Policy, Decoded

The Homegrown Consulting Group
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Policy, Decoded is a weekly podcast on cannabis and hemp policy for the people who have to act on a rule before it takes effect. Every Sunday, one argument given the room it needs, with a position at the end. The written briefing runs every weekday morning, and this is the piece that steps back from it. Written by Shawn Collins, inaugural Executive Director of the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission from 2017 to 2023, who built the state's cannabis program from nothing and ran it for six years. Read the written edition and the Deadlines, Decoded effective-date tracker at https://policy.homegrown-group.com/ Episodes are AI-assisted and reviewed before publication.

  1. Sep 20

    What If Bourbon Couldn't Leave Kentucky? (September 20, 2026)

    An eighth of cannabis costs $15 in Washington and $52 in Kentucky, where every buyer is a patient. A bottle of bourbon costs about the same in all fifty states. We run the experiment the other way and ask what happens if bourbon can't cross a state line, then follow four states that never traded a gram to the same $18 price. We look at who pays in an open market and who pays under a cap. The former regulator's bottom line: most of what a state charges above $18 is a decision somebody made. 🔗 https://www.homegrown-group.com/read-in/cannabis-prices-by-state This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight. Sign up to receive Policy, Decoded in your inbox

  2. Aug 16

    Who Is Watching the Dispensary Parking Lot? (August 16, 2026)

    🎙️ Powered by THC Group, Policy, Decoded steps back from the churn to unpack one policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and regulated markets. This week: on the drive to a dispensary you pass plate readers at the pharmacy, the bank, and the hardware store, and the only one any government required is the one pointed at people buying cannabis. We say plainly where we land, and it implicates us to say it: we wrote those camera rules, we would write most of them again, and we never wrote the sentence about who gets to search the footage. So we walk a Wisconsin criminal complaint that treated a lawful trip to Michigan as grounds for suspicion, the Illinois statute that banned out-of-state queries and forgot the penalty, and a Texas search that reached more than eighty thousand cameras and left a record only because a company keeps an audit log by choice. We run last week's product announcement against the Wisconsin case and watch it pass every new control. And we trace the Massachusetts rule that already got this right for one narrow class of footage, and the doorstep reasoning that says it should reach further. The former regulator's bottom line: the requirement was never the mistake, and leaving it where it sits would be. 🔗 Read the Sunday editorial This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight. Sign up to receive Policy, Decoded in your inbox

    Who Is Watching the Dispensary Parking Lot? (August 16, 2026)

  3. Aug 9

    The Power of Presence (August 9, 2026)

    🎙️ Powered by THC Group, Policy, Decoded steps back from the churn to unpack one policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and regulated markets. This week: the Senate tabled the hemp amendment at two in the morning, an entire market got a crash course in civics on the way out, and fire drills only reward the people who practiced. We say plainly where we land, and it costs us something to say: the most effective advocate is the person actually affected, almost never the professional, and this publication is paid to be the professional. So we unpack a career spent on the receiving end of lobbying, the survey in which nearly nine in ten career EPA staff admitted a story moved them, the eighty percent of federal dockets that draw ten comments or fewer, and the Colorado rulemaking where hearing testimony ranked dead last because the rules were settled months earlier in workgroups. We trace Tip O'Neill's neighbor who wanted to be asked, and the North Carolina hemp businesses who watched their own senator lead the charge against them. The former regulator's bottom line: the quiet years are where the leverage lives, and you are the one a policymaker will remember. 🔗 The Power of Presence: A Guide to Policy Advocacy This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight. Sign up to receive Policy, Decoded delivered daily to your inbox.

    The Power of Presence (August 9, 2026)

  4. Jul 18

    The Government Rests (July 19, 2026)

    🎙️ Powered by THC Group, Policy, Decoded steps back from the churn to unpack one policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and regulated markets. This week: the DEA's rescheduling hearing is over, the evidence is in, and the file it produced will matter longer than the headlines about it. For two and a half weeks, in a sealed hearing room with no cameras and a handful of public seats, the government argued under oath that cannabis belongs in Schedule III, and seven designated opponents argued back. We read the file the way a former regulator would. A government case that reversed fifty years of institutional position in a single morning, on the record for good. An opposition that put DEA's own scientist on the stand and watched its marquee witness concede the statutory question in a five-minute cross. And the 1988 precedent every operator should know: the judge who read the record most closely lost to the administrator who signed the order. The recommended decision is advice, the transcript is the document, and the real audience sits at the D.C. Circuit. The people who built this industry did their part without a hearing. The least the process can do is finish. 🔗 Read the Sunday editorial This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight. Sign up for Policy, Decoded.

    The Government Rests (July 19, 2026)

  5. Jun 28

    The Government Takes The Stand (June 28, 2026)

    🎙️ Powered by THC Group, Policy, Decoded steps back from the churn to unpack one policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and regulated markets. This week: after fifty years of calling cannabis dangerous and useless, the federal government has to stand up in a courtroom and argue the opposite, and the reform is overdue, right, and far easier to lose than anyone wants to admit. For fifty years the federal case against cannabis fit in a single sentence: dangerous, useless, Schedule I, filed next to heroin. On Monday, in a hearing room in Arlington, the same government has to prove the reverse, that the plant is medicine. We say plainly where we land. It is right, and it is fifty years overdue. The question is not whether it happens. It is whether the government can do the overdue thing without losing it on a technicality, or breaking the people who built the industry on the way in. So we unpack what the hearing actually is, dull administrative procedure, stacked with only opponents, deciding nothing by itself, and where the real fight has already gone, across the river to the D.C. Circuit, where April's medical reschedule is under challenge for the very shortcut that made it fast. We trace the shockwave already loose in the market, medical now in Schedule III and adult-use still in Schedule I, a fault line cutting through the same companies, the same shelves, the same customers. And we land where the rule never will, on the budtender, the grower, and the family that signed a personal guarantee, the people a Schedule III order will reach and never name. The former regulator's bottom line: a decision you cannot defend on appeal is just a reversal with a delay on it, and the fastest way to lose this reform is to win it badly. 🔗 Read the Sunday editorial This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight. Sign up for Policy, Decoded.

