This Week in Cannabis News | March 14, 2025

Welcome to our new Friday program, This Week in Cannabis News, powered by Dutchie.

Each Friday at 10 a. m. Eastern, we'll deliver an overview of this week's cannabis news.

We will be quick, we'll be comprehensive, we'll send you into the weekend as a more informed cannabis professional, and it's all made possible by our friends at Dutchie. You can find and connect with the team there through our link in the show notes.

Let's get to it.

DEA rescheduling rigged?

The delayed process to reclassify cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III has been the subject of much hand-wringing among the cannabis community. The Drug Enforcement Administration-led hearings were supposed to kick off in January, but they’ve been delayed indefinitely. Depending on who you ask, this is either a positive or negative signal. But many pro-reform parties clearly believed that DEA had no intention of rescheduling, and in fact, stacked the deck for the prohibitionist agenda. According to news this week, the DEA rejected participation requests from Colorado and New York officials in support of rescheduling as part of the witness selection process for the hearing. The agency also allegedly assisted almost a dozen anti-cannabis reform groups, like Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), who were selected as witnesses. This information comes from publicly available court documents after Doctors for Drug Policy Reform (DDPR), a pro-reform group, brought a lawsuit.  Dr. Bryon Adinoff, the president of DDPR said: “We’re better off arguing the case where we are now than going forward and having it not work in our favor,”

Wana Brands rolls out THC drinks nationwide 

One of the best known brands in North America – Wana Brands – announced this week that they are rolling out its line of hemp derived, THC-infused beverages to Total Wine & More stores in nine states including Florida and North Carolina. This is another example of the growing trend of traditional THC companies expanding their footprint by offering hemp-derived products outside the adult-use and medical cannabis channels.

A deep, WSJ dive into Colorado cannabis

This week there was a big new feature story in the Wall Street Journal that shined a spotlight on Pueblo, Colorado, which was set to be the ‘Napa Valley’ of cannabis after the state began commercial sales in 2014. The reality turned out to be anything but. 

In the story, Mason Tvert, who led the campaign for legalization in Colorado, acknowledged that market saturation and competition from other states had hurt cannabis businesses, but said the industry was maturing, not failing. Proponents of legalization, he said, never said it would save the economy. “People are upset that this isn’t solving all these problems that it was never intended to solve,” he said. 

Trudeau’s lasting cannabis legacy

Canada became the first major economy to federally legalize cannabis in 2018 under outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. According to a poll of 1,850 Canadians, legalization is the crowning achievement of Trudeau’s nearly ten years in office: Fifty-two percent say that legalization was his most successful policy, including a strong majority of Canadians between the ages of 18-34. Canadians, by and large, seem happy to be buying weed legally. The doom-and-gloom that some anti-legalization groups in the US predict would happen under federal legalization — like a massive uptick in teen use and violent crime — has not happened here in Canada. 

One Fun Thing this week… 

Actor and comedian Danny McBride had an extensive interview in this month’s issue of GQ. And within that interview, he posited an idea we might all be able to get behind. McBride said that weed and movies “go together f….ing perfectly” – in fact, he said, “If I went to a theater, and it was like, ‘Here’s your popcorn and here’s f…g weed,’ I feel like that would be an awesome little combo right there.” McBride said he and his friends tossed around the idea of opening a movie theater with a dispensary inside, called the Green Screen. But they haven’t committed — yet.

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That’s it for This Week in Cannabis News powered by Dutchie. 

Check back next Friday at 10 am Eastern right here on Cultivated’s LinkedIn page and YouTube channel.