2.9 million; adjusted EBITDA improved to $(0.6) million from $(1.3) million.

CFO Kevin Wilson supplied the number that matters: 33% margin came without the company's own ranch biomass, against roughly 50% in the preceding three quarters when ranch material was running. The vertical integration thesis has a control group now.

Post-quarter, LEEF completed the largest harvest in its history — nearly one million plants — with first distillate testing at approximately 95% THC and 99% total cannabinoids and clearing California's CAT 4 pesticide screens. Sales begin in August.

The footprint is compounding fast. Fourteen acres added this spring bring the ranch to 80 acres, with 21 more this fall plus a contracted 21 acres from a farming partner — a total internal and contracted footprint near 122 acres, up 88% year-over-year, and enough to carry through the 2027 harvest without another gap. The full 180-acre permit, the largest in Santa Barbara County, remains the 2027 target, with capital already spent.

Elsewhere: Himalaya contributed $1.0 million in its first partial quarter, a $5.2 million raise will fund a dedicated drying and curing facility, and LEEF filed DEA registration applications across California and Nevada with Blank Rome's Shane Pennington guiding.

$5.0 million cash, up from $2.2 million, and an $8.7 million working capital surplus — enough to hold the harvest rather than dump it into depressed pricing.

That last part is the whole strategy.

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Top Cannabis Executive Weighs In on Industry's Future | TTB Powered by Flowhub

• Curaleaf beat on revenue and missed on earnings. Boris Jordan joins Shadd Dales to break down Q2: net revenue of $340.1 million (up 10%), gross profit of $169.9 million at a 50% margin, but net income of $12.5 million — $0.05 per share against a $0.17 consensus. Domestic grew 7%, international 26%.

• The market focused on the outlook, not the print. Shares fell 7.36% as investors weighed cautious guidance and cost pressures over the headline growth.

• Boris on what comes next. His read on M&A heading into Q4, whether any of the sector's top five could merge, and what he expects from rescheduling — including IRS tax guidance and how Uncertain Tax Positions ultimately get resolved.

• The lender's view of earnings season. Adam Stettner, CEO of FundCanna, joins special guest host Seth Yakatan to dig into the sector-wide trend: wholesale revenue, same-store sales, and shelf capacity — and what it signals for the back half of 2026.

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Curaleaf's Reset Is Working. Just Not Where The Headline Says.

Curaleaf Holdings (TSX: CURA) (OTCQX: CURLF) posted second-quarter net revenue of $340.1 million, up 10% year-over-year and 5% sequentially. Chairman and CEO Boris Jordan called it a second consecutive quarter of domestic growth and proof that the reset is taking hold in a durable way.

He's right that something is working. It's worth being precise about what.

The domestic story is a wholesale story

Domestic revenue reached $288.7 million, up 7% from $269.7 million. Break it apart and the composition matters more than the total.

Retail revenue grew to $224.4 million from $216.4 million — up 3.7%. Wholesale revenue grew to $64.0 million from $53.2 million — up 20.4%.

Now layer in the footprint. Curaleaf expanded Florida retail to 73 dispensaries during the quarter with openings in Jacksonville Beach and Fernandina Beach, taking the national operated-and-managed count to 174. Two more followed after quarter-end in Edgewater and Boynton Beach, reaching 176.

More doors, 3.7% retail growth. The release doesn't disclose comparable sales — and unlike Green Thumb, which published a -1.1% comp last week, Curaleaf leaves that math to you. Add stores and grow retail by less than four points, and the mature base almost certainly isn't growing.

This is now the sector's signature: wholesale is doing the heavy lifting while retail treads water. Jushi's wholesale grew 68%. Curaleaf's grew 20%. The channel with the receivable risk is the channel with the momentum.

International is the actual standout

International revenue hit $51.4 million, up 26% from $40.9 million — and it grew across every line. Retail $16.4 million (+26%), wholesale $31.9 million (+23%), management fees $3.1 million from $2.0 million. Sequentially, international grew 8.8% against domestic's 4.2%.

For the six months, international revenue reached $98.6 million versus $75.8 million — a 30% gain while domestic managed 4.5%.

Curaleaf backed that with capital: it bought out the remaining 45% of Four20 Pharma, its German subsidiary, taking Curaleaf International to 100% ownership, and appointed Four20 co-founder Torsten Greif to the board alongside Faith Charles of Thompson Hine. Post-quarter, Curaleaf Spain became the first company to receive approval for two cannabis medicines.

That's the same conclusion Tilray reached and SNDL is now chasing with its EU-GMP audit at Atholville: international medical is where the margin lives while domestic markets grind through price compression. Curaleaf just went from partial owner to full owner of its version of it.

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The margin paradox

Here's the line that deserves scrutiny. Gross margin improved 70 basis points to 50%, with gross profit of $169.9 million. Good — that's real operating improvement in a compressing market.

But adjusted EBITDA margin fell 120 basis points to 20.6%, on $70.1 million. For the six months, gross margin declined 80bps to 49% while adjusted EBITDA margin fell 100bps to 20.1%.

Gross margin up, EBITDA margin down means one thing: operating expenses are growing faster than the business. Curaleaf isn't losing the fight at the product level. It's losing it below that line — and the release doesn't itemize where, which is a disclosure gap worth asking about on the call.

Mind the tax timing

Net income from continuing operations was $12.5 million, or $0.05 per share, in the quarter. For the six months: $82.6 million, or $0.32 per share.

Do the subtraction. Roughly $70 million of the first half's net income landed in Q1 — which is where the Schedule III reclassification and the unwinding of 280E showed up on Curaleaf's books.

That matters for how you read this print. Jushi and Green Thumb both booked their tax benefits in Q2, flattering results that were weaker underneath. Curaleaf's already happened. The $12.5 million here is closer to a clean operating quarter — smaller, but less borrowed from an accounting change. Just don't annualize the $0.32.

The balance sheet is the constraint

$107.0 million of cash against $611.5 million of debt, net of discounts and financing fees.

Set that beside Green Thumb's $283.6 million cash against $283.0 million debt and the strategic gap is obvious. Net debt around $504 million against roughly $267 million of annualized adjusted EBITDA is about 1.9x — serviceable, not alarming. But $107 million of cash doesn't leave much room for opportunism in a sector where distressed assets are hitting the market weekly.

Capital allocation reflects that. Curaleaf retired and repurchased 1.01 million shares for $7.4 million in the first half. Meanwhile basic weighted average shares rose to 263.1 million from 252.4 million — an increase of 10.6 million shares, or 4.2% dilution.

Ten million shares issued, one million retired. The buyback is a rounding error, not a capital return program.

Capital expenditures ran $32.9 million across six months on facility upgrades, automation and selective retail expansion. Disciplined, given the cash position.

The forward-looking items

Three worth flagging.

Dark Heart, an ultra-premium flower brand, launched across 11 states. In a market defined by price compression, moving up-market rather than chasing volume is the correct instinct — though "strong consumer reception" is a press release phrase, not a data point.

Curaleaf applied to register all medical cultivation, processing and dispensing locations with the DEA. This is the quiet one. Schedule III brings DEA registration obligations, and getting in the queue early is real positioning, not theater. Very few operators have said this out loud yet.

And CURA options now trade on the Montreal Exchange — a liquidity and institutional-access improvement that costs the company nothing.

The read

The reset is genuine. Two consecutive quarters of domestic growth, gross margin expanding, international compounding at 26%, and a tax benefit already banked rather than pending.

But the growth is wholesale and international, not domestic retail. The EBITDA margin is going the wrong way while gross margin improves. And $107 million of cash against $611.5 million of debt limits what Curaleaf can do with the opportunity Jordan describes.

Built for Growth is the strategy. The balance sheet is the governor.

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$VRNO ( ▲ 4.85% ) Reports Steady Q2

Verano Holdings (Cboe CA: VRNO) (OTCQX: VRNO) reported Q2 revenue of $218 million, up 5% sequentially and 8% year-over-year — a third consecutive quarter of gains, which George Archos rightly flagged.

Then look at what it cost. Gross margin fell to 46% from 56% a year ago — a ten-point collapse, and down again from 48% last quarter. SG&A rose to $92 million, or 42% of revenue. Net the two and income from operations was $3.1 million, against $26.2 million last year and $13.1 million last quarter. That's an 88% year-over-year decline and a 76% sequential one, on revenue that grew both times.

Adjusted EBITDA of $51 million (24%) looks respectable until you set it beside $66 million a year ago. The net loss narrowed to $13 million from $19 million — improvement driven below the operating line, not within it.

The genuine bright spot: operating cash flow of $31 million, nearly triple last year's $11 million, against $12 million of capex. Capex guidance tightened to $40–50 million for the year. Liquidity holds at $85 million cash and $295 million working capital, against $393 million of total debt.

Strategically, Verano is positioning for a US listing — a 1-for-5 reverse split completed, a $20 million buyback authorized ($2 million used), and DEA registration applications filed for state-licensed medical operations. Shares outstanding now 73.2 million.

The footprint keeps growing: 86 Florida dispensaries, 163 nationwide across 13 states, plus Virginia adult-use landing July 1, 2027.

Verano is buying its way to 2027 with an operating engine currently generating 1.4% margins. The cash flow says it can. The gross margin says hurry.

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Verano Holdings Posts Third Straight Quarter of Growth | TTB Presented by Flowhub

• Verano's leadership takes the mic. CEO George Archos and CIO Aaron Miles join Shadd Dales to break down Q2 2026: revenue of $218 million, up 8% year-over-year for a third straight quarter of growth, with gross profit at $100 million (46% of revenue) and adjusted EBITDA of $51 million.

• Verano is positioning for a US listing. The quarter included a $20 million buyback authorization, a 1-for-5 reverse stock split aimed at advancing a U.S. exchange listing, and DEA applications filed to register certain state-licensed medical cannabis operations.

• The Florida build continues. Verano opened its 85th and 86th Florida dispensaries, bringing the national footprint to 163 locations across 13 states.

• Seth Yakatan returns for Aurora. Special guest host Seth Yakatan breaks down Verano's print alongside Aurora Cannabis (NASDAQ: ACB), which posted net revenue of $67.6 million with 17% growth in international medical. Aurora's Safari Flower Company landed a three-year EU-GMP certification, and the company closed the quarter debt-free with $149.1 million in cash and short-term investments.

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Green Thumb Industries (CSE: GTII) (OTCQX: GTBIF) posted second-quarter revenue of $306.7 million, up 4.6% — a respectable number in a sector where most operators are explaining declines. Ben Kovler framed it as real momentum built on a disciplined approach and a solid balance sheet.

The balance sheet part is unarguable. The momentum requires reading one line further down.

The growth is geographic

Retail revenue rose 3.6%. Consumer Packaged Goods gross revenue rose 3.7%. Both driven, by the company's own account, by Minnesota's adult-use launch last September plus continued gains in Connecticut, Florida, Ohio and New Jersey — partially offset by price compression and increased competition.

Then the number that reframes all of it: comparable sales fell 1.1% across a base of 103 stores.

Every dollar of growth came from new markets and new doors. The mature footprint — the stores open at least twelve months, which is most of the business — shrank. That's not a Green Thumb problem specifically; it's the sector's defining condition. But it does mean the growth engine is capex and licensing, not throughput, and that engine costs money to keep running. Two more doors opened after quarter-end: adult-use at RISE Paramus in New Jersey on July 13, and RISE Hanover in Pennsylvania on July 31.

Squeezed from both ends

Gross profit came in at $137.9 million, or 45.0% of revenue — down from $146.3 million and 49.9%. That's nearly five points of gross margin, attributed to price compression and to RYTHM brand licensing fees.

SG&A moved against them at the same time: $117.9 million, or 38.4% of revenue, versus $106.8 million and 36.4%. Anthony Georgiadis is refreshingly direct about why — increased compensation and benefits, a deliberate call to retain and reward staff, and he acknowledges outright that it weighed on EBITDA margins. You can argue with the timing; you can't fault the disclosure.

Net the two and operating income fell to roughly $20.0 million from about $39.5 million — down close to half on revenue that grew. Margin contracted on the cost of goods and on overhead simultaneously, which is the least pleasant combination available.

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The RYTHM line deserves a second look

Reported EBITDA was $53.1 million, or 17.3% of revenue, down sharply from $69.1 million and 23.6%. Normalized EBITDA — the figure in the highlights — was $84.3 million, or 27.5%, described as up from $82.7 million.

The bridge between those two numbers is $15.8 million of licensing fees, $10.6 million of stock-based compensation, and $4.8 million of other adjustments.

Stock comp is a standard exclusion. The licensing fee is not. It's paid to RYTHM, Inc. — the entity Green Thumb sold its incredibles intellectual property and hemp business to in the prior year, and the same Rolling Meadows manufacturer now putting Señorita THC beverages into Lollapalooza and the United Center. The fee appears in both the gross margin explanation and the normalization add-backs, and it has no counterpart in the year-ago quarter.

Treat a recurring brand licensing payment as an operating cost — which is what it is — and normalized EBITDA looks more like $68.5 million, down roughly 17% year-over-year, with margin closer to 22% than 27.5%. The reconciliation is disclosed plainly, so this isn't a gotcha. But "normalized EBITDA up" and "normalized EBITDA down 17%" are both defensible sentences from the same release, and investors should know which one they're holding.

The tax line rescued the print

Income tax expense fell to $12.5 million from $21.6 million, a $9.1 million improvement, attributed directly to the DOJ's final order reclassifying state-legal medical cannabis to Schedule III, effective April 28, ending 280E across portions of the business.

Net income was $4.9 million, or $0.02 per share, against a $0.6 million loss last year.

Without the tax relief, this quarter is a net loss of roughly $4.2 million. Same pattern as Jushi's print last week: rescheduling is showing up below the operating line, it's carrying the headline, and it is a one-time step-change rather than a recurring growth driver. The 2027 comparison will be brutal for anyone who models it as ongoing improvement.

Helping separately: other expense dropped to $4.0 million from $17.1 million, mostly because last year's period absorbed the loss on that incredibles sale.

Capital allocation, and what it costs

The balance sheet remains the company's genuine advantage — $624.3 million of current assets, $283.6 million of cash, and $283.0 million of total debt. Roughly one-to-one. Very few operators in this sector can say that.

What they did with it is more debatable. Green Thumb repurchased 7.9 million Subordinate Voting Shares for $48.3 million at an average of $6.11. Cash flow from operations was $29.0 million — meaning the buyback consumed 167% of operating cash flow and about 2.4x operating income before a dollar of capex on those new stores.

Cumulatively the program has retired 29.5 million shares for $203.4 million at an average of $6.90, with $62.3 million of authority remaining through September 22. At this quarter's average price, that cumulative position sits underwater.

Meanwhile weighted average shares were 221.0 million basic. Had this quarter's repurchase not happened, $4.9 million of net income still rounds to $0.02 per share. Forty-eight million dollars, no EPS movement, $48.3 million less cash heading into a Virginia build.

The 2027 case is the real case

And it's not a weak one. Virginia authorized adult-use sales beginning July 1, 2027, where Green Thumb has operated since 2021 and holds one of five vertically integrated licenses, six RISE dispensaries and a grower-processor facility. Add a conditional license under Texas's Compassionate Use Program, and Kovler notes the two states together represent roughly 12% of the US population.

The hemp read is also correct. Ohio pulled most intoxicating hemp from general retail and routed consumers into licensed dispensaries — an incumbent-protection regime that rewards exactly what Green Thumb has: number one brand share in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland and Minnesota, scale, and shelf space already built.

The read

Best-capitalized operator in the sector, market-leading brands, and two of the strongest 2027 catalysts available. Also negative comps, operating income down by half, a $15.8 million recurring fee doing quiet work in the adjusted numbers, and a quarter that was a loss before the tax change.

Green Thumb is well positioned for 2027. 2026 is the part that has to be funded.

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$SNDL ( ▼ 0.83% ) Lands EU GMP Cert

SNDL Inc. (NASDAQ: SNDL) (CSE: SNDL) announced the successful completion of an EU-GMP audit at its Atholville, New Brunswick cultivation facility, with certification anticipated within 90 days.

The asset is substantial. Atholville runs roughly 380,000 square feet with more than 110,000 square feet of cultivation canopy, currently supporting about 4,500 kilograms per quarter — call it 18 tonnes annually — with stated potential to exceed 30 tonnes with targeted investment. That's a two-thirds capacity increase available, but only if the capital shows up behind it.

CEO Zach George called it another example of disciplined execution and singled out Tim Main and Rebecca Knight alongside the New Brunswick team. Nice to see named credit in a press release rather than the usual anonymous gratitude.

Now the part worth understanding. Last week's Q2 showed Cannabis Operations gross margin collapsing to 1.8% from 25.8%, on revenue down 10.1% — the ugliest line in the print, attributed to Jeeter ramp-up costs. Domestic Canadian cannabis is, at present, barely a gross-margin business at all.

International medical is a different animal. It sells into regulated pharmaceutical channels at pharmaceutical pricing, and EU-GMP is the gate. SNDL's international sales were C$5.0 million in the quarter, up from C$3.8 million — small, but the fastest-growing thing in the segment. Tilray's international medical business, for reference, grew 34% last fiscal year and is the healthiest part of that company.

So the read is straightforward: SNDL just qualified its largest, lowest-cost cultivation asset for the only cannabis channel currently generating real margin, at precisely the moment its domestic channel stopped generating any.

Certification is still 90 days out, and export contracts are a separate exercise entirely. But this is the right fix for the segment that broke.

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Cannabis Earnings Season Is Here -- Here's What To Watch | TTB Presented by Flowhub

• IIPR (NASDAQ: IIPR) grew everywhere except its core business. Net income jumped 62% to $40.7 million while rental revenue rose just 0.7% — the bulk of the gain came from a $270 million investment in IQHQ, a life sciences developer outside cannabis. Meanwhile defaulted tenant payments from PharmaCann and 4Front are falling sharply, and IIP applied security deposits toward rent owed this quarter.

• High Tide (NASDAQ: HITI) pre-announced a record quarter. Preliminary Q3 2026 guidance calls for record revenue, gross profit and adjusted EBITDA, with management noting the low end of the range beats every current analyst estimate.

• Green Thumb reports live on the broadcast — and the brand data cuts both ways. Branded sell-through is up 8.8% year over year with own-brand penetration on GTI shelves reaching 60.4%, but retail share fell in 12 of 13 states, including a swing of more than 1,000 basis points in Minnesota.

• The RYTHM licensing structure is drawing scrutiny. Shadd Dales and guest host Seth Yakatan dig into the arrangement behind GTI's flagship brand — one that recently prompted a sell-side analyst to lower EBITDA estimates.

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Innovative Industrial Properties, Inc. (NYSE: IIPR) reported a quarter in which net income attributable to common stockholders jumped 62% to $40.7 million, or $1.36 per share — and almost none of that came from being a cannabis REIT.

Total revenues were $63.3 million, up 0.7% from $62.9 million a year ago. That's the number to sit with. New leases and contractual rent escalations were, in the company's own accounting, substantially offset by property sales, tenant defaults and lease terminations. The core rental business is treading water.

What moved the needle was everything else. Interest and other income rose $9.2 million to $10.8 million, driven primarily by $8.5 million of interest and dividend income from the IQHQ investment plus interest on the seller-financed note from the Perth, New York sale. AFFO reached $53.0 million, or $1.83 per share, up from $1.71. Normalized FFO hit $1.70 per share against $1.60.

Strip out IQHQ and the story is considerably less exciting.

The IQHQ pivot, now fully funded

As of June 30, IIP has fully funded $270.0 million into IQHQ, Inc. — a $100.0 million revolving credit facility and $170.0 million of Series G preferred equity, with $120.0 million of that preferred funded during the quarter alone.

IQHQ is a life sciences real estate developer. It is not a cannabis company. Which makes this the largest capital deployment in IIP's recent history, directed entirely outside the sector the company was built to serve.

Executive Chairman Alan Gold framed the quarter around execution across multiple fronts, substantial liquidity and conservative leverage. All accurate. But read the segment math and the strategic message is plainer: with cannabis tenants defaulting and cannabis rents flat, IIP is deploying capital where it can actually underwrite the credit.

The tenant problem, quantified

This is where the release earns points for transparency.

Payments from defaulted tenants have been declining sharply. PharmaCann contributed $3.2 million in Q1 ($0.11/share), then $1.2 million in Q2 ($0.04/share), and just $81,000 quarter-to-date in Q3. 4Front paid $225,000, then $675,000, then $400,000. Total defaulted-tenant payments fell from $3.5 million in Q1 to $1.9 million in Q2 to $481,000 so far in Q3.

That's roughly $0.11 per share of quarterly earnings support evaporating over two quarters. Whatever Q3 looks like, it won't have this cushion.

The underlying resolutions are progressing, at least. IIP has settled all pending litigation with PharmaCann, securing monetary judgments across the New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania leases. Ohio courts released $0.6 million and Pennsylvania $0.3 million of previously escrowed rent. PharmaCann surrendered the Ohio premises in April, and IIP immediately re-leased the 58,000 square foot building to Curaleaf — a quick turn on a distressed asset, and the best operational news in the release.

