For the Culture By The Culture
This week’s Reefer Report Card cuts through the hype around cannabis “rescheduling,” exposing how a label change left federal prohibition fully intact. Arrest authority, workplace punishment, and immigration penalties remain untouched. Headlines claimed progress. Reality delivered none. A week defined by performance over policy, and reform that never arrived.
Weed shops profit from cannabis culture while refusing to hire the people who shaped it. Insurers, compliance officers, and corporate rules punish cannabis users even in legal states. Testing myths, background screening, and liability fear filter out anyone with real experience. The result is a workforce designed to exclude the culture that keeps the industry alive.
Congress buried a hemp ban inside a federal funding deal and triggered a crisis that threatens farmers, retailers, processors, and millions of consumers nationwide. A microscopic THC limit will erase products, crush rural economies, and push people back toward alcohol or the underground. The fight now moves to the Farm Bill, where pressure can force lawmakers to fix what they broke.
Michigan’s new 24 percent wholesale cannabis tax is being sold as a road repair plan but looks more like a cash grab. Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s law faces a constitutional challenge from the Michigan Cannabis Industry Association, while NORML’s Paul Armentano warns that greedy taxation drives consumers back underground and destroys legal markets that voters fought to build. The weed war is back this time in a budget.
Health Canada’s recall of Chillows THC pouches exposes a deeper flaw in cannabis regulation: mislabeled potency, weak oversight, and labs chasing numbers over truth. Across North America, inflated THC counts and unreliable testing show how legalization’s promise of accuracy keeps slipping through the cracks. The high might be real, but the numbers are not.
Colorado regulators just banned Midnight Drops after reports linked the cannabis sleep aid to liver injuries. Nuka Enterprises and affiliates were fined $400,000 and booted from the state, but loopholes may allow their return. This is not about the plant. It is about corporate shortcuts, weak oversight, and the way scandals weaponize prohibitionist narratives against cannabis culture.