    The Government Takes The Stand (June 28, 2026)

  6. May 30

    To The Class of Schedule III (May 31, 2026)

    🎙️ Powered by THC Group, Policy, Decoded steps back from the churn to unpack one policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and regulated markets. This week: the cannabis industry just graduated to Schedule III, and the commencement address it is not going to get anywhere else. Every spring a famous stranger in rented robes tells a graduating class that the world needs them and the future is theirs. The cannabis industry got that speech in April, the morning the federal government moved part of it to Schedule III. The trade press called it a coming of age. This week we give the industry the other speech, the one a former regulator gives when the assignment is the truth. The diploma it collected is a receipt. It changed the tax bracket and little else. It could not hand over the one thing the industry was never permitted to keep. We walk the cast waiting outside the auditorium: lenders who already hold a lien on the bet, patients who trusted a number printed on a jar, and a tax code that still treats the graduate like the drug trafficker it was written for. We make the harder case underneath all of it, that the industry has no institutional memory, no one to carry a lesson from one state to the next, which is why Colorado wrote the book on oversupply and Michigan flooded its own market anyway. And we land where rescheduling cannot, on the responsibility the industry now owes the patients and customers who trusted it, the one that says do not make them pay twice for a lesson the state next door already learned. 🔗 Read the Sunday editorial This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight. Sign up for Policy, Decoded

    To The Class of Schedule III (May 31, 2026)

  7. May 17

    Vote No On Weed? (May 17, 2026)

    🎙️ Powered by THC Group, Policy, Decoded steps back from the churn to unpack one policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and regulated markets. This week: the campaign to repeal cannabis legalization in Massachusetts, and how the argument against legal weed quietly changed. Six kids went to a Detroit hospital this spring after getting into edibles at their elementary school. They are fine. They bought nothing. The product came from a house. By November some version of that story will be in Massachusetts mailboxes, because the repeal campaign has figured out something the industry has not. The old argument against legal cannabis was moral, and it lost. The new one leads with emergency rooms, lab fraud, and untested gas-station product. Most of it is true. That is what makes it work. We grant the prohibition case its strongest form and show what actually follows: every failure it names is an argument for governing the market better, not ending it. We follow the 1.55 million dollars behind the signature drive, from a source that will not say who funds it. And we land where the campaign does not want voters to land, on what repeal actually does, which is not return Massachusetts to a time before cannabis but to a time before the rules. 🔗 Read the Sunday editorial This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight. Sign up for Policy, Decoded

    Vote No On Weed? (May 17, 2026)

  8. May 10

    We Regulate Cannabis Like It Is Uranium (May 10, 2026)

    🎙️ Powered by THC Group, Policy, Decoded is the Sunday briefing that steps back from the churn and unpacks one consequential policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and regulated markets. This week, we sit with a complaint a former cannabis commissioner used to make: we regulate cannabis like uranium. She did not mean it as a compliment. The framework is heavy, and the industry has not built what would let it operate inside the framework with credibility intact. On Monday in Illinois, a class action filed in federal court named four of the largest cannabis companies in the country, alleging that they had marketed their products as therapeutically beneficial without adequate evidence. The complaint runs more than three hundred pages on behalf of thirty plaintiffs across thirteen states. Other industries have done the work cannabis has not. The nuclear industry built the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations after Three Mile Island. The alcohol industry built the Portman Group. Cannabis has built trade associations and best-practices documents. Neither clears the threshold the road ahead requires. This episode walks through what such an institution would actually do, the sequencing fight that has to happen first, the working examples from other regulated industries, the failure modes that have brought down voluntary self-regulation in the past, the cost arithmetic, and the calendar that gives the institution-building project a deadline. November 12th. June 29th. Less time than the vapor industry had, and the vapor industry did not survive its window. The room where the institution gets built is currently empty. The question this episode closes on is when somebody is going to call the meeting. 🔗 Read the Editorial: https://www.homegrown-group.com/blog/regulate-cannabis-like-uranium This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight.

    We Regulate Cannabis Like It Is Uranium (May 10, 2026)
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About

Policy, Decoded is a weekly podcast on cannabis and hemp policy for the people who have to act on a rule before it takes effect. Every Sunday, one argument given the room it needs, with a position at the end. The written briefing runs every weekday morning, and this is the piece that steps back from it. Written by Shawn Collins, inaugural Executive Director of the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission from 2017 to 2023, who built the state's cannabis program from nothing and ran it for six years. Read the written edition and the Deadlines, Decoded effective-date tracker at https://policy.homegrown-group.com/ Episodes are AI-assisted and reviewed before publication.

Information

  • Creator
    The Homegrown Consulting Group
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    43
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © The Homegrown Consulting Group
  • Show Website
    Policy, Decoded