New York and Pennsylvania are murkier. PharmaCann remains in possession past the surrender dates with IIP's consent, cooperating on license transfers to new tenants. Translation: the licenses are the asset, and moving them takes time.

On 4Front, IIP has tentative arrangements with prospective new tenants for all four assets — a 250,000 sq ft Illinois property, 114,000 sq ft in Washington, and two Massachusetts assets totaling 124,000 sq ft. Each remains subject to licensing transfer approvals and won't take effect until receivership proceedings conclude, anticipated by year-end 2026 or early 2027.

Also worth flagging: IIP applied $1.2 million of security deposits toward rent owed by Battle Green and The Cannabist Company this quarter, against just $18,000 in the prior-year period. Security deposits are a finite resource. Burning them to cover rent is a leading indicator, not a solution.

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The balance sheet did real work

Whatever you think of the strategy, the capital markets execution was genuinely impressive.

IIP fully repaid $291 million of 5.50% Unsecured Senior Notes due 2026 and replaced them with an upsized $402.5 million private offering of 6.0% exchangeable senior notes due 2029. It also layered on a stack of secured term loans — $20.0 million at 9.0%, $56.5 million at SOFR+500, four loans totaling $44.9 million at 6.67%, a $7.3 million loan at 7.50%, and a $20.0 million 10.0% loan already repaid in full.

Those rates deserve a second look. 9.0% and SOFR+500 is not investment-grade pricing. IIP is demonstrating access to capital, which matters — but it's paying for the privilege.

Meanwhile the company was busy on both sides of its own stock: issuing 680,842 common shares for $34.8 million and 948,034 preferred shares for $20.9 million through ATM programs, while repurchasing 1,468,542 common shares for $89.0 million at roughly $60.58 — $80.5 million of it funded directly from the exchangeable notes. Issuing equity at the ATM while buying back stock with borrowed money is a defensible arbitrage if you believe the shares are cheap. It is also, unavoidably, a company financing buybacks with 6% debt.

The leverage picture remains genuinely conservative: 14.2% net debt to total gross assets, $3.0 billion in total gross assets, 1.7x net debt to adjusted EBITDA, and $299.7 million in total liquidity.

Dispositions and the dividend

Two property sales, two very different outcomes. Perth, New York sold for $88.5 million under a tenant purchase option, generating a $16.7 million gain — with IIP providing $49.0 million of seller financing, which is how the buyer got there. A San Marcos, Texas land parcel went for $3.3 million at a $4.9 million loss.

The Board declared a $1.90 quarterly dividend — $7.60 annualized — with cumulative distributions since inception now exceeding $1.2 billion. Against $1.83 of AFFO, that's a payout above 100% for the quarter. Sustainable if IQHQ income keeps compounding. Less so if it doesn't and the default payments keep shrinking.

The read

IIP is executing well on a portfolio it would rather not be so concentrated in. Flat cannabis revenue, evaporating default payments, security deposits covering rent, and a $270 million bet on life sciences real estate tell a coherent story: the landlord is diversifying away from its tenants.

The balance sheet buys plenty of time to do it. The question is whether shareholders signed up for a cannabis REIT or a diversified credit investor that happens to own grow facilities.

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$HELP ( ▲ 5.41% ) Brings In The Big Guns

Helus Pharma (Nasdaq: HELP) (Cboe CA: HELP) named Michael Halstead Chief Executive Officer effective immediately — and the timing is not subtle. The clinical-stage company developing novel serotonergic agonists is weeks from topline data on APPROACH, the first pivotal Phase 3 study of HLP003 as an adjunctive treatment for major depressive disorder, expected in Q4 2026.

Halstead's résumé reads like a specification sheet for exactly this moment. He spent his most recent tenure as President of Intra-Cellular Therapies, where he helped convert an early-stage clinical outfit into a fully integrated commercial biopharma — including the development, launch and commercialization of CAPLYTA®, approved across schizophrenia, bipolar depression and, notably, adjunctive MDD. That's the same indication HLP003 is chasing. He also managed multiple equity offerings and led the company's US$14.6 billion sale to Johnson & Johnson in 2025.

Before that: senior roles at Warner Chilcott, where he oversaw the US$3 billion acquisition of Procter & Gamble's pharmaceutical business and the integration of roughly 2,000 employees, then the company's US$8.5 billion sale to Actavis.

The rest of the pipeline continues around him. Enrollment is ongoing in EMBRACE, the second pivotal study in the Phase 3 PARADIGM program, with rollover into the EXTEND long-term extension. HLP004, a short-acting compound for generalized anxiety disorder, sits behind it. Halstead flagged an IP position of 350+ patent applications and 100+ granted patents worldwide.

Hiring a commercialization operator with two multibillion-dollar exits, right before a pivotal readout, tells you what the board is planning for.

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The Hemp Industry Is Front & Center While MSOs Await Rescheduling Fate | TTB Presented by Flowhub

• Texas pulled the plug on July 31. Delta-8, delta-10 and THCP are now controlled substances statewide after the Texas Supreme Court dissolved a five-year-old injunction — erasing roughly a $500 million market and exposing retailers to fines up to $25,000 per violation.

• The CR "lifeline" buys 29 days, not a win. Senate appropriators moved the federal hemp THC ban from November 12 to December 11, but the House passed its own CR without the language — and synthetic cannabinoids get recriminalized on schedule regardless. Michael Bronstein of ATACH explains why the industry is celebrating too early.

• Todd Blanche won't say where he stands. The acting attorney general who signed the April 23 Schedule III order is now Trump's nominee for permanent AG — and just declined to tell Senate Judiciary whether he supports rescheduling adult-use cannabis or easing enforcement penalties.

• Plus: what the expedited DEA hearing means for full Schedule III — and how state-level hemp crackdowns are quietly pushing consumers back into licensed dispensaries.

💸 The Tape

Senate appropriators handed the hemp industry a reprieve over the weekend, and the trade groups responded roughly the way you'd expect — with a Mark Twain riff about reports of death being exaggerated and a press release calling it the sector's biggest win since the 2018 Farm Bill.

It is not. It is a four-week postponement of a firing squad, contingent on a chamber that hasn't voted, attached to a vehicle that historically gets ransacked, with a carve-out that guts most of the benefit. Anyone treating this as a resolution is going to have a very unpleasant December.

Here's what actually happened, and then here's why you should stay seated.

The facts

On Sunday, Senate Appropriations Committee leaders released text of a bill extending federal agency funding through December 11, past the current fiscal year's end on September 30. Included are provisions delaying the planned prohibition on most hemp products until that same date — with a carve-out permitting immediate recriminalization on November 12 of synthetic cannabinoids not capable of being naturally produced by a cannabis plant.

For context: hemp derivatives below 0.3% delta-9 THC were legalized under the 2018 Farm Bill, but legislation signed late last year redefines hemp so that only products with 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container remain legal after November 12.

So the ban moves from November 12 to December 11. Twenty-nine days.

Reason one: it isn't law, and the House is the obstacle

This is Senate committee text. It has not passed the Senate. And critically — the House passed its own continuing resolution last month containing no hemp provisions whatsoever, meaning the Senate language would still require approval from the other chamber before reaching the president.

The House already voted once and declined to touch this. Asking it to vote again, on different text, under time pressure, in an election year, is not a formality. It's the whole ballgame — and nobody has demonstrated the votes.

Reason two: the vehicle is a continuing resolution

Of all the legislative conveyances available, appropriators picked the one most likely to be stripped, renegotiated or blown up entirely. CRs are where policy riders go to die. The fiscal year ends September 30. If the fall brings the shutdown standoff Washington has produced with near-metronomic reliability, hemp language becomes a bargaining chip — and it will be traded by people who do not care about delta-8 gummies.

Betting your inventory plan on a rider surviving a shutdown fight is not risk management. It's optimism with a business license.

Reason three: the carve-out does most of the damage anyway

Read the exception again. Synthetic cannabinoids get recriminalized on November 12 regardless.

Commercially, delta-8 and most of the isomer catalog are synthesized from CBD, not harvested. That's the category that built the gas-station THC economy. This "lifeline" protects full-spectrum CBD and beverages — the products with mainstream lobbying muscle behind them, from the restaurant association to Target — while the isomer business keeps its original execution date.

That's not an accident. It's the compromise. But it means the delay saves considerably less of the market than the celebration implies.

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Reason four: the White House support is softer than advertised

Trump has publicly pressed Congress to preserve access to full-spectrum CBD while restricting products that pose health risks, and OMB Director Russell Vought wrote Speaker Johnson urging fair treatment of hemp products. That sounds like backing.

Look closer. The president's ask is specifically about CBD, framed around Medicare beneficiaries and farmers — not intoxicating hemp. And on the leading legislative fix: Rep. Andy Barr's office claimed White House support for his bipartisan bill with Rep. Angie Craig, but the administration has never specifically endorsed it and reportedly has problems with the inhalable product provisions.

Meanwhile the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America praised Barr's bill but said its tax provisions require continued discussion — trade-association Esperanto for we have not agreed on the money. The alcohol lobby is not a bystander here.

Reason five: the actual tell

Buried in the coverage is the sentence that matters most. Lawmakers in both chambers and both parties have filed a growing number of bills to prevent recriminalization — and until now, none of them gained traction with congressional leaders.

Rep. James Comer is circulating one. Barr filed a longer one. A Senate companion is expected from Sens. Tim Sheehy and Amy Klobuchar. That's a great deal of legislative activity producing exactly zero enacted statute.

A 29-day delay smuggled into a spending bill is not evidence that Congress is converging on hemp policy. It's evidence that Congress cannot pass hemp policy on its own merits and has resorted to attaching it to must-pass funding — which is what you do when the standalone bill can't get a floor vote.

And note where December 11 lands you: the next government funding deadline, which the Hemp Roundtable's own counsel has identified as the target for a comprehensive fix. Same cliff. Same dysfunction. Holiday calendar. Merry Christmas.

What operators should actually do

Two practical points.

First, rolling uncertainty is worse than a fixed date. A business can plan around a ban — liquidate, pivot, exit. It cannot plan around maybe. Try explaining a 29-day extension to a landlord, an insurer, or a lender underwriting a term loan. Capital does not price "we'll know in December."

Second, and more important for the licensed side: none of this reopens Texas or Ohio. Texas's controlled-substance definitions took effect July 31 by state action. Ohio's SB 56 routed intoxicating hemp exclusively into licensed dispensaries back in March. Those are state laws, unaffected by any federal delay — and polling already shows state bans pushing consumers toward licensed marijuana retailers.

For MSOs operating in states that have already acted, the federal fight is noise. Their channel-shift benefit is banked. For hemp operators, the federal fight is everything — and they just got a stay of execution, not a pardon.

Twenty-nine days, one chamber short, with the synthetics dying on schedule anyway.

That's not a win. That's a continuance.

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Lolla Catches An Alternative Buzz

Green Thumb Industries just put hemp THC beverages inside Grant Park. Through its RYTHM Inc. subsidiary, the company's Señorita brand — margarita-style canned cocktails with 5mg of hemp-derived THC per 12-ounce can — made its Lollapalooza debut this weekend, sold to fans 21 and up at $16, the same price point as alcohol.

CEO Ben Kovler called beverages a major category going forward, and the receipts support him. Señorita is now on the menu at more than 80 independent Chicago venues, including the Riviera, Vic and Ramova, and earlier this year the United Center became the first major U.S. arena to carry THC drinks. One Lolla bar manager reported selling out of mango on day one.

The demand signal is real. A 2026 consumer study found 76.6% of respondents had cut alcohol consumption in favor of THC drinks, with 21.1% abandoning beer and wine entirely — and Chicago venues need it, with only one in four independent rooms reporting profitability last year.

Here's the catch nobody at the festival was thinking about. Illinois passed legislation in June regulating delta-8 and other intoxicating hemp products like recreational marijuana. When it takes effect in November, Señorita may be dispensary-only.

Kovler says Lolla shows where the culture is, well ahead of Washington. Fair. But the drinks were hard to find on-site, available at only select bars — which looks less like scarcity marketing and more like a company reading the same calendar everyone else is.

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Texas Erases $500 Million Hemp Market | TTB Weekly Recap

• Hemp regulation has fractured into four competing models. Texas now treats delta-8, delta-10 and THCP as controlled substances statewide, while Ohio, Florida and Delaware have taken sharply different approaches. All of it funnels toward the federal 0.4mg total-THC rule in November — which will effectively decide whose playbook becomes the national one.

• Veterans are becoming a real bipartisan force. Shadd breaks down how rescheduling has opened VA-funded psychedelic research, and how a Supreme Court ruling protecting gun rights for cannabis users has widened the coalition pushing reform.

• Record consumption, shrinking legal revenue. SAMHSA's newest survey puts 21.4 million Americans using cannabis 20+ days a month — more than daily alcohol or cigarette users — even as legal cannabis revenue fell for the first time ever.

• Earnings and M&A. Jushi (CSE: JUSH) (OTCQX: JUSHF) posted record wholesale revenue, Tilray (NASDAQ: TLRY) delivered record fiscal-year revenue alongside a wider net loss, and SNDL (NASDAQ: SNDL) leaned on a debt-free balance sheet heading into the Parallel restructuring. Vireo Growth (CSE: VREO) (OTCQX: VREOF) closed its 12th acquisition in eight months.

💸 The Tape

Vireo Growth Inc. (CSE: VREO) (OTCQX: VREOF) has now announced three acquisitions in eleven days, which is either admirable conviction or a company that has discovered the "buy" button and can't find the "stop." Friday's entry: four separate definitive purchase agreements — with FarmaceuticalRx LLC, FarmaceuticalRx 2 LLC, CAOH LLC and Canoe Hill Ohio, LLC — to acquire eight dispensaries, a cultivation and processing facility and related real estate, establishing a vertically integrated platform in Ohio.

The price tag is $208 million, and the currency is worth noting: the consideration will be satisfied entirely by issuing roughly 11 million subordinate voting shares, delivered in three tranches — 50% at closing, 25% at about 90 days, and the final 25% at about 180 days. The deferred portions are tied to continued performance of the acquired businesses, with a forfeiture mechanism letting Vireo claw back up to 25% of the shares if specified thresholds aren't met. Closing is expected in Q4 2026. Vireo Growth Inc. Announces a Four-Deal Transaction to Establish Presence in Ohio.

Structuring an all-stock deal with staged delivery and a clawback is the correct way to buy assets you haven't operated yet. Credit where due — this is more seller-alignment than most cannabis M&A bothers with.

The governance asterisk

One item deserves daylight rather than a footnote. CEO John Mazarakis is himself a seller under the CAOH LLC agreement. He declared the conflict, recused himself from all board deliberations and voting, and the other sellers are arm's-length. The deal qualifies as a related-party transaction under MI 61-101, and Vireo intends to rely on exemptions from both the formal valuation requirement and the minority approval requirement, on the basis that the interested-party portion doesn't exceed 25% of market capitalization. No shareholder approval is expected.

Everything there is procedurally clean. It also means a $208 million purchase that partly enriches the CEO clears without an independent valuation or a minority vote. That's not an accusation — it's a disclosure item investors should price rather than skim.

The roll-up in full

Zoom out and the Ohio deal is one tile in a much larger mosaic. Vireo announced an agreement to acquire Planet 13 Holdings on July 27 — a deal it says would make Vireo the largest U.S. operator by dispensary count — after agreeing on July 20 to acquire certain assets of The Cannabist Company. Stack them together and Vireo expects a presence in 16 states with roughly 270 dispensaries, up from 10 states and about 170 today, plus single dispensary licenses in Pennsylvania and Nevada.

That is a 60% increase in store count in under two weeks of announcements. The integration risk here is not theoretical.

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Why Ohio, and why now

Here's where the strategy gets defensible, because Ohio is arguably the best-constructed limited-license market in the country right now — and it got that way in March.

Vireo notes Ohio recently surpassed $1 billion in combined medical and adult-use sales and remains one of the fastest-growing markets in the country. But the number that actually matters is the one nobody put in the release: supply is capped.

Senate Bill 56, effective March 20, 2026, set a statutory cap of 400 dispensaries statewide under a unified Division of Cannabis Control, with buffer requirements from schools, playgrounds and churches. In a capped market, a license stops being an operating permit and starts being an appreciating asset. $208 million for eight stores and a grow looks expensive against a per-door average — until you notice the doors are non-replicable.

Then there's the hemp piece, which is the real story. SB 56 reclassified any product containing more than 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container as marijuana, meaning delta-8 gummies, THCA flower and THC beverages can no longer be sold at gas stations, smoke shops or convenience stores — they're restricted exclusively to licensed dispensaries. Governor DeWine went further than his own legislature: SB 56 originally carved out 5mg THC beverages through the end of 2026, and he line-item vetoed it, saying a carve-out would create consumer confusion and conflict with federal law. The industry's counterpunch missed — Ohioans for Cannabis Choice failed to gather enough signatures for a November referendum, letting the law stand.

Put plainly: Ohio capped the number of licensed sellers and simultaneously deleted their unlicensed competition. Every hemp dollar formerly spent at a Circle K is now a dispensary dollar or an illicit one. That is the single most operator-friendly regulatory combination in the country, and it explains why capital is flowing toward Ohio licenses rather than away from them.

Jushi already showed you the math

You don't have to model this. Someone reported it Tuesday.

Jushi Holdings disclosed that Ohio contributed $4.6 million in incremental retail revenue in Q2 on three new dispensaries — the largest single-market contribution in a quarter where total company revenue grew 10%. Three stores. In a market where the hemp channel had been closed for roughly ten weeks.

Jushi's broader print showed retail revenue up just 4% on units up 11.4% — heavy price compression across its footprint. Ohio was the exception that carried the quarter. That's the read-through: in states where licensed operators aren't competing with gas-station THC, the volume growth actually converts to revenue.

Vireo isn't guessing at Ohio's unit economics. It's buying into a market that a competitor just validated in public.

The catch

Two of them. First, local opt-outs are real: 137 Ohio jurisdictions had active moratoriums as of May 1, covering roughly 14% of the state's population, and 106 of those bans carry no defined end date — though Ohio's opt-out rate remains modest against Michigan's 73% and New York's roughly 50%, and the Host Community Fund distributes 36% of adult-use excise tax only to localities that permit dispensaries, which is a fairly direct financial nudge.

Second, Vireo is paying in its own stock, three announcements deep, before integrating any of it. The clawback protects against seller underperformance. Nothing protects against buyer indigestion.

Ohio is the right market. 270 dispensaries in sixteen states is the question.

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$GTBIF ( ▲ 2.52% ) Expands In PA

Green Thumb Industries (CSE: GTII) (OTCQX: GTBIF) opened RISE Dispensary Hanover on Friday, adding a twentieth Pennsylvania location to a footprint the company has been building since 2017. The store sits at 361 Eisenhower Drive in Hanover, serving York and Adams Counties, with a grand opening slated for late August.

The product set is the full house lineup — RYTHM premium flower, vapes and concentrates, Good Green flower, (inc)ensored troches and Doctor Solomon's topicals — all supplied from Green Thumb's manufacturing facility in Danville. President Anthony Georgiadis called Pennsylvania a priority market, which the store count already made fairly clear. Per RISE tradition, first-day profits go to Friends & Neighbors of Pennsylvania, York County's only comprehensive street outreach organization for people facing homelessness.

The timing is the interesting part. This lands four days before Green Thumb reports Q2 results on August 4 — and Pennsylvania is precisely the market investors should be watching.

Why: Jushi reported Tuesday that retail revenue grew just 4% while units sold rose 11.4% — roughly seven points of price compression across a footprint anchored in Pennsylvania. Volume is there. Price is not. Adding a store into that environment is a share-capture play, not a market-growth one, and the operator with in-house manufacturing and vertical margin is better built to win it than a leveraged competitor.

Green Thumb has the balance sheet for that fight, closing Q1 with $274.3 million in cash and buying back $33.3 million of stock.

Twenty stores in a state still limited to medical patients is a considerable bet on Pennsylvania eventually going adult-use. RISE now operates over 120 locations across 14 markets. Tuesday tells us what the model is earning while it waits.

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The DEA Requirements Nobody Talks About | Trade to Black

• The DEA and the FDA are asking completely different questions. Deepank frames the DEA as an inventory management system — tracking every milligram of controlled substance moving in and out of a facility — while the FDA owns product quality and safety. Two agencies, two entirely separate compliance burdens.

• Vantage built for DEA control from day one. The distinction matters because retrofitting an existing facility to GMP and DEA standards essentially doesn't work. Design decisions made at the outset determine whether pharma-grade compliance is achievable at all.

• Real GMP means quality is built in, not tested in. In practice that runs from equipment qualification and risk analysis through preventative maintenance and full documentation — quality engineered at the first step rather than inspected at the last.

