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.
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.
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16 Aug 2026
Who Is Watching the Dispensary Parking Lot? (August 16, 2026)
🎙️ Powered by THC Group (www.homegrown-group.com), 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.
🔗https://www.homegrown-group.com/blog/who-is-watching
This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight.
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9 Aug 2026
The Power of Presence (August 9, 2026)
🎙️ Powered by THC Group (www.homegrown-group.com) , 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 (https://www.homegrown-group.com/blog/power-of-presence)
This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight.
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