12/13/2025
So true.
What consumers have gone through in the US to gain even a sliver of freedom with cannabis is something most will never fully understand. The arrests, the raids, the families torn apart, the patients forced to hide their medicine, the caregivers who risked everything to help someone in pain, that was the cost before a single legal storefront ever opened its doors.
Those early years were built on fear and hope mixed, because we were fighting for access to a plant that never should have been taken from us in the first place. We pushed forward anyway. We voted. We protested. We educated. We kept showing up even when the system refused to listen.
To have cannabis still sitting on Schedule 1 after all that history feels like an insult wrapped in bureaucracy. Schedule 1 was never about science. It was about control.
It claimed the plant had no medical use, even as thousands of patients found relief every day. It claimed danger where decades of lived experience showed otherwise.
It labeled us criminals for trying to heal. Even today, the echoes of that era shape how consumers are treated, from banking restrictions to research barriers to fear-driven policy decisions that ignore the real world.
The idea of moving cannabis to Schedule 3 gets presented as progress, but the truth is more complicated. Schedule 3 hands control to the pharmaceutical channels. It invites a level of regulation that pushes out small growers, community caregivers, and legacy operators who built this movement long before it was profitable.
It risks turning a natural plant into a prescription commodity while pushing the culture, the knowledge, and the compassion that defined the early movement to the sidelines. We do not want that because we know what happens when corporations take over. Access narrows. Prices rise.
The plant becomes something you need permission to use instead of something you grow, share, and learn from.
We fought too hard to hand cannabis over now. The plant brought many of us back to life. It does not belong behind the counters of a system that never believed in it.
-Mike Robinson, The Researcher OG