• Rescheduling opens a genuine FDA drug approval pathway. Deepank explains why that changes the opportunity set, and why exporting under this level of compliance is a fundamentally different undertaking than operating domestically.

💸 The Tape

Hemp regulation in America has stopped being a federal question and become fifty state questions — all of which get overwritten in 105 days. If you want to understand where the intoxicating hemp market goes from here, the tape this week runs from Austin to Dover, and the states are not converging.

Texas: the ban lands tomorrow

Start with the largest disruption. Following the Texas Supreme Court's May 1 ruling in favor of the Department of State Health Services, the Court issued its mandate on June 5, dissolving a five-year-old injunction, and DSHS published notice in the July 10 Texas Register reinstating controlled-substances definitions first adopted in 2021 — definitions that take effect July 31, 2026.

Translation: as of tomorrow, more than trace amounts of any THC other than delta-9 is a controlled substance in Texas, with products subject to detention, embargo and referral to law enforcement. That covers delta-8, delta-10, THCP and the rest of the isomer catalog. The distinction regulators drew is between naturally occurring and manufactured cannabinoids — trace isomers in a product testing at or below 0.3% delta-9 remain lawful. Since commercial delta-8 is almost always synthesized rather than harvested, that's a distinction without much of a market.

Two things make Texas worth studying closely. First, the legislature never passed any of this. SB 3, SB 5 and SB 6 all failed, and the field moved to the agencies and the courts instead — a reminder that in hemp, rulemaking and litigation now matter more than floor votes. Second, there are two separate DSHS actions running in parallel, sharing dates and confusing everyone. A distinct March 2026 rule recalculates "total THC" to include THCA, raises licensing fees, and effectively restricts most smokable flower; an appeals court lifted the injunction against it in June.

The commercial damage is not small. The closing loophole had sustained a roughly $500 million annual hemp-cannabinoid market in Texas, and retailers face fines up to $25,000 per violation plus criminal referral. Licensing costs escalated in parallel: annual retailer fees jumped from $150 to $5,000 per location, with manufacturers owing $10,000 a year. That's not regulation trimming the market's edges. That's a structural extinction event for independent Texas hemp retail.

Ohio: the channel-shift model

Ohio ran the same play with a different objective — and it's the version MSOs should be rooting for everywhere.

Senate Bill 56, signed December 19, 2025 and effective March 20, 2026, reclassifies any product containing more than 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container as marijuana — meaning delta-8 gummies, THCA flower and THC beverages can no longer be sold at gas stations, smoke shops or convenience stores, and are restricted exclusively to licensed dispensaries regulated by the Division of Cannabis Control.

Note the mechanism. Ohio didn't destroy the demand — it relocated it, into a licensed channel with a statutory cap of 400 dispensaries. Every hemp dollar previously spent at a Circle K is now either a dispensary dollar or an illicit one.

Governor DeWine went further than his own legislature. SB 56 originally carved out 5mg THC beverages through the end of 2026; DeWine line-item vetoed it, saying a carve-out would create consumer confusion and conflict with federal law. And the industry's counterattack failed — Ohioans for Cannabis Choice couldn't gather enough signatures to put a referendum on the November ballot, letting the law take effect. Ohio moved roughly three months from signing to enforcement, while the federal government gave states a full year. Compressed timelines are becoming the norm.

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Florida: the permissive outlier, still unhedged

Then there's Florida, which has spent three years declining to decide.

The 2024 session passed SB 1698 — which would have banned delta-8, delta-10, THCA, HHC, THCV and THCP — and DeSantis vetoed it on June 7, 2024, citing debilitating regulatory burdens on small businesses. HB 1597 died in committee in May 2025. The 2026 session adjourned March 13 without enacting hemp legislation. The next regular session doesn't begin until January 2027. CannabisregulationsCannabisregulations

The result is that Florida runs the most permissive hemp framework among large states, with no statewide milligram cap per serving or container — the vetoed 5mg/50mg limits never took effect. Enforcement has been aggressive but sideways: FDACS has issued stop-sale orders on more than 631,000 products across 420,000 packages on packaging and child-appeal grounds rather than on the underlying legality of the cannabinoid. Is HHC Legal in Florida? 2026 Status Under FS 581.217 +2

For a state with a large medical program and no adult-use market, that's a meaningful competitive leak — and Florida enters the federal deadline with no state framework to fall back on.

Delaware: regulate and tax

The third playbook showed up this week. Governor Matt Meyer signed HB 373, restricting hemp THC drinks to buyers 21 and up, capping single-serving containers at 10mg delta-9 and multi-serve packages at 60mg, allowing 170mg in 750ml bottles, taxing single servings at 50 cents and large bottles at $8.50, and confining sales to licensed liquor stores or marijuana dispensaries.

But read the fine print — the law contains a sunset clause terminating legal hemp beverage sales if federal restrictions classify those beverages as controlled substances. Delaware built a regime and pre-installed a kill switch.

The cliff

All of it runs into the same wall. Late last year the president signed legislation redefining hemp so that only products with 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container remain legal after November 12. The post-decarboxylation total-THC test replaces the delta-9-only standard, rendering most current hemp delta-9 edibles and beverages non-compliant.Several members of Congress have filed bills to delay or alter the recriminalization, and the Trump administration has called for similar action, but none has gained traction with House or Senate leadership. Delaware Governor Signs Bill To Regulate And Tax Hemp THC Drinks - Marijuana Moment +2

The investment read: Texas shows what happens when you delete the category. Ohio shows what happens when you route it into licensed retail. Florida shows what happens when you do nothing. Only one of those three is good for MSO comps — and after November 12, everyone finds out whether Washington intends to make Ohio's answer the national one.

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$PCLO.TSX ( ▲ 5.26% ) Fixed Its Costs With A Ways To Go

PharmaCielo Ltd. (TSXV: PCLO) (OTC Pink: PCLOF) closed its fiscal year ended March 31 with the kind of results that read well in percentage terms and remain very small in absolute ones.

Fourth-quarter revenue was $0.7 million, up from $0.5 million. More meaningfully, Q4 gross profit swung to positive $0.3 million from a $0.3 million gross loss — the difference between selling product profitably and not. The quarterly net loss narrowed to $1.3 million from $2.2 million, with the adjusted EBITDA loss improving to $0.6 million.

For the full year, gross profit rose to $0.7 million on lower production costs and operational rightsizing, while the net loss narrowed dramatically to $3.6 million from $11.4 million. Adjusted EBITDA loss improved to $2.5 million from $3.5 million — achieved on a twelve-month period against a fifteen-month comparative and lower revenue, which makes the underlying improvement better than the headline suggests.

The balance sheet work was decisive. PharmaCielo sold the unused La Margarita property for roughly $10.0 million gross, booking a $2.2 million gain, and used the proceeds to fully repay the Banco Agrario loan, make $3.6 million of debenture repayments and reduce other obligations. Management reports the Colombian subsidiaries turned cash-flow positive for the first time — before Canadian corporate and financing costs, a caveat that carries weight.

Because the financing costs are the remaining problem. The company has drawn $2.8 million in bridge loans from management and directors — $2.6 million from Marc Lustig, $0.2 million from Doug Bache. And it now intends, subject to TSXV approval, to settle $777,717 of accrued interest on its 11% secured debentures by issuing 9.7 million shares at $0.08.

Paying interest in stock at eight cents is a solvency solution, not a strategy. The operations are finally working. The capital structure is what's left.

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Cannabis Consolidation Wave Expected Within 18 Months | Trade to Black

• The next 12 months could reshape cannabis finance more than the last decade. Terry points to rescheduling, the SAFE Banking Act, and a wave of financial institutions finally treating the space as investable.

• Losing 280E opens the entire tax code. Operators gain access to deductions they've never had — including potential opportunity zone benefits — and Terry argues companies should simplify corporate structures now to be ready for consolidation or acquisition later.

• Federal legality remakes the ancillary stack. Mainstream payroll providers, point-of-sale systems and payment processors entering the market would change dispensary and brand operations day to day.

• Where the money goes next. Terry shares his read on where consolidation hits first, how loan participation programs could let smaller banks and credit unions compete, and what the Fed holding rates steady means for cannabis lending.

💸 The Tape

Americans are now more likely to use cannabis on a near-daily basis than to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. That's not an advocacy survey or a sell-side projection — it's the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, run by SAMHSA, released Monday.

The topline: 21.4 million Americans aged 12 and over report using marijuana on 20 or more days out of 30. Daily or near-daily alcohol use, measured identically, comes in at 17.2 million. Cigarettes register 19.9 million. Cannabis also clears nicotine vaping (17.5 million), smokeless tobacco (4.3 million) and cigars (2 million).

One caveat belongs up front, because it will get lost in the headline cycle: the cigarette figure counts only respondents who smoked on all 30 days — a stricter bar than the 20-of-30 threshold applied to cannabis and alcohol. Measured consistently, daily cigarette use would land higher. The alcohol comparison, however, is apples to apples, and cannabis takes it by more than four million people.

The trend line is the story

A single year of survey data is a snapshot. The trajectory behind it is the actual finding. Prior work using NSDUH data found the per capita rate of daily cannabis consumption has risen nearly fifteenfold since 1992. Separate research drawing on the federally funded Monitoring the Future study found younger adults are roughly three times more likely to consume cannabis on a daily or near-daily basis than alcohol. Gallup reached a parallel conclusion in 2024: more American adults smoke marijuana than smoke tobacco cigarettes.

Stack those together and this week's release stops looking like a milestone and starts looking like a generational substitution that has been running for three decades and simply crossed a threshold visible enough to make news.

The politics land awkwardly. Alcohol and tobacco — the two substances cannabis just passed — sit entirely outside the Controlled Substances Act. Cannabis remains largely federally prohibited, though the Trump administration has reclassified medical cannabis to Schedule III and is weighing broader rescheduling. The same survey also shows teen marijuana use continuing to decline even as adult-use markets proliferate, which quietly retires the single most durable argument prohibition advocates have deployed for a decade.

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Now the part investors should actually care about

Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic. Consumption is at a record high. Legal revenue is not. Industry analysis reported earlier this year found legal marijuana revenue declined for the first time in 2025 — the first annual contraction the sector has ever posted, arriving in the same year daily consumption set a record.

That gap doesn't evaporate. It relocates. Twenty-one million near-daily consumers are buying product somewhere, and a growing share of them are buying it outside licensed channels — from illicit operators, from hemp-derived THC sold in gas stations and smoke shops under a federal loophole, and increasingly from intrastate markets where the tax stack makes the legal price uncompetitive. Federally funded research this year found precisely that: set cannabis taxes too high and consumers migrate to the illegal market. Polling has found the reverse also holds — restrict hemp THC products and consumers move toward licensed operators.

For anyone underwriting cannabis equities, that's the whole thesis in two sentences. Demand is not the problem. Capture is. Every quarter of MSO earnings that shows negative same-store sales against a backdrop of expanding consumption is measuring leakage, not consumer indifference. The addressable market is growing. The licensed share of it is shrinking.

Which makes the hemp regulatory question — and its November deadline — arguably more consequential to 2027 revenue than the rescheduling docket. Rescheduling fixes the tax line. Hemp enforcement fixes the top line. Only one of those is currently on a clock.

The alcohol trade is messier than it looks

The obvious pairing here is the cannabis-displaces-alcohol trade, and there's real support for it: beverage alcohol volumes have been under structural pressure for years, and the generational data is stark.

But the cleanest natural experiment available complicates it. SNDL Inc. operates both Canada's largest private-sector liquor retail network and one of its largest cannabis retail networks. In its June quarter, liquor same-store sales fell 6.2% — and cannabis same-store sales fell 4.6%. Both declined. If cannabis were straightforwardly eating alcohol's lunch, one of those numbers should have been positive.

The likelier read is that consumers are trading down and shopping around across both categories simultaneously, while a meaningful slice of cannabis demand exits the regulated channel entirely. Substitution is real over a decade. It is not reliably a quarterly tailwind, and anyone modeling it that way is going to be disappointed on schedule.

Worth noting that the industry's largest players are hedging accordingly. Tilray Brands just closed a fiscal year in which beverage revenue ($254.0 million) nearly matched cannabis revenue ($268.3 million), having acquired BrewDog outright. When the sector's most visible operator builds a beer business roughly the size of its cannabis business, that's a considered position on how cleanly the substitution thesis converts to earnings.

The bottom line

A federal agency just documented that cannabis is the most-used daily intoxicant in America, ahead of two substances that are fully legal, federally regulated, taxed at scale, and sold in every grocery store in the country.

The consumer verdict is in and has been for some time. What remains unresolved is whether the regulated market gets to serve that consumer, or whether it continues watching record demand route around it to unlicensed operators and hemp-derived competitors selling functionally identical products with none of the compliance cost.

Twenty-one million people, every day. The question for the next twelve months isn't whether the demand exists. It's who books the revenue.

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$SNDL ( ▼ 0.83% ) Is At An Inflection Point

SNDL Inc. (NASDAQ: SNDL) turned in a quarter that reads like two companies stapled together — one shrinking, one about to get considerably more interesting.

Start with the shrinking half. Net revenue fell 3.7% to C$235.8 million. Gross margin compressed 370 basis points to 23.9%. The company swung to a C$7.8 million operating loss from C$5.0 million of income a year ago, and adjusted EBITDA slid to C$12.5 million from C$19.4 million.

Most of the damage sits in one place. Cannabis Operations gross margin fell to 1.8%, down from 25.8% — a 24-point compression management attributes to ramp-up inefficiency on the Jeeter launch. That one should prove transitory. Less transitory: cannabis retail same-store sales fell 4.6% on market contraction in Alberta and Ontario, and liquor retail SSS dropped 6.2%. Every consumer-facing banner comped negative, which makes Jeeter a headwind stacked on a headwind rather than the whole story.

Now the interesting half. SNDL closed the quarter with C$183.2 million of unrestricted cash and no debt, C$598.5 million in total cash and investments, and free cash flow of negative C$6.7 million — actually a C$1.2 million improvement year-over-year. It also repurchased 11.7 million shares at a US$1.43 average, bringing cumulative buybacks to 29.0 million since Q4 2024.

Then, on July 27, the Parallel restructuring closed. Pending regulatory and Nasdaq sign-off, SNDL expects direct control of medical operations in Florida, Texas and Massachusetts — 56 dispensaries, three cultivation and manufacturing facilities, roughly US$150 million in annualized revenue. CEO Zach George floated combined revenue exceeding C$1 billion.

Clear that bar and SNDL becomes the first US-listed company consolidating plant-touching American cannabis revenue. That's the trade here: a debt-free balance sheet buying time for a transition the Canadian core can no longer fund on its own.

$JUSHF ( ▲ 5.56% ) Reports Q2

Jushi Holdings Inc. (CSE: JUSH) (OTCQX: JUSHF) posted revenue of $71.3 million, up 10% year-over-year, with both channels pulling. Wholesale was the standout — $9.4 million, up 68%, an all-time record and the first quarter above $9 million, driven by higher production volumes and better product quality across every state but Nevada.

The footprint keeps widening. Jushi closed the quarter with 42 dispensaries across eight states, up from 40 in seven a year ago, and five vertical markets. In-house brands now account for 57% of retail revenue, and the company pushed out 501 new SKUs, including the Van Golden live resin launch in Pennsylvania. Ohio was the growth engine, adding $4.6 million in retail revenue on three new stores. Gross margin held at 44.2%, though income from operations slipped to $0.7 million and adjusted EBITDA eased to $13.3 million.

But the real story is Virginia, which delivered record quarterly revenue this quarter — retail up on a 10% increase in units sold across six dispensaries, and wholesale up $1.1 million on partner demand. That's the warm-up act. Virginia has now enacted adult-use legislation with sales beginning July 1, 2027, converting a limited-license medical program in a populous East Coast state into a full recreational market.

Jushi is unusually well-positioned for it: vertically integrated, already the incumbent, and operating stores that CEO Jim Cacioppo says were built "with adult-use demand in mind." The company is advancing cultivation and processing investments to meet the volume step-change. globenewswire

The catch is funding the build. Against $219.8 million of gross debt, $35.5 million of cash, and $9.9 million in quarterly interest, Jushi has roughly eleven months to scale capacity — and is openly evaluating financing options to get there.

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What SNDL’s Latest Quarter Really Says | TTB Presented by Flowhub

• Revenue and margin both went backwards. Q2 revenue fell 3.7% to C$235.8 million, gross profit dropped 16.6% to C$56.3 million, and margin compressed 370bps to 23.9% — producing a C$7.8 million operating loss.

• The culprits were a mix of market and self-inflicted. Softening liquor and cannabis demand, heavier promotional activity, Jeeter production ramp-up costs, and a C$2.3 million SunStream writedown.

• The balance sheet remains the story. SNDL closed with C$183.2 million in unrestricted cash and no debt, repurchased 11.7 million shares for C$23.3 million, flagged C$20 million-plus in expected incremental operating income, and improved free cash flow to negative C$6.7 million from negative C$7.9 million — even while absorbing a C$6.9 million incentive payment.

• The U.S. build is the real catalyst. SNDL expects direct control of Parallel's medical operations in Florida, Texas and Massachusetts — roughly 56 retail locations and C$150 million in annualized revenue, pending regulatory approval.

💸 The Tape

While everyone watches Washington, the most consequential consolidation story in cannabis is unfolding in Florida 

Florida remains the crown jewel of American medical cannabis: 938,435 qualified patients with active ID cards, 771 dispensing locations, and — per the state's July 24 weekly report — 411.9 million milligrams of THC dispensed in a single week, alongside more than 146,000 ounces of smokable flower. Annualize that volume and you're looking at the largest medical cannabis market in the country, operating under a vertically integrated, limited-license structure that rewards scale like nowhere else.

The Top Five: Who Runs Florida

The OMMU's weekly dispensation report is the industry's most transparent scoreboard, and the July 17–23 numbers tell a clear story.

Trulieve remains in a league of its own: 170 dispensing locations moved 106.2 million mg of THC and 49,493 ounces of smokable flower in one week — more than a quarter of the entire state's volume, and more than the next two competitors combined. Roughly 625,000 mg per store per week, at a footprint more than double anyone else's. This is what a decade of first-mover discipline looks like.

MÜV (Verano) holds the clear second position: 86 locations, 48.9 million mg, and 16,678 smokable ounces. Curaleaf sits just behind at 75 locations and 47.2 million mg — and notably posts the highest per-store productivity among the majors at roughly 629,000 mg per location. Ayr Cannabis Dispensary — now operating under creditor-owned Arboretum — runs 65 stores doing 37.7 million mg. And Surterra Wellness (Parallel) rounds out the top five by footprint at 44 locations, though its 14.5 million mg shows a productivity gap that smaller rivals are exploiting.

One honorable mention demands attention: GTI Florida generates 18.9 million mg from just 22 stores — approximately 860,000 mg per location, the highest productivity in the state. Sunburn (750,000 mg/store) and Jungle Boys show the same pattern: newer, brand-led operators winning on velocity rather than footprint.

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The Vireo Assembly: A Top-Four Operator Built From Three Logos

Now overlay Vireo Growth's acquisition spree onto this scoreboard, because something remarkable emerges from the OMMU table when you combine three separate line items: FLUENT, Green Dragon, and Planet 13.

The pieces arrived through three distinct transactions. First came FLUENT, acquired via a $30 million debt equitization announced in Vireo's January deal wave — bringing 33 Florida dispensing locations currently moving 13.5 million mg weekly. Then the Eaze acquisition delivered more than California delivery: Eaze owned the Green Dragon retail platform, whose Florida operation spans 41 locations dispensing 15.9 million mg — quietly the sixth-largest footprint in the state. And this week, Vireo announced its all-stock merger with Planet 13 at a 16.6% premium to 20-day VWAP as of July 24, and a 24% premium to the July 24 closing price — adding 34 Florida locations, 8.7 million mg in weekly volume.

Combine the three OMMU line items and the pro forma entity is striking: 108 dispensing locations moving 38.1 million mg of THC and roughly 13,900 smokable ounces per week. On store count, that's the second-largest retail footprint in Florida — vaulting past MÜV's 86 and trailing only Trulieve's 170. On volume, the combined platform lands at number four — 38.1 million mg edging past Ayr's 37.7 million, behind Curaleaf and MÜV.

The gap between those two rankings is the entire investment thesis. Vireo's combined Florida per-store productivity sits around 353,000 mg per week — roughly half of what Trulieve, Curaleaf, and MÜV extract per location, and barely 40% of GTI's benchmark. Three brands, three loyalty programs, three supply chains, and three cultivation platforms serving 108 stores at sub-scale velocity. That's either a permanent drag — or the largest same-store-sales opportunity in Florida. If integration lifts the combined platform merely to MÜV-level productivity, the same 108 doors would generate over 61 million mg weekly — a top-two volume position without opening a single new store.

Setting the Tone: What Florida Looks Like From Here

The next chapter of Florida cannabis will be defined by three forces, and this consolidation sits at the center of all of them.

