Federal cannabis policy is moving faster in 2026 than it has in half a century. In April, the Drug Enforcement Administration issued an order downgrading state-licensed medical marijuana and FDA-approved cannabis medications from Schedule I to Schedule III, and expedited hearings on rescheduling marijuana altogether are underway this summer. On November 12, a new, broader federal definition of hemp takes effect, closing the loophole that filled gas stations and convenience stores with intoxicating hemp-derived THC products.
These are consequential changes, and we understand why they dominate the headlines. But neither rescheduling nor the hemp fix answers the question that matters most for public health. That question is not whether Americans will have legal cannabis — most already live in states that allow it in some form. The question is how it will be sold.
As public health researchers who have spent years studying drug policy, we favor legalization — with strict, strongly enforced rules that minimize the risks to health. Unfortunately, our research finds that cannabis regulation falls far short of that standard. The problem isn’t legalization. The problem is how we’ve chosen to legalize: by defaulting to a kind of Wild West capitalism that treats drugs like any other consumer product rather than as substances that carry real risks and deserve serious regulation.
What We Found In The Stores
From a public health standpoint, legalization does not mean “no rules.” It means the opposite. It means using the tools of civil governance — licensing, taxation, product standards, marketing restrictions, public education, and enforcement — to make drugs less harmful, not more profitable. It means ending incarceration for drug use while still making harmful substances harder to access, less potent, and less appealing, especially to young people.
Measured against that standard, state cannabis markets are failing — not only in how their rules are written, but in whether the rules operate at all. In our (CB and SB) research — repeated mystery-shopper audits of 130 licensed cannabis retailers in Denver, Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles — about 90 percent of retail staff, when asked, endorsed cannabis for anxiety and insomnia in 2025, including in states that explicitly prohibit such health claims. More than 40 percent failed to warn against driving after use. A companion point-of-sale audit of 161 retailers found similarly widespread violations of marketing and signage rules, from missing required warning signs to youth-oriented packaging. Across three years of audits, we have found high levels of evasion and noncompliance with even the weak rules now in place.
Commercialization Was A Choice
Those findings are not the work of a few bad actors. They are the predictable output of the system we built when we handed cannabis over to the logic of corporate competition. In much of the country, legal cannabis markets now revolve around price wars, ever-increasing potency, and relentless promotion. Companies compete to sell stronger products more cheaply, in more appealing forms, with branding that would be familiar to anyone who remembers Big Tobacco or Big Alcohol in their unregulated heyday. Meanwhile, enforcement of even the modest rules on the books — warning labels, advertising restrictions, sales limits — is often weak or nonexistent.
The result is entirely predictable. We have normalized heavy use, expanded access, and created powerful commercial interests whose legal obligation is not to public health but to shareholder value. And once those interests are entrenched, they become very hard to dislodge.
We have run this experiment before. Regulations that we know reduce consumption of alcohol — the drug that causes the most harm to Americans — have steadily weakened: taxes have eroded to a tiny fraction of the retail price, and courts have chipped away at advertising restrictions. High-risk alcohol products are cheap, widely available, and aggressively marketed — and alcohol-related harm has been going up instead of down. If cannabis follows the arc of tobacco and alcohol, the accumulating costs of commercialization — more impaired driving, more emergency department visits, more dependence, more damage to mental health — will eventually build political pressure for action. But entrenched corporate influence will push the response downstream, toward more treatment here and a warning campaign there, while resisting the upstream controls that actually reduce harm.
Why Getting This Right Matters
Virtually all psychoactive drugs cause harm. Some cause great harm. At the same time, most also produce pleasure, and many have therapeutic or culturally embedded uses. Crucially, the most serious harms do not occur for most people who use. That combination — real risk, real pleasure, uneven harm — is what makes drugs like cannabis such a difficult public policy problem to solve.
We suggest that the most important public health goal is to reduce the total amount of suffering in society: the suffering caused by drugs themselves, and the suffering caused by how we try to control them. That means reducing harmful use, overdose, dependency, and long-term health consequences — but also incarceration, criminal violence, racial injustice, environmental destruction, and geopolitical chaos. Fifty years of the War on Drugs show what happens when policy ignores that second category: two decades of record overdose deaths, prisons filled with people whose primary offense was drug-related, criminal empires enriched, entire regions destabilized — and no meaningful reduction in drug availability. A serious drug policy can’t pick and choose among these harms; it must address all of them. Legalization done right is how. Legalization run as pure commerce is not.
A Regulatory Agenda For The Schedule III Era
What we need is a regulatory model that lets America get comfortable legalizing drugs without surrendering control. Most of that work belongs to the states, where cannabis regulation actually lives. It means strictly limited licenses and sales outlets. Real restrictions on potency. Meaningful taxes that raise prices without fueling an illicit market. Bans on advertising and promotion to the extent the First Amendment allows. Prominent health warnings. And enforcement treated as a core public health function rather than an afterthought — routine compliance audits, with penalties that change retailer behavior, funded by cannabis tax revenue dedicated to prevention, treatment, and oversight rather than absorbed into general budgets.
Federal motion creates openings, too. Rescheduling will ease the research restrictions that have starved regulators of the evidence they need; that opportunity should be used deliberately. As cannabis commerce gains federal legitimacy, the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission should treat unsubstantiated therapeutic claims by cannabis sellers the way they treat unlawful health claims for any other consumer product. And the hemp standard taking effect in November will be an early test: Congress has now written a strict rule for intoxicating products, and whether that rule is enforced will tell us whether we have learned anything. A strict law weakly enforced is precisely the failure our data document in state markets.
Above all, we need a regulatory frame that treats drugs as inherently risky products whose availability should be constrained, not expanded — and a commitment to redirecting the resources we now spend on prohibition and punishment into prevention and care. Cannabis should be the proving ground for a smarter approach — not a cautionary tale that scares us back into criminalization or onward into unfettered drug capitalism.