Guest Op-Ed by Gretchen Gailey, President of Project Champion
If there is one lesson the cannabis industry should have learned by now, it’s this: Washington does not run on urgency. It runs on process, power, and patience.
For more than a decade, advocates, entrepreneurs, veterans, patients, investors, and policymakers have been told that federal cannabis reform is just around the corner. One more election. One more committee vote. One more White House signal. And yet, even with the President’s directive to reschedule cannabis to Schedule III, the industry remains in limbo. Businesses are still largely locked out of banking. Patients remain vulnerable. Communities promised equity are still waiting.
The uncomfortable truth is that Washington is working exactly as designed. Change, especially disruptive change, takes time. It takes money. And then it takes more time.
That reality is frustrating. But ignoring it has cost the cannabis industry dearly.
Too often, reform is framed as if moral clarity alone should be enough. As if the injustice of prohibition, overwhelming public support, or the sheer economic scale of cannabis should naturally compel Congress to act. But Washington does not move on righteousness. It moves when incentives align, when pressure is sustained, and when the cost of inaction outweighs the cost of change.
That does not happen overnight.
What’s often missing from the conversation is education, not just public education, but congressional education. Many lawmakers shaping cannabis policy are not experts in the industry, the plant, or the unintended consequences of prohibition. Yet their understanding directly affects how, and whether, reform is implemented. Too often, members rely on cursory staff briefings, outdated assumptions, and legacy narratives that have gone largely unchallenged.
That education gap matters now more than ever as the administration moves toward Schedule III. Without sustained, credible engagement that …
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Author: High Times Contributors / High Times