First, the market is bifurcating. The OMMU data shows a widening split between high-velocity operators (Trulieve, GTI, Sunburn, Jungle Boys) and footprint-heavy laggards (Surterra, the long tail of sub-20-store MMTCs). Vireo's bet is that scale plus operational discipline can convert laggard assets into velocity assets. The weekly OMMU reports will grade that homework in public, every Friday.

Second, the catalysts are real — but the biggest one may be further away than the headlines suggest. Federal 280E relief is already flowing to Florida's medical operators, DEA registrations are converting the state's dispensaries into federally recognized facilities, and the November hemp ban is poised to push consumers back toward licensed channels. But the adult-use timeline deserves sober handicapping. The next realistic window is 2028 or beyond, meaning operators must underwrite Florida as a medical-only market for years, not months. That reframes everything: the 938,000-patient registry, growing steadily on the back of expanded conditions and the Supreme Court's gun-rights ruling, isn't a placeholder awaiting conversion. It is the market — and winning it on medical economics is the only strategy that doesn't require a ballot miracle.

Third, the consolidation window stays open longer — and that cuts both ways. FLUENT came through distressed debt. Planet 13 came at a modest premium after years of Florida struggles. In a medical-only Florida stretching to 2028 and beyond, distressed assets keep surfacing: sub-scale MMTCs burning cash at 350,000 mg per store per week can't wait indefinitely for an adult-use bailout, and each year without conversion shakes more of them loose at bottom-cycle prices. That's the patient consolidator's advantage — Vireo and any followers get more time to buy cheap, but they also inherit the burden of making medical-market math work now, without adult-use multiples riding to the rescue. Watch the remaining independents on the OMMU table: Sunburn, Jungle Boys, The Flowery, Goldflower. The high-velocity names can thrive on medical economics indefinitely; the laggards face a harder question every Friday the report drops. Every one of them is either a future consolidator, a future target — or, in a prolonged medical-only market, a future casualty.

The scoreboard updates every Friday. In Florida, nobody gets to hide — and now, nobody gets to wait for November to save them either.

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$LEEEF ( ▼ 7.12% ) Taps The Capital Markets

LEEF Brands just closed the capital that completes its supply chain — and the oversubscription tells you investors see what's being built.

The California extraction leader announced the final closing of its oversubscribed financing, bringing total gross proceeds across all tranches to approximately US$14.5 million. The final closing added $5.2 million in fresh capital through the issuance of 20.8 million Series A-2 preferred shares at US$0.25 per share, alongside an exchange converting existing Series A-1 holders into the new series. Insider Jamie Mendola participated in the exchange — continued skin in the game from the board level.

The use of proceeds is precise: purchasing a cannabis processing and storage facility that will dry, cure, freeze, and store biomass harvested at Salisbury Canyon Ranch before transport to LEEF Labs in Mendocino County for extraction. It's the missing link in a vertically integrated chain that now runs from one of California's largest cultivation sites through processing to the state's premier extraction platform.

The capacity math is forward-looking. The facility supports Salisbury Canyon Ranch's current output, accommodates the planned expansion to the ranch's fully permitted 180-acre footprint, and — critically — provides headroom for the two markets management keeps naming: interstate commerce and international export. The facility can also generate a third-party revenue stream by offering processing and storage services to other cultivators.

CEO Micah Anderson framed it as infrastructure for the long game: "We've built one of California's premier low-cost cultivation platforms at Salisbury Canyon Ranch. Owning our own processing and storage facility is the next step."

For a company that doubled gross margins to 49% last quarter while unit volumes grew 60%, the thesis is consistent: own the lowest-cost position in California's brutal market today, and be structurally ready the moment state lines — or national borders — open. The infrastructure keeps compounding.

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Big Day For Cannabis Announcements, Bigger Questions Ahead | TTB Presented by Flowhub

• SNDL Goes South: SNDL completed its acquisition of Parallel's Florida, Texas, and Massachusetts assets — adding a 249-store retail network and positioning it as one of the first Nasdaq-listed companies with direct, consolidated exposure to U.S. medical cannabis operations.

• Glass House Preps for Export: The company retained former DEA compliance executive Matt Murphy to advise on interstate commerce and export opportunities, leveraging his experience building Colombia's first DEA-comparable compliance program at Khiron Life Sciences.

• Vireo's Crown: The Planet 13 acquisition pushes Vireo's Nevada and Florida footprint significantly higher — bringing its pro forma count to roughly 265 dispensaries across 15 states and positioning it as the largest U.S. cannabis operator by store count once pending deals close.

• Export Reality Check: Global cannabis consultant Deepak Anand separates fact from fiction on how U.S. cannabis exports will actually work — breaking down DEA applications, GMP compliance, and what operators genuinely need to understand before building business plans around international opportunities.

💸 The Tape

When Pete Buttigieg — Navy Reserve veteran, former cabinet secretary, and likely 2028 presidential contender — told a Nebraska audience last week that medical marijuana has "made a difference to people I've served with, to people in my extended family," he wasn't making a novel political argument. He was stating what has quietly become one of the most bipartisan truths in American policy: no population stands to benefit more from changing cannabis and psychedelics laws than the nation's veterans — and for the first time, the laws are actually changing to meet them.

"I think the American majority recognizes that people should have access to this," Buttigieg said while campaigning in Nebraska, where Republican officials continue trying to roll back the medical cannabis initiative that voters approved in 2024 — a fight the former mayor called out directly. "I hope common sense prevails."

The comments carry extra weight coming from a veteran who has spent years advocating that VA doctors should be able to recommend medical cannabis — a position he first articulated to Marijuana Moment during a 2019 dispensary visit in Las Vegas.

Why Veterans, Specifically

The math of veteran suffering is brutal and well-documented. Veterans experience PTSD at rates far exceeding the civilian population — as many as 20-30% of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chronic pain affects a majority of older veterans. Traumatic brain injury became the signature wound of two decades of war. And the consequences cascade: veteran suicide claims more than 6,000 lives annually — roughly 17 per day — while opioid prescribing through the VA system helped fuel dependency in exactly the population least served by it.

The conventional pharmaceutical toolkit — SSRIs, benzodiazepines, opioids, antipsychotics — has failed too many of these patients for too long. That's precisely why the evidence emerging around cannabis and psychedelics resonates so powerfully in the veteran community. The 2024 Stanford-led study published in Nature Medicine found that a single ibogaine treatment protocol produced dramatic reductions in PTSD, depression, anxiety, and functional disability among U.S. Special Operations veterans. Cannabis research consistently shows opioid-sparing effects — including the recent five-year Israeli study documenting 95% opioid elimination among chronic pain patients. And veterans themselves have voted with their feet: organizations like VETS (Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions), Heroic Hearts Project, and TARA Mind have sent thousands of veterans abroad for psychedelic treatment that remains restricted at home.

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What's Changing at the VA

For decades, the VA's position was simple: federal prohibition meant VA clinicians couldn't recommend cannabis, VA benefits couldn't touch it, and veterans feared losing benefits for disclosing use. That wall is now cracking on multiple fronts.

The Schedule III rescheduling of medical cannabis in April fundamentally altered the legal foundation. With state-licensed medical marijuana now recognized federally as medicine, the categorical bar on VA clinician engagement is eroding — the Congressional Research Service has noted that patients possessing medical cannabis from licensed dispensaries now have federal protections that simply didn't exist a year ago. Bipartisan legislation to explicitly authorize VA doctors to recommend medical cannabis in legal states — a proposal that has passed committee votes repeatedly over the years — now faces a dramatically friendlier legal landscape.

On psychedelics, the VA has moved from resistance to active participation. The agency began funding psychedelic-assisted therapy research in 2024 — its first such funding since the 1960s — studying MDMA and psilocybin for PTSD and depression. Under the current administration, VA Secretary Doug Collins has publicly championed psychedelic research, and the VA has expanded clinical trials across its medical centers. The April 2026 Trump executive order on psychedelic therapeutics explicitly prioritized veteran access, directing federal funding to match state investments and instructing agencies to expand Right to Try pathways — a framework tailor-made for terminally struggling veterans.

The Federal Cascade

Beyond the VA itself, the federal reforms of 2025-2026 keep landing disproportionately in veterans' favor. The Supreme Court's unanimous ruling that cannabis use alone cannot strip firearm rights removed the single biggest deterrent keeping veterans — among the most heavily armed demographics in America — out of state medical programs. The ATF's updated gun purchase forms acknowledging medical marijuana's legal status codified the same principle. The DOD's proposed NDAA amendments would extend psychedelic research for active-duty service members for six years, and separate legislation would require the Pentagon to formally evaluate psilocybin's benefits. Even the FDA's September hearing on psychedelic therapeutics — covering provider training and patient access — is substantially a veterans' access conversation, given that veteran cohorts anchor much of the clinical evidence.

And the state-level treatment infrastructure is being built with veterans at the center: Texas's $50 million ibogaine research program, Arizona's psilocybin research grants, Oregon and Colorado's regulated psilocybin programs — all feature veteran access provisions or veteran-focused research cohorts. Companies like Helus Pharma have formalized veteran recruitment collaborations with TARA Mind and VETS for Phase 3 trials, while Trulieve builds its philanthropy around veteran organizations like DAV and Paralyzed Veterans of America — the only cannabis company partnered with either.

The Political Convergence

What makes this moment singular is that veteran access has become the rare drug policy argument that works in both parties. Buttigieg makes the Democratic case in Nebraska. Rick Perry champions ibogaine in Texas. Dan Crenshaw pushes psychedelic research through the NDAA. Trump's executive order and the VA's Collins push access from the right. When SAM and prohibitionist attorneys general testified against rescheduling at the ALJ hearing, it was a VA psychiatrist they called — and it was veterans' clinical stories, like Dr. Burchman's opioid-reduction testimony, that carried the government's case.

The reason is obvious: the veteran suffering statistics are unanswerable, the conventional treatment failures are undeniable, and the moral debt is universally acknowledged. "Support the troops" was always a bipartisan slogan. Letting them access the medicines that demonstrably help them is finally becoming bipartisan policy.

The Bottom Line

Buttigieg's Nebraska remarks will be read through a 2028 lens, and fairly so — cannabis access is now a proven majority issue. But strip away the politics and his statement stands on its own: the people he served with found relief in a plant the federal government classified alongside heroin for fifty years, and the American majority knows it.

The laws are catching up — at the VA, in Congress, in the courts, and in the states. For the veterans who fought two wars and came home to fight their own nervous systems, the change can't come fast enough. Common sense, as Buttigieg put it, is finally prevailing. The only question left is how many veterans had to wait — and how many didn't make it — while Washington took its time.

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$VREOF ( ▲ 0.81% ) Picks Up Planet 13

Vireo Growth just made it a dozen — and this one brings the most famous dispensary in the world.

The industry's most relentless consolidator announced an all-stock merger to acquire Planet 13 Holdings, with each Planet 13 share converting into 0.015383618 Vireo subordinate voting shares — an exchange ratio implying a 16.6% premium to Planet 13's 20-day VWAP and a 24% premium to Friday's close.

The strategic haul is substantial: 36 dispensaries, three cultivation and production assets, up to 2.3 million square feet of potential cultivation capacity in Nevada, plus a distribution and consumption lounge license. The crown jewel is Planet 13's Las Vegas SuperStore — the largest dispensary on the planet and arguably cannabis retail's most recognizable destination, sitting steps off the Strip. Combined with the pending C21/Silver State Relief acquisition in northern Nevada, Vireo is assembling outright dominance of the Silver State — and inheriting Planet 13's Florida operations, including its recently approved BHO extraction facility, to stack atop the FLUENT footprint.

Pro forma, Vireo expects to operate approximately 265 dispensaries across 15 states — closing the gap on Trulieve's national retail lead deal by deal. The 2026 acquisition tally now reads: Schwazze, Eaze, Hawthorne, FLUENT, C21, Bridgewell, HA-MD, PhytoNatural, the Cannabist five-state package, the Johnstown buyback — and now Planet 13. Eleven transactions in under eight months.

Closing requires Planet 13 stockholder approval with MI 61-101 minority protections, SEC effectiveness of a Form S-4, CSE listing of the new shares, and cannabis regulatory sign-offs. A US$1.8 million termination fee applies in specified circumstances, and Planet 13 shares will be delisted after closing.

The integration risk question grows louder with every deal. But so does the platform. Vegas's biggest cannabis landmark is about to fly the Vireo flag — and the machine shows no signs of stopping.

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A Lifeline For Hemp, But Is It Right? | TTB Weekly Recap

• Hemp's Lifeline: The Barr-Craig Lawful Hemp Protection Act offers a real alternative to the November THC cliff — raising the limit to 1% total THC by dry weight while adding federal permits, labeling standards, and a three-tier beverage system modeled on alcohol.

• Three Bills, One Question: Senate Democrats revived the CAOA, joining the MORE Act and STATES 2.0 as competing federal legalization frameworks — with growing speculation that meaningful reform may ultimately come from Republicans rather than the bills' original champions.

• Beverages Go Mainstream: Señorita became the official THC beverage partner of Lollapalooza — the latest proof that hemp-derived drinks are conquering festivals, arenas, and entertainment venues rather than staying confined to dispensaries.

• Deals & Data: Vireo added Cannabist assets across five states (pushing toward 230 dispensaries), Cannara launched a buyback, Auxly executed a 14-for-1 consolidation, while in psychedelics Helus Pharma finished Phase 3 enrollment early and Incannex began screening for its sleep apnea trial.

💸 The Tape

If you want to see the future of cannabis consumption, skip the dispensary. Go walk the lakefront to Navy Pier, catch a show at The Salt Shed, and finish the summer at Lollapalooza. At every stop, you'll find the same thing: THC beverages sold alongside beer — and increasingly, instead of it.

The company behind that transformation is RYTHM, Inc. (Nasdaq: RYM), and its twin brands — RYTHM Beverages and Señorita — have spent 2026 executing the most aggressive mainstream venue strategy the cannabis industry has ever seen.

The Illinois Experiential Takeover

The milestones have come in rapid succession. In early 2026, Señorita and RYTHM made history at Chicago's United Center — home of the Bulls and Blackhawks — as the first THC beverages ever sold at a major U.S. arena, with RYTHM, Inc. named the venue's official THC sponsor. In May, Navy Pier — the most visited destination in the Midwest at 8 million+ annual guests — named RYTHM its official THC beverage partner in a multi-year deal centered on the RYTHM Stage in the Pier's Beer Garden, complete with events, sampling, and seasonal programming. Every beverage sold there carries 5mg of hemp-derived THC in a 12oz can — a sessionable, approachable dose engineered for the beer garden crowd.

And this week came the crown jewel: Señorita is the Official THC Beverage Partner of Lollapalooza — the first time THC beverages will be sold at one of America's marquee music festivals, in front of hundreds of thousands of fans over four days in Grant Park.

The connective tissue between those tentpoles is just as important. Both brands now pour across 16" on Center venues — The Salt Shed, Thalia Hall, The Empty Bottle — and Jam Productions rooms including the Riviera Theatre, Park West, and The Vic. The 2026 footprint has included Windy City Smokeout, Sueños Music Festival, the Chicago Pride Parade, and Taste of Randolph. Beyond Illinois, Señorita signed on as the official THC beverage partner of Opry Entertainment Group venues and expanded into Georgia-based Oak View Group properties. Retail distribution now spans 6,000+ locations including Circle K, Total Wine, ABC Fine Wine & Spirits, and Chicago's own Binny's, plus direct-to-consumer shipping to 30+ states.

Notice what's absent from that list: dispensaries. This is a strategy built on meeting consumers where they already gather — arenas, festivals, piers, and liquor stores — executed with the timing advantage of Illinois's new Hemp Act, which legitimized where and how THC beverages can be sold while banning the gray-market chaos. Regulation didn't kill the category in Illinois. It gave premier venues the legal confidence to sign multi-year partnerships.

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The GTI Relationship: A Structure Worth Understanding

Here's where the story gets strategically fascinating for investors. RYTHM, Inc. is not a scrappy beverage startup — it's the spun-off brand and hemp platform of Green Thumb Industries, one of the largest and best-capitalized cannabis MSOs in America. Ben Kovler — GTI's founder — serves as Chairman and Interim CEO of RYTHM, Inc., and the two companies remain deeply intertwined by design.

The economics of that relationship are remarkable. RYTHM, Inc. holds the brand portfolio — RYTHM, Señorita, incredibles, Dogwalkers, and others — and licenses those brands back to GTI for use in the regulated, plant-derived cannabis channel. That licensing arrangement delivers RYTHM, Inc. approximately $70 million in fixed annual licensing fees — a contractual, high-margin revenue base that exists before a single can of Señorita is sold. Layer the hemp beverage business on top — $13.3 million in Q1 revenue at a 78% gross margin, with Q2 guidance of $22 million (up 65% sequentially) — and you have a Nasdaq-listed brand company with bond-like base income and hypergrowth beverage upside.

The analysis writes itself: GTI kept the regulated cannabis operations — cultivation, dispensaries, state licenses — while giving the brands a separate vehicle that can do everything a plant-touching company cannot. RYTHM, Inc. trades on Nasdaq without deconsolidation gymnastics. It sells at the United Center, Navy Pier, and Lollapalooza — venues no dispensary-licensed product could touch. It ships DTC across state lines. And when consumers encounter RYTHM or Señorita at a festival, that brand equity flows straight back into GTI's dispensary shelves, where the same names sit on regulated flower, vapes, and edibles. It's a two-entity flywheel: the hemp company builds mainstream awareness in mainstream places; the MSO monetizes it in regulated markets. No other cannabis organization has structured brand-building this cleverly.

The Beverage Boom — and Alcohol's Problem

None of this would matter if the category weren't exploding. It is. THC beverages have become the fastest-growing format in cannabinoid consumption, with Target expanding sales to 300+ stores across multiple states, total wine-and-spirits chains dedicating shelf sets, and the National Restaurant Association lobbying Congress to preserve the category as "an alternative to alcohol."

That phrase — alternative to alcohol — is the entire story. As Pollstar noted in covering the Lollapalooza deal, alcohol consumption is dwindling among younger generations while drink prices at live events keep climbing. The macro data is unambiguous: the U.S. now counts more daily cannabis consumers than daily alcohol drinkers for the first time in history, and Canadian market data shows cannabis spending rising 6.1% while alcohol declines. Gen Z drinks meaningfully less than any prior generation at the same age, citing health, hangovers, and calories — and a 5mg agave-based margarita with real fruit juice and no hangover, as Señorita positions itself, answers all three objections at once.

The alcohol industry sees it clearly. Beer volumes have declined for years; spirits growth has stalled; and the very distributors and retailers built for alcohol — Total Wine, Binny's, Circle K, Republic National — are now racing to carry THC beverages because that's where the growth lives. When Navy Pier's Beer Garden builds a stage named after a THC brand, the symbolism is complete: cannabis isn't knocking on alcohol's door anymore. It's on the tap list.

The Bottom Line

Kovler said it plainly: "Consumers are choosing THC, and the venues they love are responding." In 2026, RYTHM, Inc. turned Chicago into the proof-of-concept city for that thesis — first arena, first pier, first Lollapalooza — while its licensing spine with GTI generates $70 million a year before the first can cracks open.

The only cloud is the November 12 federal hemp deadline — and it's precisely why the Barr-Craig bill's beverage-friendly framework matters so much to this story. If Congress lands a regulated path, RYTHM, Inc. isn't just Chicago's summer story. It's the blueprint for how cannabis brands go fully mainstream in America.

The margaritas are already at Lollapalooza. The rest of the industry is still in line outside.

📈 Dog Walkers

$IXHL ( ▲ 0.97% ) On Track To Improve Sleep

Incannex Healthcare just moved its lead program from paperwork to patients — and the market it's chasing is almost incomprehensibly large.

The clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company announced that participant screening has commenced in DReAMzz, its Phase 2 dose confirmation study of IHL-42X for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). The first tranche of clinical sites is approved and actively screening, with additional sites coming online as approvals land — marking the program's transition into active recruitment ahead of planned Phase III development.

The commercial setup here deserves attention. OSA affects an estimated one billion people globally, and there are currently no FDA-approved oral pharmaceutical therapies for the condition. The standard of care — CPAP machines — is notorious for poor patient compliance. IHL-42X, a combination of dronabinol (synthetic THC) and acetazolamide, holds FDA Fast Track designation, and the prior Phase 2 study delivered results that explain the agency's interest: up to an 83% reduction in the Apnea-Hypopnea Index versus placebo, with statistically significant improvements in fatigue and sleep-related impairment and a favorable safety profile.

The DReAMzz crossover study is designed to optimize dosing while tightening the link between objective sleep metrics and patient-reported outcomes — the dual evidence package regulators and payers increasingly demand for chronic disease therapies. CEO Joel Latham said the drug "has the potential to fundamentally change the treatment paradigm" for OSA.

The operational groundwork is done: global CRO appointed, drug manufacturing complete, import/export permits secured, and a fresh U.S. patent grant for IHL-42X in June plus an A$6 million R&D tax refund bolstering the balance sheet.

For a company also advancing PSX-001 for generalized anxiety and IHL-675A for rheumatoid arthritis, IHL-42X is the flagship — a cannabinoid-based oral therapy racing toward a billion-patient market with no approved oral competition. Screening has begun. The clock to Phase III is running.

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Does This Hemp Bill Actually Fix Anything? | TDR Cannabis in 5

• The Barr-Craig Fix: The bipartisan Lawful Hemp Protection Act would raise the incoming 0.4mg total THC cap to 1% by dry weight — keeping THCA flower, most hemp edibles, and vapes legal under a new national regulatory framework ahead of the November 12 ban.

• What Gets Banned: The bill prohibits synthetic cannabinoids including converted Delta-8 and THCP, while imposing national testing and labeling standards, a U.S.-only cultivation and processing requirement, and new federal taxes on retail sales and THC beverages.

• The Enforcement Question: Shadd raises the issue the industry isn't discussing — whether the federal government actually has the capacity to enforce this framework, given that policing unlicensed shops, distributors, and online sellers has historically fallen to states that largely haven't stepped up.

• Two Possible Outcomes: The bill could produce a genuine regulated hemp market — or function as a delay tactic that simply buys the unregulated market more time, depending entirely on whether enforcement infrastructure materializes alongside the legal framework.

💸 The Tape

The hemp industry finally has its rescue vehicle. Whether it has the engine to reach the finish line by November is another question entirely.

Reps. Andy Barr (R-KY) and Angie Craig (D-MN) introduced the Lawful Hemp Protection Act on Wednesday — a 60-page bipartisan bill that would partially reverse the federal hemp ban scheduled to take effect November 12, replacing prohibition with the "tax it and regulate it" framework the industry has been begging for. It is the most serious legislative attempt yet to save a market facing extinction in less than four months.

What the Bill Does

The core fix is definitional. The current law taking effect in November caps legal hemp products at a devastating 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container — a threshold that eliminates an estimated 95% of products on the market. The Barr-Craig bill rewrites the definition to permit up to 1% total THC on a dry-weight basis, keeping most current products legal for adults 21 and over.

But this is not deregulation — it's the opposite. The bill draws a hard line against synthetics: HHC, THC-O-acetate, and THCP are explicitly banned, along with any cannabinoid produced through "chemical synthesis, hydrogenation, acetylation, alkylation, or any other artificial process." Naturally occurring cannabinoids stay; lab-converted novelties go.

The regulatory architecture is comprehensive. HHS would set potency limits within 12 months — with statutory defaults of 5 mg per serving for oral products and 50 mg for inhalables and topicals if the agency fails to act. Products must be entirely domestically sourced — cultivated, processed, finished, packaged, and labeled in the U.S. Labeling requirements include per-serving THC content, pregnancy and impaired-driving warnings, drug-test disclaimers, and QR codes linking to certificates of analysis. Manufacturers and wholesalers need federal permits.

Then comes the alcohol-style structure: hemp beverages get a three-tier system — manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, with strict separation between tiers. And the taxes: 5% on consumable hemp products, 5 cents per milligram of THC on beverages, plus a 5% tax on manufacturer annual revenue — all flowing into a new federal Trust Fund for oversight and enforcement, with a slice of beverage revenue funding impaired-driving enforcement through the Highway Trust Fund.

Notably, the bill also codifies the Medicare hemp coverage program launched by the Trump administration — insulating the CMS pilot from the litigation still seeking to kill it.

Get Started Today

The Political Math: Brutally Difficult

Now for the honest assessment Anthony's readers deserve: getting this done between now and November 12 is a long-shot sprint through a minefield.

Start with the calendar. Congress has roughly six working weeks of legislative session between now and the ban's effective date, once August recess and campaign-season absenteeism are accounted for. A 60-page regulatory bill creating new federal taxes, a three-tier distribution system, and multiple agency mandates would normally take years to move through committee, scoring, and floor consideration. There is no committee markup scheduled. There is no Senate companion. The House Rules Committee already blocked Barr's earlier attempts to attach similar language to larger vehicles — a warning sign about where leadership stands.

The opposition coalition is uniquely awkward: Barr himself has acknowledged the bill faces resistance from segments of the alcohol industry (fighting the beverage competition), marijuana businesses (who want hemp intoxicants pushed into licensed dispensary channels), and prohibitionist groups (who want everything banned). When distributors, dispensaries, and drug warriors all oppose you, the lobbying terrain is treacherous. Add Ted Cruz predicting an "uphill path," the Marijuana Policy Project saying a full fix is unlikely this year, and a former Trump DHS secretary warning that preserving hemp THC "emboldens foreign criminal actors," and the headwinds are substantial. The House just passed a Farm Bill without any hemp ban delay — a telling omission.

What the bill has going for it is singular but potent: the White House wants it. Trump has personally and repeatedly demanded Congress act — "We must get this done RIGHT and FAST" — OMB Director Russell Vought formally requested it in a letter to Speaker Johnson specifically citing Barr's framework, and White House officials provided Barr's office with draft legislative text. This is as close to an administration-authored bill as Congress produces. And both sponsors are running for Senate in November — Barr in Kentucky, Craig in Minnesota — giving each a personal electoral incentive to deliver.

The realistic path isn't standalone passage — it's attachment. A September continuing resolution or year-end appropriations package is the likeliest vehicle, potentially paired with a short delay of the November deadline to buy implementation time. Handicapping it honestly: a full enactment by November 12 is perhaps a one-in-four proposition; some partial fix — a delay, a beverage carve-out, or a narrowed version of this framework riding a must-pass bill — is closer to a coin flip. Trump's personal engagement is the variable that could beat those odds.

Implications for the Hemp Industry — Clearly and Concisely

If this passes, here is what changes:

Survival, at a price. The $28 billion market lives, but as a federally taxed, permitted, labeled, and potency-capped industry. The gas-station free-for-all ends either way — the only question is whether it ends in regulation or prohibition.

Winners: Compliant, scaled manufacturers of naturally derived products — especially beverage brands, who gain a legitimized three-tier structure that mainstream retail and restaurant channels can embrace. American farmers, via the domestic-sourcing mandate that walls out Chinese biomass. Full-spectrum CBD companies, whose products are preserved and now Medicare-codified. Kentucky and Minnesota operators, whose regulatory models the bill nationalizes.

Losers: The synthetic cannabinoid sector — Delta-8 converted from CBD via chemical synthesis faces an existential question under the artificial-process language, and HHC/THC-O products are dead outright. Import-dependent supply chains. Margin-thin operators who can't absorb three stacked federal taxes plus compliance costs. Consolidation follows.

The strategic shift: hemp stops being an arbitrage on regulatory gaps and becomes a regulated CPG category — closer to craft beverage than to cannabis. For the licensed marijuana industry, the bill is a mixed outcome: hemp competition survives, but on a taxed, capped, and policed playing field rather than a lawless one.

The Bottom Line

Barr and Craig have given the hemp industry exactly what it asked for: a credible, White House-backed, bipartisan framework that trades chaos for legitimacy. The substance is the easy part. The calendar, the Rules Committee, and a three-front lobbying war are the hard part. Four months. Six working weeks. One presidential demand to "get it done SOON."

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$LOVFF ( ▲ 1.47% ) Initiates Buyback

Cannara Biotech just told the market what it thinks of its own stock price — and it's putting cash behind the opinion.

The Québec-based producer announced that the TSX has accepted its notice to launch a normal course issuer bid, authorizing the repurchase of up to 1,975,642 common shares — approximately 2% of shares outstanding — over the twelve months beginning August 4, 2026. Daily purchases are capped at 10,469 shares (25% of average daily trading volume), and all repurchased shares will be cancelled.

The board's rationale was stated plainly: "the underlying value of its common shares may not be reflected in the market price." For a company with Cannara's operating profile, the argument is credible. This is a producer holding #1 market share in Québec (14.3%), growing national share to 4.4%, posting consistent profitability, and fresh off two major strategic wins — the exclusive Canadian rights to Blue River's Ampersand™ live rosin technology and a C$21 million international supply agreement with Curaleaf that accelerated its Valleyfield expansion timeline by a full year.

The timing carries symbolic weight too. Cannara only graduated to the TSX main board in March — the NCIB arrives barely four months later, signaling a management team confident enough in cash flow to fund buybacks without impairing growth investment. The company explicitly noted it has "sufficient cash flow and financial resources" to run the bid while pursuing expansion, including the buildout toward 75,000 kg of annual production capacity.

A 2% buyback won't transform the cap table overnight. But the message matters more than the math: while scaling toward international markets, activating new cultivation zones, and launching novel product formats, Cannara believes the cheapest asset it can buy right now is itself.

An automatic share purchase plan will allow repurchases to continue through blackout periods. The bid runs through August 3, 2027.

$CBWTF ( ▲ 4.17% ) Announces Reverse Split

Auxly Cannabis Group is joining the share consolidation club — and management wants to make one thing crystal clear: this isn't what you think it is.

The Canadian cannabis CPG company announced it will complete a 14-for-1 share consolidation, reducing its outstanding count from approximately 1.42 billion shares to roughly 101.3 million. Post-consolidation trading begins on the TSX on or about July 28, with shares continuing under the "XLY" symbol. The ratio was approved by shareholders at the June 30 annual meeting.

CEO Hugo Alves went out of his way to preempt the market's reflexive skepticism about reverse splits: "This is not a precursor to a financing or any other dilution — as we have previously said and our actions under our standing NCIB program have shown, we are buyers of our shares, not issuers."

That distinction matters. Historically, Canadian cannabis consolidations have often preceded desperate capital raises from struggling operators. Auxly's situation is the opposite: the company is coming off a record 2025, posted Q1 revenue of $39.8 million (up 22%) with 55% gross margins and $12.3 million in adjusted EBITDA (up 65%), and describes its balance sheet as the strongest in years. Alves framed the move as consolidating "from a position of strength" to improve market quality and align the capital structure with the business Auxly has become.

A 1.4 billion share count was a relic of the company's dilutive past — penny-stock optics that no longer matched one of Canada's fastest-growing, most profitable operators. At ~101 million shares, the per-share metrics become legible, institutional screens stop filtering the stock out, and the active buyback does more work per dollar.

The cleanup era of Canadian cannabis continues — and Auxly just handled its own from strength, not weakness.

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Cannabis Is Being Rebuilt From The Ground Up | TTB Presented by Flowhub

• Open vs. Closed Tech: Flowhub CEO Kyle Sherman makes the case against closed technology ecosystems — arguing dispensaries need the freedom to choose best-in-class tools across POS, payments, loyalty, and analytics rather than being locked into a single vendor's roadmap.

• What Retailers Should Own: Sherman outlines the non-negotiables operators must control — their customer relationships, data, brand, and choice of technology partners — and how surrendering them to a walled-garden vendor is a long-term strategic mistake.

• Headless Commerce: Flowhub's Open Ecommerce approach lets operators build custom websites, apps, kiosks, and new shopping channels without ripping out their core system — bringing cannabis retail tech in line with mainstream e-commerce architecture.

• Clinical CBD Realities: Dr. Paul Shields breaks down the gap between retail-dose and therapeutic-dose CBD, the real drug interaction risks cannabinoids carry with medications like blood thinners and antiepileptics, and the open research questions surrounding terpenes and the entourage effect.

💸 The Tape

With Senate Democrats refiling the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act (CAOA) last week, Washington now has three distinct blueprints for ending federal cannabis prohibition sitting on the table: the CAOA, the STATES 2.0 Act, and the MORE Act. They're often lumped together as "legalization bills." They shouldn't be. The three proposals represent fundamentally different philosophies of what post-prohibition America looks like — and their differences matter enormously for operators, investors, and the law itself.

The MORE Act: Descheduling With a Justice Lens

The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act is the elder statesman of the trio — and the only one that has ever actually passed a chamber of Congress. Introduced by Rep. Jerry Nadler with then-Senator Kamala Harris carrying the Senate companion, the MORE Act passed the House twice: 228-164 in December 2020 and 220-204 in April 2022, both under Democratic control with only a handful of Republicans (notably Matt Gaetz and Dave Joyce) crossing over. Both times, it died in the Senate without a vote.

Substantively, MORE is descheduling with a criminal justice engine: complete removal of cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act, automatic expungement of federal convictions, resentencing hearings, a 5% federal excise tax rising to 8% funding an Opportunity Trust Fund for communities harmed by the drug war, SBA access, and protections in immigration and federal benefits. What MORE deliberately does not do is build a heavy federal regulatory apparatus — it largely leaves regulation to states, treating cannabis closer to how alcohol was handled post-21st Amendment.

For the industry, MORE would deliver the two holy grails — 280E elimination and banking normalization — through descheduling itself, with a modest federal tax layer. Its light regulatory touch means minimal new compliance burden. Its weakness: without a federal product framework, questions around interstate commerce standards, FDA jurisdiction, and hemp-cannabinoid boundaries would remain messy.

The CAOA: Descheduling With a Federal Regulatory State

The Schumer-Booker-Wyden bill is MORE's maximalist cousin. Its history is less distinguished: a discussion draft in July 2021, formal filing in July 2022, refilings in 2023 and now 2026 — and in five years, it has never received a hearing, a markup, or a vote in either chamber. It has zero Republican support and, filed by a Senate minority, no realistic path to sixty votes.

Substantively, CAOA goes furthest: full descheduling, automatic expungement, a Cannabis Justice Office at DOJ, restorative justice grants — plus an entirely new federal regulatory architecture. The FDA would gain a Center for Cannabis Products regulating manufacturing, labeling, and standards; the TTB would administer taxation; the ATF would handle trade enforcement. The federal excise tax scales up to 25% for large businesses — stacked atop state and local taxes.

For the industry, CAOA is a double-edged sword sharpened on both sides. Descheduling, expungement, banking, interstate commerce, and institutional capital access are transformational. But a combined federal-state tax burden approaching or exceeding 40% in some markets would hand the illicit market a pricing advantage that California has already proven fatal, and an FDA compliance regime layered onto existing state frameworks would favor the largest, best-capitalized operators while crushing small businesses — ironic for a bill whose stated priority is equity. CAOA is the most comprehensive vision and the least commercially examined one.

STATES 2.0: Federalism Without Descheduling

The STATES 2.0 Act — championed by Rep. Dave Joyce (R-OH) with bipartisan co-sponsors including Dina Titus (D-NV) and Max Miller (R-OH), descended from the original 2018 Gardner-Warren STATES Act — takes the opposite philosophical approach. It doesn't deschedule cannabis at all. Instead, it amends the CSA so that federal prohibition simply does not apply to activity conducted in compliance with state law, while adding an updated framework permitting interstate commerce between consenting legal states and directing FDA treatment of cannabis products.

Legislatively, STATES has never passed anything — no floor vote in any Congress — but it has something the other two lack: genuine Republican authorship and a federalism framing engineered for a GOP-controlled Congress. In the current Washington, where Republicans hold the gavels and the Trump administration has claimed cannabis reform as its own, STATES 2.0 is structurally the most viable of the three vehicles, even if none is moving today.

For the industry, STATES 2.0 would quietly deliver most of what operators actually need: exempting state-legal activity from the CSA resolves 280E (the tax code's trafficking trigger disappears when the conduct is no longer federally unlawful), unlocks banking (the predicate offense evaporates), and permits interstate commerce — arguably the single biggest economic unlock in any bill, allowing efficient producers in California or Oklahoma to supply high-cost markets. What it doesn't do: no expungement, no equity funding, no federal excise revenue, no uniform national standards. Cannabis would remain technically scheduled — an awkward legal residue with implications for immigration, gun rights, and federal employment that descheduling would resolve.

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The Comparison That Matters

Strip away the press releases and the three bills answer three different questions. MORE asks: how do we end prohibition and repair its harms? CAOA asks: how do we build a permanent federal cannabis regulatory state? STATES 2.0 asks: how do we make the federal government stand down where states have decided?

On raw industry economics, STATES 2.0 is paradoxically the most favorable — maximum relief, minimum new taxation and compliance — despite being the least ambitious. CAOA is the most transformative and the most burdensome. MORE sits between them, pairing descheduling's full legal benefits with a tax load the industry could actually survive.

On political reality: MORE has proven it can pass a Democratic House and nothing else. CAOA has proven it can generate headlines and nothing else. STATES 2.0 has proven nothing yet — but it's the only bill whose coalition matches the Congress that actually exists.

The Bottom Line

Here's the uncomfortable truth about all three bills: they mean well, and none of them are going anywhere. MORE has passed the House twice and died in the Senate twice — and that was under Democratic control that no longer exists. CAOA has been filed four times in five years without ever receiving so much as a committee hearing, and its latest iteration was introduced by a Senate minority with zero Republican co-sponsors the day after a Republican administration's rescheduling hearing concluded. Even STATES 2.0, the most politically realistic of the trio, has never been marked up in the twelve months since its introduction. These are messaging vehicles wearing the costume of legislation, and the industry has learned — painfully, repeatedly — not to price them into anything.

But the landscape that made these bills futile may be the same one that produces something real. The political conditions of mid-2026 are unlike anything cannabis reform has operated under: a Republican president who has personally claimed rescheduling as a legacy achievement, an ALJ recommendation expected within weeks, cannabis companies donating to Trump-aligned PACs, Senate Banking Chairman Tim Scott publicly conceding the banking problem, and supermajority public support that now includes most Republican voters. In that environment, the logical next move isn't a Democratic bill that Republicans won't touch — it's a Republican bill that Democrats can't refuse. Reporting and chatter around Capitol Hill increasingly point toward exactly that: GOP lawmakers exploring legislation built on the STATES Act chassis — federal deference to state markets, interstate commerce authority — but going further, potentially descheduling cannabis outright and pairing it with the regulatory framework Trump ally William Barr has publicly advocated: tax it, regulate it, and end the gray zone.

If that bill materializes, the three proposals compared above become instantly historical — the drafts that defined the debate but never crossed the finish line. The party that spent decades blocking reform would deliver it, the party that spent decades promising reform would be forced to vote for someone else's version, and the industry would finally get the only thing it has ever actually needed: a law. Watch the Republican side of the aisle. That's where the ending gets written.

📈 Dog Walkers

$HELP ( ▲ 5.41% ) Completes Enrollment Early

The clinical-stage company announced it has completed enrollment ahead of schedule in APPROACH, the first Phase 3 pivotal study of HLP003 as an adjunctive treatment for major depressive disorder. The trial enrolled 223 participants with moderate to severe MDD (MADRS ≥24) responding inadequately to stable antidepressant regimens, randomized 1:1 to two 16 mg doses of HLP003 or placebo administered three weeks apart. Topline data remains on track for Q4 2026, with the primary endpoint measuring MADRS change at six weeks.

The Phase 2 foundation is what makes this readout so anticipated: a mean ~23-point MADRS reduction sustained 12 months after just two doses, with 100% response and 100% remission using the ≤12 benchmark employed by peers like Definium. HLP003 — a deuterated psilocin analogue with FDA Breakthrough Therapy Designation — is targeting a potential NDA submission in 2028.

Interim CEO Eric So credited the clinical team's screening and site selection, noting baseline disease severity matched the Phase 2 population — "reinforcing the quality and integrity of the Phase 3 study population." Enrollment continues in EMBRACE, the second pivotal study, with participants rolling into the EXTEND long-term extension evaluating durability and redosing.

The commercial context Helus cited is telling: J&J's SPRAVATO posted $584 million in Q2 sales, up 40.8% year-over-year — proof that clinic-administered interventional psychiatry is scaling rapidly. The adjunctive positioning matters too: current add-on options are atypical antipsychotics carrying weight gain, sedation, and tardive dyskinesia risks. An intermittent two-dose alternative addresses a genuine practice gap.

With $207 million in liquidity, FDA guidance alignment baked into the PARADIGM program design, and Eli Lilly's atai acquisition validating the entire space, Helus enters Q4 with everything in place. Now the data decides.

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Why M&A Is Already Happening in Cannabis & Psychedelics | TTB Presented by Flowhub

• Vireo's Biggest Swing Yet: The hosts break down Vireo's $35 million acquisition of Cannabist assets across five states — up to 25 dispensaries pushing its footprint to ~230 locations across 15 states, second only to Trulieve — and debate whether ten acquisitions in one year is smart consolidation or mounting integration risk.

• Florida Hemp on the Clock: Florida hemp businesses face the November 12 federal THC ban threatening an industry that's become a major part of the state's retail landscape — with operators now hoping Trump intervenes on their behalf.

• Alabama Watches Washington: State officials are holding a public hearing this week on whether to reschedule marijuana at the state level in alignment with the federal Schedule III move — an early example of federal reform cascading into prohibition states.

• Whiz on the Lilly Deal: Former fighter pilot Matthew "Whiz" Buckley of Top Gun Options gives his read on Eli Lilly's $2.8 billion acquisition of AtaiBeckley — including whether the premium was rich enough and what Big Pharma's entry means for the remaining independent psychedelic developers.

💸 The Tape

At this point, Vireo Growth's acquisition announcements should come with their own recurring calendar invite. But this morning's deal is different in scale and consequence: Vireo is buying its way to the second-largest dispensary network in America — and it's doing it by carving the choicest cuts from a fallen comrade.

The company announced a definitive purchase agreement to acquire cultivation, manufacturing, and retail operations from The Cannabist Company — the distressed MSO formerly known as Columbia Care — across five markets: Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and West Virginia. Total consideration is up to US$35 million: $18.75 million in cash at closing and $16.25 million in seller notes, subject to customary adjustments. Closings will occur in stages through 2026 and into 2027 as regulatory approvals land in each state.

The haul: up to 25 dispensaries, one cultivation asset, and one production facility. Combined with pending deals, Vireo's pro forma footprint reaches approximately 230 dispensaries across 15 states — vaulting it behind only Trulieve in national retail count.

The Acquisition Machine: 2026's Ledger

To appreciate the velocity here, consider what Vireo has announced or closed this year alone:

Schwazze — 45 dispensaries across Colorado and New Mexico. Eaze — California's largest delivery platform. Hawthorne Gardening — the cultivation supply business acquired from Scotts Miracle-Gro. FLUENT — a $30 million debt equitization delivering roughly 74 Florida dispensaries. The Glass House joint venture — 23 California retail locations. C21 Investments — 15 Nevada dispensaries anchored by Silver State Relief. Bridgewell Agribusiness — a $40 million organic food and agricultural supply platform. HA-MD — a 49% stake in two Maryland operations. The Johnstown, New York facility buyback from Innovative Industrial Properties for $88.5 million. The PhytoNatural Pennsylvania retail permit — authorizing six dispensaries in a 450,000-patient market, closed just last Friday. Plus a market-making engagement to support the stock's liquidity as all this equity-fueled dealmaking expands the shareholder base.

That's ten transactions across cannabis retail, cultivation, delivery, real estate, and adjacent agriculture — in roughly seven months. No other cannabis company is operating at anything close to this tempo. CEO John Mazarakis calls it "disciplined and strategic" consolidation toward "one of the most capital efficient, vertically integrated cannabis platforms in the United States." Skeptics call it integration risk stacked on integration risk. Both can be true — and the Cannabist deal will be a major test of which framing wins.

How the Cannabist Assets Fit

What makes this transaction strategically coherent — rather than acquisition for its own sake — is how precisely each market slots into Vireo's existing map.

Colorado is the deepening play. Vireo already commands a significant Colorado presence through Schwazze, and the eight Cannabist dispensaries bolt directly onto that platform. In a mature, hyper-competitive market where density drives purchasing leverage, delivery economics, and brand distribution, going deeper is the only strategy that works. Vireo isn't entering Colorado — it's consolidating it.

Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and West Virginia are all new state entries — and the selection is telling. Three of the four are limited-license markets with structural protections: New Jersey's adult-use market continues growing with constrained retail licensure, West Virginia is a nascent medical market with minimal competition, and Illinois — fresh off SB 3222's expansion of operational flexibility, drive-through authorization, and the companion medical license pathway for DEA registration — is a $1.5 billion market where retail footholds are exceptionally hard to acquire. Massachusetts is more competitive, and carries the November repeal ballot question as a known risk, but Cannabist's operations there come with established infrastructure at distressed pricing.

Layer this onto the existing map and the geographic logic sharpens further. Vireo now touches the Northeast corridor (New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania via PhytoNatural, New York via Johnstown and its legacy operations, Maryland via HA-MD), the Midwest (Minnesota's home base, Illinois), the Mountain West and Southwest (Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada), the Southeast (Florida via FLUENT), and California (Eaze, Glass House JV). Fifteen states. National brand distribution potential. And with Bridgewell and Hawthorne, an agricultural supply layer that serves the broader industry regardless of which cannabis markets outperform.

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The Distressed-Asset Math

The price deserves emphasis. Columbia Care was once valued in the billions — one of the original vertically integrated MSOs, a medical cannabis pioneer with institutional research pedigree and a brand portfolio spanning Seed & Strain, Triple Seven, Hedy, gLeaf, and Classix. Its collapse into CCAA proceedings in March, with Chapter 15 recognition in Delaware following in May, is one of the industry's starkest cautionary tales: overexpansion, debt, and execution failures converting a first-mover into a forced seller.

Vireo is paying up to $35 million — with more than 46% of it in seller notes rather than cash — for 25 dispensaries and production assets across five states. Even accounting for the operational work required to stabilize distressed operations, the per-store math is a fraction of replacement cost, let alone what these licenses commanded at the market's peak. The Cannabist's Virginia assets went to Millstreet for $130 million; Vireo is acquiring a five-state package for roughly a quarter of that. This is what buying at the bottom of a consolidation cycle looks like.

The court process adds procedural steps — a sale approval and vesting order from the Ontario court under CCAA, plus state-by-state regulatory sign-offs — and Vireo flagged that additional divestitures could follow as part of portfolio optimization. Not every acquired asset will be a keeper, and management is being upfront about pruning.

The Bottom Line

The cannabis industry spent 2024 and 2025 talking about consolidation. Vireo spent 2026 doing it — and today's deal is the most consequential move yet. Ten transactions, fifteen states, 230 pro forma dispensaries, and the second-largest retail network in the country, assembled largely from distressed sellers, creditor processes, and deferred-equity structures while competitors focused on uplistings and balance sheet repair.

The open question remains execution. Integrating ten acquisitions across cannabis retail, delivery, cultivation supply, and organic agriculture — simultaneously, through staged closings stretching into 2027 — is an operational challenge no cannabis company has ever successfully completed at this scale. Mazarakis is betting that discipline, local execution, and bottom-of-cycle pricing turn this collection into a platform.

If it works, Vireo will have built a national footprint for pennies on the peak-cycle dollar. Columbia Care's assets living on inside the industry's most aggressive consolidator is either poetic or ironic — depending on whether the integration succeeds. Either way, the pace isn't slowing. It never does.

📈 Dog Walkers

Cannabis Calms 87% of Agitated Dementia Patients

The most compelling cannabis research of the year just landed — and it addresses one of medicine's most heartbreaking challenges.

A federally funded, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial found that a combination of THC and CBD produced significant and sustained reductions in agitation among people with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia. The results, presented at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference, are remarkable by any clinical standard: 87% of patients receiving the cannabis medication improved by the end of the 12-week study, compared to just 24% on placebo.

The LiBBY study — funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Alzheimer's Association — enrolled 120 hospice-eligible dementia patients with an average age of 80.5 years, all experiencing clinically significant agitation. The preparation, called T2:C100 and manufactured by MediPharm Labs, contained 2 mg THC and 100 mg CBD. Improvement showed up fast: at just two weeks, 84% of the cannabis group had improved versus 31% on placebo.

Lead investigator Jacobo Mintzer of the Medical University of South Carolina didn't temper his enthusiasm: "Rarely do we see close to 90 percent of patients in a trial respond positively to a new medication." He called the results "a level of response not seen before in clinical trials related to dementia" — offering "grace and peace" to patients in their final stages of life.

The context makes this even more significant. Current agitation treatments — often antipsychotics — carry serious side effects and FDA black-box warnings for elderly dementia patients. The American Medical Association recently acknowledged cannabis "may offer therapeutic benefits for managing agitation in dementia patients, potentially serving as an alternative to antipsychotic medications."

An NIH-funded, gold-standard randomized trial showing near-90% response in end-stage dementia care — arriving weeks after the FDA acknowledged cannabis's accepted medical uses under oath. The evidence base isn't just growing. It's compounding.

Source: Marijuana Moment

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ALJ Julius Locks in August 17th Filing Deadline | TTB Presented by Flowhub

• Organigram Update: The hosts break down Organigram's latest business update — early Sanity Group performance in Germany (~10% market share, in line with expectations) and Canadian category leadership (#1 in flower and vapes) ahead of first consolidated results on August 11.

• Definium's Clinical Position: CMO Dr. Dan Karlin details where Definium stands in its trial program, why its Phase 3 LSD data is considered among the strongest in psychedelics, and the path toward potential FDA approval and commercialization beginning in 2027.

• Big Pharma Validation: Dr. Karlin reacts to Eli Lilly's $2.8 billion acquisition of AtaiBeckley — a landmark deal signaling that major pharmaceutical players are now moving into psychedelic therapeutics rather than watching from the sidelines.

• Rescheduling Timeline: Michael Bronstein explains the post-hearing process — ALJ Derek Julius has set August 17 as the deadline for final briefs, and Bronstein assesses whether a Recommended Decision could realistically arrive before the end of August.

💸 The Tape

The Florida hemp industry wants a savior. As the November 12 federal ban approaches — the "total THC standard" that would render roughly 95% of hemp-derived products federally illegal — Sunshine State hemp operators are pinning their hopes on President Trump, who has called on Congress to preserve access to full-spectrum CBD while restricting products that pose health risks.

At St. Petersburg retailer Herban Flow, where owner Michael Smith says 80% of sales come from hemp-derived THC products, the anxiety is palpable. "So many people are now just discovering it and they don't believe me when I tell them in three months that all of this is going away," Smith told the Florida Phoenix. Treadwell Farms CEO Jammie Treadwell says farmers aren't planting this season, license renewals are in doubt, and the ban "could very well put us out of business." David Shiffman of Amigos insists "the category's too big to fail."

Their fear is genuine, and some of these operators — the ones who paid fees, passed inspections, and played by Florida's rules — deserve sympathy. But before the industry writes its collective hardship letter to Washington, a moment of honesty is required about how Florida hemp arrived at this cliff.

Because two years ago, when Florida's hemp industry had the chance to stand with cannabis reform, it did the opposite. It bankrolled the campaign to kill it.

The Amendment 3 Betrayal

In 2024, Amendment 3 — the adult-use legalization initiative funded overwhelmingly by Trulieve to the tune of well over $140 million — reached the ballot needing 60% to pass. It earned 56%: a supermajority of Florida voters, and more votes than either presidential candidate received in the state, but short of the threshold.

Standing against it, alongside Governor Ron DeSantis and his political apparatus, was a coalition that included a striking bloc of donors: Florida hemp companies. Campaign finance records showed hemp operators pouring millions into the DeSantis-aligned committees fighting the measure — contributions that flowed, conspicuously, in the months after DeSantis vetoed SB 1698, the 2024 bill that would have crushed intoxicating hemp with Delta-8 bans and THC caps. The governor's veto message decried "debilitating regulatory burdens on small businesses." The hemp money against Amendment 3 arrived shortly thereafter. Draw your own conclusions; most observers drew the obvious one.

The strategic logic was cynical but transparent: a regulated adult-use marijuana market was the hemp industry's competitive nightmare. Every gas-station gummy and smoke-shop THCA jar in Florida existed in the arbitrage gap between prohibition and legalization — intoxicating products sold without dispensary licensing costs, without seed-to-sale tracking, without the 60,000-square-foot cultivation requirements, without the taxes. Legal recreational cannabis would have collapsed that arbitrage. So the hemp industry linked arms with prohibitionists to preserve it.

It worked. Amendment 3 died. And now, twenty months later, the same industry that spent millions to keep regulated cannabis out of Florida is begging the federal government to save its unregulated products from a ban — invoking small business, farmers, and consumer access with no apparent sense of irony.

You cannot fund prohibition for your competitors and then demand deregulation for yourself. That's not a policy position. That's a protection racket that lost its protector.

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Florida's Clampdown — And Why the Status Quo Had to Die

To its credit, Florida has been tightening the screws within its own authority. The 2023 legislation imposed 21+ age restrictions, banned packaging attractive to children, and required food-establishment permitting for hemp retailers. The Department of Agriculture has conducted sweeps pulling non-compliant products. Repeated legislative attempts at comprehensive restriction — including the 2025 session's dueling House and Senate bills — collapsed over chamber differences, but House Speaker Daniel Perez's hemp workgroup reached the conclusion everyone serious already knew: the industry shouldn't be destroyed, but "the status quo had to change."

The status quo, let's be clear, was indefensible. Intoxicating products chemically indistinguishable from dispensary cannabis, sold beside energy drinks with no purchase limits, no pharmacist consultation, no METRC tracking, inconsistent testing, and — until recently — packaging that would make a candy company blush. More than a dozen states have already banned or heavily restricted these products. Florida's medical operators spent years and hundreds of millions complying with one of the strictest regulatory regimes in the country while an unregulated parallel market sold the same molecules across the street. No coherent policy framework tolerates that asymmetry forever. The November ban is a blunt instrument — and Trump's push for a carve-out protecting genuine full-spectrum CBD is the right refinement — but the era of unregulated intoxicating hemp needed to end. The only question was whether it ended through regulation or recriminalization. The industry's political choices helped ensure it got the worse of the two.

The Regulated Market Waiting to Absorb It

The bitter twist for hemp operators: the regulated market they fought to contain is now positioned to inherit their customers.

Florida's medical program — roughly 890,000 registered patients, approximately $2.25 billion in annual sales, and nearly 700 dispensaries statewide — remains the second-largest cannabis market in America. Trulieve dominates with over 160 Florida locations and roughly half of statewide flower sales, now amplified by its NYSE listing, DEA registrations, and 280E relief flowing through its medical-only structure. Verano's MÜV banner, Curaleaf, Surterra, Green Thumb's RISE stores, the creditor-owned Ayr Wellness footprint, Sunburn, and the FLUENT assets now under Vireo's umbrella round out a fiercely competitive field that has endured price compression by getting operationally leaner.

When hemp-derived THC disappears from Florida shelves in November, the demand doesn't vanish — Smith's own customers prove it. It migrates: some to the illicit market, yes, but much of it to the medical program, where a card is now easier to obtain than ever and where the Supreme Court's recent gun-rights ruling just removed the single biggest enrollment deterrent for Florida's firearm-owning demographic. Every top operator in the state is quietly modeling the Q4 patient bump.

The Bottom Line

The Florida hemp industry is asking Trump for mercy it refused to extend to its cannabis competitors. Perhaps it gets a partial reprieve — the CBD carve-out is genuinely warranted, and the Barr framework of taxation and regulation is where this ends eventually. Shiffman is right that the category is too big to disappear.

But if the lifeline comes, it should come with the condition the industry has dodged since 2019: full regulation — testing, tracking, age-gating, taxation, and licensing on par with the operators who built compliant businesses. The hemp industry bet millions that prohibition would protect its arbitrage. The bet failed, the arbitrage is closing, and the market it tried to strangle will be there to collect.

In Florida cannabis, karma keeps a ledger. November 12, it comes due.

📈 Dog Walkers

$OGI ( ▲ 1.63% ) Highlights Sanity Group

Organigram just gave investors their first look at the Sanity Group acquisition in action — and the early returns suggest the company paid for exactly what it's getting.

The business update revealed that since the acquisition closed April 15, Sanity has maintained approximately 10% market share in Germany and performed in line with revenue expectations established at the time of the deal. Critically, the recently announced German regulatory changes on reimbursement eligibility for medical cannabis won't materially impact the business — reimbursement-based sales represent just 1% of Sanity's total revenue, insulating Organigram from the policy shift that rattled parts of the German market.

On the home front, Organigram continues to hold the crown as Canada's #1 cannabis company by market share, with category leadership across the segments that matter most: #1 in flower (12.5%), #1 in vapes (14.5%), and #2 in pre-rolls (7.3%) — categories that together represent more than 86% of Canadian recreational retail sales. The company also posted meaningful year-over-year gains in beverages (+3.1 points) and concentrates (+3.3 points).

The June trend data addresses the quarter's soft spot. After vape share declines earlier in Q2, Organigram stabilized and improved all-in-one vape share by roughly a point month-over-month, with sequential improvements in pre-rolls and infused pre-rolls as well. Total Canadian share ended June at 11.1% — down 0.4 points year-over-year but up 100 basis points versus May, an early signal that Q2's operational fixes are taking hold.

CEO James Yamanaka confirmed the milestone ahead: Q3 results on or about August 11 will mark the first consolidated quarter including Sanity's international contribution, followed by a comprehensive Digital Investor Session in late September covering global strategy and capital allocation.

Canada's market leader is now a transatlantic platform. August is when the numbers start proving it.

$VREOF ( ▲ 0.81% ) Completes PA Acquistion

Vireo Growth doesn't announce deals and let them linger — it closes them. Pennsylvania is now officially on the map.

The company announced the completion of its PhytoNatural acquisition, executed jointly with Vive Penn, LLC — its joint venture with Hive Holdings — securing a Pennsylvania medical cannabis retail permit that authorizes up to six dispensaries in the Commonwealth, subject to regulatory approvals. Total consideration was $20 million: $8 million in cash paid by Vive at closing, plus approximately $12 million in 645,161 Vireo subordinate voting shares at a deemed price of $18.60 per share, to be issued two years post-closing.

The deferred equity structure is worth noting — it's become Vireo's signature deal architecture. Pushing share issuance out two years preserves near-term float, aligns sellers with long-term performance, and lets the company keep deploying its $137.8 million cash position across multiple simultaneous transactions without excessive immediate dilution.

Pennsylvania is a prize worth the structure. The state's medical program serves nearly 450,000 registered patients with $1.7 billion in annual sales under a limited-license framework — and looming adult-use legislation, whenever Harrisburg finally moves, would transform the value of any retail footprint overnight. CEO John Mazarakis has called it entry into "one of the country's leading limited-license cannabis markets."

The tally keeps growing: Schwazze, Eaze, Hawthorne, FLUENT, C21, Bridgewell, HA-MD, the Glass House JV, the Johnstown buyback — and now Pennsylvania closed. Site selection for the Vive dispensaries is underway.

Eleven states and counting. The Vireo machine doesn't idle.

📺 Trade To Black

The Political Fight for Cannabis Just Exploded | TTB Weekly Recap

• CAOA as Midterm Play: Senate Democrats revived full federal legalization the day after the ALJ hearing concluded — timing that appears aimed as much at the midterm elections as at passage, with political competition potentially pressuring the Trump administration to finalize Schedule III faster.

• Hearing Record Favors Rescheduling: The federal government strongly defended rescheduling throughout the ALJ proceeding, while several opposition witnesses struggled to challenge the scientific and legal case for moving marijuana to Schedule III.

• Big Pharma Enters Psychedelics: Eli Lilly agreed to acquire AtaiBeckley for approximately $2.8 billion — a landmark validation of the sector that puts a spotlight on Compass Pathways and Definium Therapeutics as the major remaining independent psychedelic developers.

• Hemp Deadline & Deal Flow: The November 12 hemp ban looms with carriers and payment processors expected to restrict businesses early, while Curaleaf-Cannara's supply agreement, MariMed's new Betty's Bite-A-Mins wellness chew, and Tilray's £1 million BrewDog bar tab rounded out the week's company news.

💸 The Tape

On Thursday — one day after the DEA's rescheduling hearing concluded — Sen. Cory Booker, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Sen. Ron Wyden reintroduced the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act (CAOA), a sweeping proposal to deschedule cannabis entirely, expunge federal convictions, create an FDA Center for Cannabis Products, impose federal excise taxes up to 25%, and stand up a Cannabis Justice Office at DOJ. The press release quotes are stirring. Booker invokes the failed War on Drugs. Schumer says "the movement is budding." Wyden jokes about reefer madness.

If it all feels familiar, that's because it is. This is the third consecutive Congress in which this exact bill has been filed — and if history is any guide, it will meet the exact same fate as its predecessors: a press conference, a news cycle, and a quiet death without so much as a committee markup.

The Receipts

Let's review the record, because the record is damning.

In 2018, Schumer announced — on 4/20, naturally — that he was introducing legislation to decriminalize marijuana. It went nowhere. In 2020, the Democratic-controlled House passed the MORE Act, a full descheduling bill. The Senate never touched it. The House passed it again in 2022. Same result.

Then came the CAOA saga. Schumer, Booker, and Wyden released a "discussion draft" in July 2021 with enormous fanfare, promising comprehensive reform was imminent. The actual bill didn't arrive until July 2022 — a full year later — and never received a hearing, a markup, or a vote. It was refiled in May 2023. Same outcome. Now it's back in July 2026, filed by a party that no longer controls the chamber, with zero Republican co-sponsors, zero path to sixty votes, and zero chance of reaching the floor.

And here's the part that should make every cannabis operator's blood pressure spike: during the years Democrats held the White House, House, and Senate simultaneously — 2021 and 2022 — they passed nothing. Not legalization. Not banking. Not expungement. Schumer famously blocked the SAFE Banking Act — a bill with bipartisan support that had passed the House seven times — because he insisted comprehensive reform had to come first. Comprehensive reform never came. Neither did banking. The industry got neither the whole loaf nor the slice, because the majority leader held the achievable hostage to the aspirational and then delivered neither.

Even President Biden's contribution — the scheduling review he initiated in October 2022 — was slow-walked so thoroughly that the DEA hearing process stalled for fifteen months and died without a single day of testimony. The rescheduling Democrats now dismiss as "merely" incremental? Their own administration couldn't finish it in over two years. It took a Trump executive order and a Blanche directive to get it done in months.

So forgive the skepticism when the same three senators, now in the minority, refile the same bill the day after a Republican administration's rescheduling hearing concludes. The timing isn't legislative strategy. It's counterprogramming. The CAOA in 2026 is not a bill designed to pass — it's a bill designed to remind Democratic base voters who the "real" cannabis champions are, just as Trump threatens to permanently claim an issue Democrats spent a decade treating as a messaging prop.

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Why This Is Actually Good News

Here's the twist: this transparently political filing may end up being one of the most helpful things Democrats have done for cannabis reform in years — precisely because of how the Trump administration is likely to respond to it.

This White House does not share issues. It claims them. Trump has already demonstrated — with rescheduling, with the psychedelics executive order, with the Medicare CBD pilot — that he views cannabis and drug policy reform as his legacy items, taken directly from the Democrats' abandoned playbook and executed while they watched. The political logic is straightforward: cannabis reform polls at supermajority levels, including with independents and a growing share of Republicans. Whoever delivers it owns it.

Now Schumer and Booker have publicly framed the contrast: Trump is "merely" reclassifying while Democrats would "fully legalize." That framing is meant as an attack. But inside the White House, it reads as a challenge — and a warning that if the administration stalls, hedges, or lets the ALJ recommendation gather dust, Democrats will spend 2028 campaigning on the unfinished business.

The rational response from an administration that hates being outflanked? Finish the job, and finish it big. Adopt the ALJ's recommendation swiftly. Extend Schedule III to all marijuana. Push Treasury and FinCEN guidance out the door. Lean on Senate Republicans to move the banking bill that Tim Scott is already warming to. Every step Trump takes toward completion is a step that makes the CAOA look redundant — and that's exactly the dynamic the industry should want: two parties competing to deliver, instead of one party pandering and the other prohibiting.

For fifteen years, cannabis reform suffered from the opposite dynamic — Democrats who talked and didn't act, Republicans who acted only to block. The CAOA filing, cynical as its timing may be, formalizes a new competition. Democrats have planted their flag at full legalization. If Trump wants to deny them the issue — and everything about his political instincts says he does — the only move is to keep delivering tangible reform faster than they can hold press conferences about theoretical reform.

The Bottom Line

Judge the CAOA by the standard its own sponsors set: they had total control of Washington and produced nothing. They blocked banking while promising everything. Their administration slow-walked the very rescheduling they now belittle. Three filings, zero hearings, zero votes.

But politics is a game of pressure, and pressure is finally pointed in the right direction. The Democrats' bill won't become law. What it will do is make absolutely certain that a president who despises being upstaged has every incentive to take the ALJ's forthcoming recommendation and run through the finish line with it.

Sometimes the most productive thing an empty gesture can do is provoke a real one. The industry should send Schumer a thank-you note — and address the follow-up to the White House.

📈 Dog Walkers

$TLRY ( ▲ 0.34% ) BrewDog pays for a $1M Bar Tab for UK World Cup Fans

The company's BrewDog brand announced a £1 million bar tab for football fans across England, Scotland, and Ireland, running from July 20 through September 30 at participating Tilray-owned pubs. Fans can redeem two free pints per person through BrewDog's Treats loyalty platform — show the QR code, collect the beers, celebrate the summer of football. First-come, first-served until the million runs dry.

CEO Irwin Simon framed the activation around community: "The greatest moments in sport are not defined only by the scoreline... they are defined by the people who come together to share them."

Strip away the sentiment and the strategy is sharp. The mechanics require Treats enrollment — meaning every free pint converts a walk-in football fan into a registered loyalty member with a digital wallet card and marketing opt-in. A £1 million tab that builds a permanent customer database across three countries is customer acquisition dressed as generosity — and smart acquisition at that.

The timing stacks with Tilray's broader summer sports blitz: SweetWater's World Cup activations in Atlanta, Village Farms' WK Duo-Pack in the Netherlands, and now BrewDog anchoring UK match-day culture with watch parties extending into auto racing, golf, and the August return of top-flight football.

For a company rebuilding BrewDog toward its former $1 billion valuation ambitions, packed pubs, full screens, and a loyalty funnel running at capacity all summer is exactly the playbook. The beer is free. The data — and the repeat visits — are the payment.

📺 Trade To Black

Early Repayments, Hemp Bans & Market Games: The Episode Wall Street Should Watch | TTB by Flowhub

• Lending Data Deep Dive: FundCanna CEO Adam Stettner shares exclusive market-specific lending data — what operators are borrowing for, which state markets show strength, and what an early repayment cycle reveals about improving operator health and cash flow under Schedule III.

• Earnings Season Preview: The lending trends offer a leading indicator heading into Q2 cannabis earnings, with debt paydowns ahead of schedule suggesting stronger balance sheets across the industry than headline stock prices imply.

• Cohodes Unfiltered: Famed short seller Marc Cohodes breaks down how naked shorting, spoofing, and manipulation tactics distort small-cap markets — and why cannabis stocks have been particularly vulnerable to these games.

• Glass House's NYSE Moment: Cohodes and Anthony preview the upcoming bell-ringing ceremony for Glass House Brands (NYSE: GLAS) — the second U.S. plant-touching operator on a senior exchange — plus his take on the November 12 hemp ban and what it means for the industry.

💸 The Tape

Bloomberg lit the fuse Wednesday night, reporting Eli Lilly was in talks to buy AtaiBeckley. By Thursday morning it was no longer a rumor: the two companies announced a definitive agreement. Lilly will pay $6.75 per share in cash, valuing AtaiBeckley's equity at roughly $2.8 billion, with a contingent value right worth up to an additional $2.50 per share (about $1 billion) tied to development and regulatory milestones for lead asset BPL-003 and follow-on VLS-01.

Do the math and the message is loud. The cash portion alone is a ~40% premium to AtaiBeckley's 30-day VWAP, and 26% above Wednesday's $5.36 close. Shares gapped up 30%+ on the open. This is the moment big pharma officially entered the psychedelic arms race — and it won't be the last deal of its kind.

The counterintuitive part

Two days ago, if you'd asked us to rank the three scaled psychedelic pure-plays — AtaiBeckley, Definium (the former MindMed), and Compass Pathways — by near-term take-out probability, AtaiBeckley would have been third. It has the earliest-stage lead asset of the group. BPL-003, an intranasal synthetic 5-MeO-DMT for treatment-resistant depression, is only in Phase 3 preparation, with initial pivotal data not expected until 2029. Compass is filing its NDA this quarter. Definium already has one positive Phase 3 in hand.

So why did the least de-risked company get bought first? Because that's exactly how the smart pharma playbook works, and it's worth internalizing if you're trading this sector.

Lilly didn't pay a full, launch-ready premium. It bought optionality at a discount and structured the deal to push risk back onto sellers. BPL-003 carries FDA Breakthrough Therapy Designation and produced genuinely strong Phase 2 numbers — a single 10mg intranasal dose drove a ~12.6-point MADRS reduction by Day 2 that held to Day 85. But the pivotal readout is years out. Rather than pay up for certainty, Lilly paid a modest cash premium now and loaded the upside into a CVR that only pays if BPL-003 and VLS-01 actually deliver. It's a way to bridge the valuation gap between what a seller wants and what a buyer will underwrite: you take the base case in cash, and the bull case becomes a coupon you only clip if the science works.

Just as important, Lilly wasn't buying a single molecule. AtaiBeckley is a platform of rapid-acting neuroplastogens — BPL-003, plus VLS-01 (DMT buccal film) and EMP-01 (R-MDMA) — with a discovery engine behind it. For a company already spending upward of $10 billion (potentially $25 billion) across eight acquisitions in its current M&A spree, a $2.8B upfront bolt-on that broadens the neuroscience franchise into TRD and hard-to-treat psychiatric disorders is a rounding error with asymmetric payoff. Lilly gets a beachhead in the category for the price of a single-asset premium.

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What it means for the two companies still standing

The deal doesn't just reprice AtaiBeckley. It sets a comp for the entire space — and puts a spotlight on Compass and Definium as the two remaining independent pure-plays of real scale.

Compass Pathways (CMPS) is the closest thing to a launchable product in psychedelics. COMP360, its synthetic psilocybin, cleared both pivotal trials (COMP005 and COMP006), with durable six-month benefit and a differentiated rapid-onset profile in TRD. It holds a rolling NDA, a Commissioner's National Priority Voucher, and expects to complete its filing in Q4 — launch-ready by year-end, commercial launch targeted for the first half of 2027. It's sitting on roughly $466 million in cash.

Here's the nuance the Lilly deal creates: Compass just became more valuable and more expensive at the same time. More valuable because a marquee acquirer validated the whole thesis and the Street already frames Compass as a target for CNS-hungry buyers — J&J (obvious Spravato synergy in interventional psychiatry), AbbVie, and AstraZeneca all get named. More expensive because "closest to launch" means the premium to take it out is the richest in the group. If Lilly's move was about buying cheap optionality, a Compass deal is the opposite trade — paying up for a de-risked, near-revenue asset. Both can be rational for different buyers.

Definium (DFTX) is the higher-beta bet and, in our read, the most likely next domino. Its LSD-derived DT120 ODT posted the best raw efficacy signal in the sector — the Phase 3 Emerge study in MDD showed an 8.1-point placebo-adjusted MADRS improvement (p<0.0001), materially larger than the psilocybin numbers, with the effect still significant at Week 12. Definium is also the only one of the three attacking both MDD and GAD at pivotal stage (DT120 has Breakthrough Therapy Designation in GAD), with two more Phase 3 readouts — Panorama and Voyage — due in Q3 2026, plus the confirmatory Ascend MDD trial. It's cheaper than Compass and carries ~$373 million in cash into 2028.

The swing factor is those Q3 readouts. A single positive Phase 3 still leaves replication risk that disciplined acquirers discount. But if Ascend and the GAD trials hit, Definium arguably leapfrogs Compass on strategic value, because LSD-derived DT120 addresses broader primary-care-adjacent populations than a TRD-first psilocybin. That data is the next catalyst worth pre-positioning around.

The re-rank

For a take-out today, our order on the remaining field:

1. Compass — most de-risked, most strategically obvious, richest premium. J&J is the name to watch.

2. Definium — highest upside, one confirmatory dataset from being fully in play. Q3 GAD/Ascend data is the trigger.

AtaiBeckley is off the board. The uncomfortable truth for anyone who ranked it last: the market's read on "acquirability" conflated time-to-revenue with deal-readiness, and pharma just showed us those aren't the same thing. Buyers will pay for platform and early optionality when the price is right — they don't wait for the finish line.

The bigger picture

This is the tailwind the sector has waited a decade for. Layer in the executive order directing the DEA to fast-track review of psychedelic treatments that complete Phase 3, and the setup is clear: a legitimizing acquirer, a regulatory on-ramp, and two obvious next targets with catalysts on the calendar.

For years, psychedelic investing sat on the fence between "will it work" and "will anyone pay for it." Lilly just answered the second question with $2.8 billion. Expect the list of buyers to grow from here, not shrink.

📈 Dog Walkers

$CMPS ( ▼ 0.22% ) Publishes Critical Data

Compass Pathways just published data that answers one of the most consequential questions hanging over its regulatory path: is COMP360 a drug, or is it drug-assisted therapy?

According to a new post-hoc analysis published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, the answer is unambiguous — it's the drug. The analysis of support methods in Compass's open-label Phase 2 PTSD study found that 78% of administration sessions were spent in silence, with interactions between patients and support providers described as minimal, non-directive, and largely outside patients' awareness during treatment.

Chief Medical Officer Dr. Guy Goodwin drew the line explicitly: "It is incorrect to describe the treatment we are developing as psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy." The findings, he said, reinforce that the rapid and durable symptom improvement observed in the trial "was attributable to the psilocybin drug experience" — with support providers serving as reassuring presence rather than active therapeutic participants.

The regulatory significance is substantial. The FDA approves drugs, not psychotherapy protocols — and the entanglement of drug effect with therapist-driven intervention was a central complication in Lykos Therapeutics' failed MDMA application in 2024. By demonstrating that patients "self-navigate" the experience with only reassurance and physical proximity as support, Compass strengthens the case that COMP360's efficacy is pharmacological, measurable, and replicable — exactly what regulators need to see.

With 26-week durability data expected this quarter and a rolling NDA submission targeted for Q4, Compass is systematically clearing the obstacles that stalled its predecessors. The silence in those treatment rooms may end up speaking loudest at the FDA.

$AVTBF ( ▼ 0.49% ) Reports Q2

Avant Brands delivered a quarter that requires reading past the headline numbers — because the story underneath is one of deliberate short-term pain for long-term positioning.

The ultra-premium Canadian producer reported Q2 2026 net revenue of $7.8 million, down 8% year-over-year, with adjusted EBITDA swinging to negative $1.2 million from positive $1.2 million a year ago. But the declines weren't demand-driven — they were self-inflicted by design. Avant took staggered room closures at its Flowr facility, its largest, to execute a nearly $2 million capital improvement program converting the entire facility to high-efficiency LED lighting — upgrades designed to cut electrical demand, increase capacity per square foot, and elevate product quality. Notably, $1.8 million in government grant proceeds directly funded the project — non-dilutive capital that most small-caps can only dream about.

Where demand showed up, it showed up loudly. Recreational revenue jumped 31% in the quarter and is up 34% year-to-date, driven by dominant Ontario market positions: BLK MKT™ ranked #1 in premium flower ($8.60+/gram) — outperforming more than 60 competing brands — and held the #1 spot in single pre-rolls above 1 gram. Tenzo™ claimed the #2 best-selling 14-gram SKU in the province and the #1 multi-pack milled product.

The balance sheet work is equally striking. CEO Norton Singhavon highlighted that Avant has eliminated nearly 90% of its total debt in under 24 months — from $8.1 million to just $1.03 million — while cash more than doubled to $3.3 million and the company generated $1.7 million in operating cash flow over six months.

The export wholesale decline (-29%) bears watching, and negative EBITDA is never comfortable. But a company with category-leading brands, near-zero debt, positive operating cash flow, and freshly upgraded capacity heading into the second half looks a lot like one that traded a rough quarter for a stronger multi-year setup.

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ALJ Hearing Is Officially Over | TTB Presented by Flowhub

• Anticlimactic Finish: The ALJ hearing's final day wrapped surprisingly early at 12 PM Eastern with no dramatic exchanges or late-breaking developments — closing the evidentiary record on the sixteen-day proceeding, with Gretchen Gailey reporting the final details from Arlington.

• States' Closing Witnesses: Nebraska, Idaho, and Indiana presented the final testimony, calling Dr. Deepak D'Souza — a VA psychiatrist and Yale School of Medicine professor — to reinforce their scientific opposition to rescheduling.

• The Illicit Market Argument: Second witness Sheriff William Honsal of Humboldt County challenged the premise that legalization is the fastest way to eliminate the illicit market — drawing on his experience in California's most notorious unlicensed cultivation region.

• Now We Wait: With the record officially closed, the process moves to post-hearing briefs and the ALJ's recommended decision to the DEA — the findings that will determine whether all marijuana follows medical cannabis to Schedule III and shape the next phase of federal policy.

💸 The Tape

The FDA just gave the psychedelic therapeutics industry two things it has been asking for since the sector's inception: a finalized regulatory rulebook and a seat at the table. For the companies racing toward the first psychedelic drug approvals in American history, the timing could not be better.

On Monday, the agency published its finalized guidance — "Psychedelic Drugs: Considerations for Clinical Investigations" — providing formal recommendations for sponsors developing therapies based on psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, and related compounds. Simultaneously, the FDA announced a public hearing on September 14 to gather perspectives on the "potential future therapeutic use" of psychedelic drug products in supervised and supportive settings.

Together, the two announcements represent the clearest signal yet that the FDA is not merely tolerating psychedelic drug development — it's building the infrastructure to regulate an approved market.

What the Guidance Actually Says

The finalized document builds on the draft version first published in 2023, incorporating public comments received over the intervening years. Its core message: psychedelic programs face "the same regulations and same evidentiary standards for approval as other drug development programs" — but the agency acknowledges these compounds present "unique challenges" that require tailored solutions.

Chief among them is the functional unblinding problem. Psychedelics "cause intense perceptual disturbances and alterations in consciousness that can last for several hours or days," the FDA notes — which means patients, therapists, monitors, and raters can often tell who received the active drug and who received placebo. That creates expectation bias in both directions: participants who experience perceptual changes may expect to benefit, while placebo recipients may expect not to. Designing well-controlled trials around that reality is one of the field's defining scientific challenges, and the guidance provides recommendations spanning chemistry, manufacturing, abuse potential assessment, and clinical pharmacology.

The document also acknowledges what makes these compounds therapeutically distinctive: they "can have both rapid-onset and long-term benefits after only one or a few doses" — a treatment paradigm fundamentally different from daily psychiatric medication, and one the regulatory framework must accommodate.

The September Hearing: Building the Post-Approval World

The public hearing announcement may be even more consequential than the guidance. The FDA is explicitly seeking input on four topics: provider training and credentialing, patient safety promotion, considerations for access, and best practices for data collection and standardization.

Read those topics carefully. They aren't questions about whether psychedelic therapy should exist. They're questions about how to operationalize it — who administers it, how patients are protected, how access is structured, and how real-world data gets captured. The agency was equally explicit about what it's not discussing: the merits of any pending application, CSA scheduling, legalization, or religious use.

This is what an agency does when it expects to approve something. You don't convene federal panelists and subject matter experts to discuss provider credentialing for a treatment class you intend to reject.

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The momentum behind this is unmistakable. The guidance and hearing follow President Trump's executive order directing accelerated psychedelic research and access, the April HHS/FDA announcement on expediting therapeutic access for serious mental health conditions, a bipartisan letter from 32 members of Congress urging faster reviews, a new bill to codify the executive order into law, a proposed NDAA amendment extending DOD psychedelic research for six years, and legislation requiring the Pentagon to evaluate psilocybin's benefits for service members. Washington is not debating whether psychedelic medicine is coming. It's preparing for its arrival.

Compass Pathways: The Immediate Beneficiary

No company stands to gain more from regulatory clarity than Compass Pathways — because no company is closer to the finish line. Compass has completed both Phase 3 trials of COMP360 psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, with COMP005 and COMP006 both meeting primary endpoints, and its critical 26-week durability data expected this quarter. The company has secured FDA agreement for a rolling NDA submission, holds a Commissioner's National Priority Voucher, and is targeting submission in Q4 2026 with launch readiness by year-end.

For Compass, the September hearing is effectively a planning session for its own commercial launch. Provider training, treatment-setting standards, and access frameworks are exactly the questions COMP360's REMS program and delivery model must answer. Sitting on $466 million in cash, Compass now has the FDA publicly building the administrative scaffolding its product will launch into.

Definium Therapeutics: Validation for the Blockbuster Data

Definium enters this moment with the strongest clinical results in the field — the Emerge Phase 3 trial of DT120 (lysergide) ODT delivered an 8.1-point placebo-adjusted MADRS improvement from a single dose, durable through 12 weeks, backed by a fresh $700 million raise led by four bulge-bracket banks. The finalized guidance directly de-risks Definium's remaining program: its confirmatory studies now proceed under a settled framework rather than draft recommendations, and the guidance's extensive treatment of functional unblinding — the primary methodological critique aimed at psychedelic trials — gives Definium a validated playbook for defending its data. When your Phase 3 results are this strong, the biggest remaining risk is regulatory ambiguity. The FDA just removed a meaningful piece of it.

AtaiBeckley: A Cleaner Path for the Pipeline

AtaiBeckley benefits across its entire portfolio. The company just dosed the final patient in Elumina, its 156-patient Phase 2b trial of VLS-01 — a DMT-based oral transmucosal film with a commercially attractive two-hour treatment session — with topline data expected in Q4. Its intranasal mebufotenin candidate BPL-003 is already in Phase 3 for TRD with Breakthrough Therapy Designation. For a company planning to advance VLS-01 into Phase 3 for major depressive disorder next year, finalized guidance means those pivotal trials get designed against known regulatory expectations from day one — no mid-program goalpost shifts. And the hearing's focus on supervised and supportive settings aligns precisely with atai's short-session thesis: if the FDA is standardizing what a psychedelic treatment setting looks like, the compound requiring two hours of monitoring instead of eight holds a structural advantage.

The Bottom Line

The psychedelic sector has raised over $1 billion in recent months on the strength of late-stage clinical data. What that capital was ultimately betting on is the moment the FDA stops treating psychedelics as a research curiosity and starts treating them as an approvable — and administrable — class of medicine.

That moment is now visible. Finalized guidance. A September hearing on post-approval logistics. An executive order, congressional pressure, and multiple bills pushing in the same direction. And three companies — Compass with its imminent NDA, Definium with its historic data and war chest, atai with its multi-asset pipeline — positioned to convert regulatory clarity into approved products.

The FDA just published the rulebook and scheduled the planning meeting. The first approvals are no longer a question of if. They're a question of which company gets there first — and all three are sprinting.

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Idaho Refuses To Move Forward

Idaho just reminded everyone why it remains the most prohibitionist state in America — and the deck may be getting stacked permanently.

The Secretary of State's Office announced that the Idaho Medical Cannabis Act initiative failed to qualify for the November ballot, falling short of the required 70,000+ signatures (6% of registered voters) and the geographic threshold of 6% in at least 18 of 35 legislative districts. The measure, spearheaded by the Natural Medicine Alliance of Idaho, would have allowed patients with conditions like cancer, PTSD, epilepsy, and chronic pain to access medical cannabis with physician documentation.

The group called the outcome disappointing but vowed to continue: "The demand Idahoans expressed through this campaign is not going away."

Here's the twist — voters will see a cannabis question in November, just not the one advocates wanted. Lawmakers placed a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would grant only the Legislature — not voters — the power to legalize marijuana or other psychoactive substances. If it passes, citizen-led cannabis initiatives in Idaho would be permanently foreclosed.

While Idaho testified against rescheduling at the ALJ hearing and every neighboring state has legalized in some form, the Gem State is moving to lock prohibition into its constitution. The contrast with the rest of the country has never been starker.

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ALJ Hearing Nears the Finish Line | TTB Presented by Flowhub

• Curaleaf's Spain First: Curaleaf became the first company registered in Spain for standardized THC-dominant and CBD-dominant cannabis preparations under Royal Decree 903/2025, clearing the pathway for hospital-dispensed medical cannabis in a country of nearly 50 million people.

• Cannara Supply Deal: Curaleaf signed a long-term international supply agreement with Cannara Biotech worth up to C$21 million, positioning the Québec producer as a key bulk-flower supplier for Curaleaf's global medical markets — and accelerating Cannara's Valleyfield expansion by roughly a year.

• States Take the Stand: Michael Bronstein breaks down the final stretch of the ALJ hearing as Nebraska, Idaho, and Indiana present their testimony — the last designated opponents before the proceeding wraps, with federalism and enforcement arguments expected to dominate.

• The Finish Line: With the hearing concluding and post-hearing briefs ahead, Bronstein outlines what investors should watch next — the ALJ's recommendation timeline, the pending D.C. Circuit stay ruling, and how the two parallel tracks could converge to shape rescheduling's final outcome.

💸 The Tape

Sixteen days. Eight presenting parties. Zero cameras. And one central question: does the rest of marijuana follow medicine into Schedule III?

The DEA's Administrative Law Judge hearing on broader cannabis rescheduling wraps up tomorrow in Arlington, Virginia, closing the evidentiary record on the most consequential drug policy proceeding in the history of the Controlled Substances Act. After more than two weeks of testimony, cross-examination, and procedural skirmishing, the shape of what happened is clear — and it didn't unfold the way the opponents planned.

The Highs: The Government's Case Landed

The proceeding opened June 29 with the government presenting as the proponent of the rule, bearing the burden of proof — and its two witnesses delivered moments that will echo through the post-hearing briefs.

Dominic Chiapperino, director of the FDA's controlled substance staff, did something no federal health official had ever done in an adversarial proceeding: he acknowledged under oath that cannabis has accepted medical uses in the United States, while comparing its abuse and safety profile favorably to alcohol and opioids. For an agency that spent five decades operating under the premise that marijuana has no medical value, that testimony wasn't just evidence — it was institutional history being rewritten in real time.

Dr. Corey Burchman supplied the clinical texture, testifying from direct experience that medical cannabis is "extremely helpful in chronic pain patients," that physicians "avidly" use it to limit opioid prescribing, and that some patients transitioned off painkillers entirely. His comparison of withdrawal syndromes — opioids as "a dumpster fire," cannabis as "a dying glowing ember of a campfire" — may be the most quotable line the federal record has ever produced on the subject.

And then came the concession nobody expected: under cross-examination, one of SAM's own key witnesses acknowledged that cannabis meets the statutory definition for Schedule III. When the opposition's expert validates the government's legal position, the evidentiary record doesn't just favor rescheduling — it becomes difficult to write a recommendation against it.

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The Lows: An Asymmetric, Closed-Door Process

The hearing's structural flaws were real, and they cut in both directions. Every designated participant besides the government — NDASA, SAM, DUID Victim Voices, Dr. Kenneth Finn, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Dr. Phillip Drum, and the states of Nebraska, Idaho, Indiana, and Louisiana — opposed the rule. Every reform organization that sought entry, including NORML and the Drug Policy Alliance, was rejected as insufficiently "aggrieved." The result was a proceeding where the opposition's claims were tested only by government attorneys, with no consumer, patient, or industry voice at the table.

Judge Derek Julius also refused to livestream the proceeding — despite the DEA having permitted livestreaming of the cancelled Biden-era hearing, and despite acknowledging the "national public interest" in transparency. Marijuana Moment's formal reconsideration request went nowhere. A hearing that will shape federal drug policy for a generation was conducted before whoever could find a seat in Arlington.

The Opponents' Record-Building Problem

Here's the strategic tension that defined the back half of the hearing: the opponents weren't really litigating the question in front of the judge. They were building a record for the D.C. Circuit.

Judge Julius set the scope with precision on day one: the hearing would consider only whether marijuana beyond the already-rescheduled medical categories should move to Schedule III. The April medical rescheduling was explicitly off the table — "no evidence or testimony will be received on that matter."

Yet much of the opposition testimony ignored that boundary in spirit if not in letter. NDASA's presentation centered on drug-testing industry economics — MRO revenue losses, employer policy costs — harms that flow from the medical rescheduling already in effect, not from the prospective question before the ALJ. SAM's case leaned heavily on procedural attacks against the Blanche order and the two-part CAMU test — the exact arguments at the heart of its D.C. Circuit lawsuit, not the scheduling criteria the judge was tasked to weigh. The state attorneys general, presenting tomorrow, are expected to emphasize federalism and enforcement disruption — sovereignty arguments aimed at Article III courts, not administrative factors under Section 812.

The pattern was unmistakable: pediatric exposure statistics, product potency variability, diversion anecdotes, and FDA data-gap critiques — much of it relevant to regulation, little of it responsive to the statutory question of whether marijuana has a lower abuse potential than Schedule I and II substances and an accepted medical use. On those actual criteria, the government's evidence went largely unrebutted, and the opposition's own witness conceded the central point.

That's not accidental lawyering. It's a hedge. If the ALJ recommends Schedule III — as the record now strongly suggests — the opponents will take their procedural and harm arguments to the D.C. Circuit, where the consolidated challenge and stay motion are already pending. The hearing, for them, was discovery and record-building for the litigation they actually believe they can win.

The DEA's Mandate Is No Longer Ambiguous

Perhaps the most significant revelation of the sixteen days wasn't any single piece of testimony — it was the government's posture. The DEA, the institution that stalled the Biden-era process for fifteen months and spent fifty years enforcing prohibition, showed up as an advocate for rescheduling. Its attorneys defended the rule vigorously, resisted SAM's attempt to call a DEA pharmacologist whose prior testimony linked cannabis to psychosis, and presented affirmative evidence of medical acceptance and comparative safety.

This is what a federal mandate looks like. The Trump executive order, the Blanche rescheduling directive, the compressed hearing timeline, the DOJ's aggressive brief against the stay motion, the on-site inspections treating dispensaries as legitimate registrants — every arm of the administration is pulling in the same direction. The agency's institutional ambivalence hasn't vanished, but it has been overridden. The government wants cannabis in Schedule III, said so under oath, and built the record to support it.

What Happens Next

Post-hearing briefs follow on a compressed schedule, and Judge Julius will then issue a recommended decision — likely within weeks given the pace Blanche has demanded. The recommendation goes to the DEA Administrator and ultimately the Acting Attorney General, who holds final authority.

The realistic outlook: a record dominated by government evidence, a scope the opponents largely declined to engage, and a concession from the opposition's own expert. If the ALJ follows the evidence, the recommendation is Schedule III for all marijuana — with a final order possible by late 2026, litigation permitting.

The opponents came to Arlington to stop rescheduling. What they mostly did was preview their appeal. The record closes tomorrow. The fight moves to the courts. And the federal government — for the first time in history — is on cannabis's side of the courtroom.

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$LOVFF ( ▲ 1.47% ) Inks Major EU Supply Agreement

Cannara Biotech just landed the international deal it's been building toward — and the partner is the biggest name in global cannabis.

The Québec-based producer announced a long-term international supply agreement with Curaleaf International for bulk cannabis flower destined for global medical markets, with a potential aggregate contract value of up to C$21 million over the term. The agreement commences August 1, 2026, with renewal provisions — marking Cannara's first long-term supply commitment for international markets.

The operational implications are immediate. Cannara has activated two additional cultivation zones at its Valleyfield facility, bringing production to 14 of 24 grow zones (each spanning 25,000 sq. ft.), with four more zones planned by the end of fiscal 2027. Once complete, annual production capacity reaches 75,000 kg — hitting Cannara's target roughly one year ahead of its original fiscal 2028 timeline.

The EU-GMP pathway is particularly clever. Curaleaf will support Cannara's pursuit of EU-GMP certification at Valleyfield's processing center. In the interim, all flower supplied under the agreement will be dried and processed at Curaleaf's EU-GMP certified Canadian facility before release into international markets — meaning Cannara can access European demand immediately while building its own certification.

Boris Jordan, fresh off Curaleaf's first-mover registration in Spain, praised Cannara's "impressive cultivation platform" and "clear commitment to quality." Cannara CEO Zohar Krivorot called the deal validation of everything built at Valleyfield: "This opportunistic agreement allows us to leverage our existing cultivation platform to deliver premium Québec-grown cannabis to international patients."

For Cannara — No. 1 in Québec market share, growing nationally, and leveraging the province's low energy costs — the deal converts cultivation efficiency into international revenue without distracting from its core Canadian strategy. With fiscal Q3 results dropping tomorrow, the timing of this announcement is no accident.

Québec-grown flower is going global. Curaleaf is the ride.

$MRMD ( ▲ 6.65% ) Launches Multi-Vitamin

Betty's Eddies is going after the multivitamin aisle — with a cannabinoid twist.

MariMed's flagship edibles brand announced the launch of Betty's Bite-A-Mins, a daily wellness chew combining full-spectrum cannabis, 30 mg of CBD, and the recommended daily allowance of Vitamin C, Vitamin D3, and Zinc in a tropical smoothie-flavored bite made with all-natural ingredients and organic fruits.

The product concept is smart positioning. Rather than competing solely within the crowded cannabis edibles category, Bite-A-Mins targets the intersection of two mainstream consumer behaviors: the daily multivitamin routine that millions of Americans already follow, and the growing interest in functional wellness products that stack multiple benefits into a single format. Brand Director Sara Rosenfield said the product came directly from consumer feedback: "Our consumers consistently tell us they're looking for products that fit seamlessly into their daily routines."

The 30 mg CBD dose also answers demand for higher-potency CBD options — a segment that's gaining relevance as clinical-grade cannabinoid conversations (including the CMS CBD pilot program) push consumer awareness of CBD's wellness applications beyond the low-dose products that defined the category's first wave.

Bite-A-Mins joins Betty's Eddies' effect-based lineup — Bedtime Betty's for sleep, Take It Easy Eddies for stress, Go Betty Go for energy, Ache Away Eddies for pain — a portfolio architecture built around specific consumer outcomes rather than generic THC content. That approach has made Betty's Eddies one of the top-selling edible brands in its markets and a consistent award winner.

The new SKU rolls out at MariMed's Thrive Dispensary locations and licensed retailers across Massachusetts, Maryland, Illinois, Delaware, Maine, and Rhode Island.

For MariMed — fresh off its DEA registration filings and posting 44% adjusted EBITDA growth — the launch reinforces what has always differentiated the company: brands built for actual consumer needs, not just shelf space.

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280E Tax Fight: IRS Pushes Back on Cannabis Refunds | TDR Cannabis in 5

• The 280E Refund Battle: The IRS is pushing back against amended tax returns filed by major MSOs — including Trulieve, Verano, Curaleaf, TerrAscend, and Ascend Wellness — seeking to reclaim millions in taxes previously paid under Section 280E.

• Refunds Under Fire: Some companies already received refunds on their amended filings, and the IRS is now taking legal action to recover money it argues should never have been paid out in the first place.

• Schedule III Isn't Retroactive: The core legal issue — while rescheduling may eliminate 280E for qualifying medical operators going forward, the IRS maintains that prior tax years remain governed by the law in effect at the time, meaning Schedule I treatment applies to past returns.

• High-Stakes Uncertainty: With court cases underway and Treasury guidance still pending, hundreds of millions of dollars in potential refunds hang in the balance — making this one of the most consequential financial stories in cannabis heading into the second half of 2026.

💸 The Tape

The hemp industry has four months left under its current federal definition — and the walls are closing in from every direction at once. Congress set the deadline, but it's the shipping carriers, e-commerce platforms, and state legislatures that are enforcing the ending early.

On November 12, 2026, Section 781 of the appropriations act signed last fall takes full effect, replacing the 2018 Farm Bill's delta-9-only standard with a total THC definition (capturing THCA, Delta-8, and other isomers) and imposing a 0.4 milligram total THC cap per container on finished products. For context, a typical hemp gummy contains 25 mg and a THC seltzer 5-10 mg. The U.S. Hemp Roundtable estimates the new definition eliminates approximately 95% of current hemp-derived products — from a market valued at roughly $28 billion supporting 300,000 jobs and generating $1.5 billion in state tax revenue.

But operators planning to run full speed until November 11 are discovering a harsher reality: the commercial infrastructure is shutting down ahead of the law.

The Carriers Are Already Out

FedEx has taken the most restrictive posture of any major carrier. Its prohibited items list bars cannabis, THC, and marijuana-derived CBD entirely — regardless of state legality — and even federally compliant hemp ingestibles have triggered seizures and account terminations. Unlike UPS, which typically returns non-compliant packages, FedEx will destroy suspect shipments without notice or compensation, and vendors report the highest seizure rate of any carrier. The practical industry consensus has hardened: FedEx is simply not a viable channel for hemp commerce, and most serious operators stopped trying.

USPS still permits compliant hemp shipping under Publication 52 with COA documentation, and UPS operates a gated program requiring dedicated accounts, signed hemp agreements, batch-specific lab results, and adult-signature delivery. But what operators describe as a 2026 "crackdown" is real: stricter shipper vetting, more frequent documentation demands, and faster account terminations after any complaint or inspection exception. Vape products remain entirely banned from direct-to-consumer shipping under the PACT Act across all carriers. And come November 13, most hemp gummies and beverages become non-mailable through every major carrier simultaneously — collapsing the interstate e-commerce model the industry was built on.

The Platforms Are Following

The e-commerce layer is tightening in parallel. Shopify, which has long operated hemp sales under a restrictive attestation framework requiring sellers to certify federal compliance, faces the same November cliff: products exceeding 0.4 mg total THC per container will no longer qualify as federal hemp, and platforms are expected to block those sales entirely rather than absorb the legal exposure of facilitating Schedule I commerce. Industry compliance analysts widely anticipate that Shopify, Square, Stripe, and mainstream payment processors will cut ties with non-compliant hemp merchants well before the deadline — mirroring the de-banking wave that hit CBD in its early days. Operators are already reporting increased documentation demands and merchant account reviews. The message from the commerce stack is unambiguous: the off-ramp is now, not November.

The State Patchwork: Four Markets, Four Realities

Ohio moved first and hardest. Senate Bill 56, signed by Governor Mike DeWine in December 2025, imposed a categorical ban on intoxicating hemp products — one of the most restrictive frameworks in the country, pushing products into dispensary-only channels. The backlash was immediate: a coalition operating as Ohioans for Cannabis Choice launched a signature drive to place a repeal referendum on the November 2026 ballot, and litigation challenging the ban has added a layer of legal uncertainty, with courts and regulators moving in different directions simultaneously.

Virginia took the regulated-middle path early. The commonwealth adopted a total-THC standard with a 2 mg per-package cap under SB 903 back in 2023 — effectively previewing the federal framework years ahead of schedule and gutting its intoxicating hemp retail market. With the state's adult-use retail launch now set for July 1, 2027 under the budget compromise, Virginia's trajectory is clear: cannabinoid commerce is being channeled into the licensed marijuana system, with hemp relegated to genuinely non-intoxicating products.

Florida remains, for now, one of the most permissive major markets — following federal alignment with a mature hemp retail sector spanning smoke shops, gas stations, and dedicated hemp stores. THCA flower and full-strength hemp derivatives remain widely available. But that permissiveness has an expiration date: absent congressional intervention, the November 12 federal redefinition applies in Florida just like everywhere else, and the state's massive hemp retail footprint — which survived multiple legislative ban attempts vetoed or defeated in prior sessions — faces the federal guillotine regardless of Tallahassee's inaction. Potential ballot activity in November adds another variable.

Missouri is the murkiest of the four. The state nominally follows federal alignment despite its recreational marijuana program, but attorney general enforcement actions have pushed THCA and intoxicating hemp into legal gray territory, with retailers facing crackdowns under consumer-protection theories. Meanwhile, HB 2541 — opposed by the U.S. Hemp Roundtable — would reclassify hemp-derived cannabinoids as marijuana under state law, restricting production and sales exclusively to licensed marijuana operators and expelling existing hemp businesses from the market entirely. Missouri illustrates the emerging endgame in adult-use states: fold intoxicating hemp into the licensed cannabis system or eliminate it.

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What Comes Next

Two rescue vehicles are circulating in Congress: a proposed two-year delay of the ban and a carve-out for low-dose products — the 5 mg edibles and 10 mg beverages that have gone mainstream at Target and liquor stores. Reports that the Trump administration has engaged Congress about softening the ban have given the industry a flicker of hope, and the beverage category has powerful retail allies. But hope is not a compliance strategy, and nothing has passed.

The rational read for operators: the carriers are enforcing early, the platforms will cut off before the deadline, four state models are converging on dispensary-channel consolidation, and the federal definition changes in four months. The hemp era as the industry has known it ends November 12 — unless Congress acts, the only question left is how orderly the wind-down will be.

The clock isn't just ticking. The infrastructure is already leaving.

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$CURLF ( ▲ 10.42% ) Plants Flag In Spain

Curaleaf just planted its flag first in Europe's next major medical cannabis market — again.

The company announced that Spain's Agency of Medicines and Medical Devices (AEMPS) has formally approved registration of two standardized cannabis preparations — one THC-dominant, one CBD-dominant — developed by Curaleaf's Spanish manufacturing subsidiary. Based on the official registry numbering (CAN-1 and CAN-2), Curaleaf is the first company to register standardized preparations under Royal Decree 903/2025, Spain's new medical cannabis framework.

The decree, approved in October 2025, established Spain's first clear national pathway for patients to access standardized cannabis preparations through the healthcare system. Curaleaf's registrations clear the way for supply to hospital pharmacies, where the preparations will be used in magistral formulas prepared pursuant to medical prescription.

The first-mover positioning is no accident. Curaleaf has operated an EU-GMP certified facility and R&D laboratory in Alicante for years, and its Medalchemy subsidiary secured the first-ever AEMPS license to process medicinal cannabis derivatives back in May 2020. The company literally built the foundation for this moment over six years.

CEO Boris Jordan called it "a defining moment," noting Spain's nearly 50 million people have always been central to Curaleaf's European vision: "We were the first company to be licensed here in 2020, and we believe we are the first to register under this new framework today."

With Germany's Four 20 Pharma, the UK's Lyphe platform, Portuguese cultivation, and now first-registrant status in Spain, Curaleaf's international moat keeps widening — while most U.S. competitors are still figuring out how to get to Europe at all.

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DEA Rescheduling, SAFE Banking & More | TTB Weekly Recap

• ALJ Hearing Bombshell: One of SAM's own key witnesses acknowledged under cross-examination that cannabis meets the statutory definition for Schedule III — a significant concession as the hearing entered its second week, while the DOJ pushed back against the latest legal effort to halt rescheduling.

• Banking & Ballot Battles: The American Bankers Association renewed its call for Congress to pass SAFE Banking, while Massachusetts officially certified its adult-use repeal initiative for November and Texas lawmakers signaled another hemp THC ban push for the 2027 session.

• Company Milestones: Glass House completed its first international sale (CBD biomass to Europe), Cannara Biotech secured exclusive Canadian rights to Blue River's Ampersand™ live rosin technology, and Vireo Growth announced a market-making agreement to enhance stock liquidity.

• Psychedelics Progress: AtaiBeckley dosed the final patient in its Phase 2b depression trial for VLS-01, with topline data expected in Q4 — joining the wave of late-stage psychedelic readouts arriving before year-end.