Nobody Knows: An Honest Update on Cannabis in North Carolina
People ask me what's going to happen with cannabis in North Carolina. I've been watching, reading, and writing about this industry — the politics, the science, the confusion — since we opened in 2019. You'd think I'd have an answer by now.
My honest answer: I don't know. Nobody does.
That's not a dodge. That's the most accurate thing anyone in this business can tell you right now. But I can tell you what I do see, what I think it means, and what I'm watching for — which is probably more useful than the confident predictions circulating in the media and around the NC General Assembly.
What's Actually Moving Right Now
Here's the honest landscape as of spring 2026, with no spin:
Federal rescheduling of marijuana. On December 18, Trump signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to complete the rescheduling of marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III — the first meaningful federal reclassification since 1970. Senator Ted Budd of North Carolina promptly led a letter signed by 22 Republican colleagues urging Trump to reverse course. The letter warned that rescheduling would "undermine your strong efforts to Make America Great Again" and argued that "the only winners from rescheduling will be bad actors such as Communist China." I am not making that up. Trump dismissed their concerns publicly, noting that an overwhelming majority of Americans support the reform. Then, on April 23 of this year, the DOJ moved forward anyway — partially rescheduling FDA-approved and state-licensed marijuana to Schedule III and ordering an expedited hearing beginning June 29. Budd's letter did not land.
North Carolina's Cannabis Advisory Council. Governor Stein's advisory council released its interim report on April 2, recommending that the General Assembly create a regulated adult-use cannabis market in North Carolina. NC Newsline covered it well. The council's position is blunt: the status quo is not an option. North Carolina is currently one of only ten states with no medical or adult-use program, and the unregulated market — the council calls it a "wild west" — serves no one well. The General Assembly just opened its short session. What the legislature does, or doesn't do, in the coming weeks matters enormously.
The November deadline. This is the one I can't stop thinking about. A provision in the Continuing Appropriations Act creates a federal deadline tied to a total THC standard that would effectively make THCA flower illegal. That's our largest product category, and it's the core revenue driver for most hemp shops in the country. If nothing changes by November, stores like ours face a genuine crisis. This isn't theoretical — it has already happened in other Southern states. Shops closed. Inventories became worthless overnight. The industry stopped.
A Southern Thing
Here's something that deserves to be said plainly: the states that have moved to restrict or ban hemp aren't simply red states — they're Southern states. That's a meaningful distinction.
Western red states — Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas — have largely moved toward legalization or left the industry alone. The legislative resistance is concentrated in the South, and I think that's worth naming honestly, because I think it's connected to something much older than the current political debate.
Cannabis prohibition in America has always had a racial dimension. Marijuana was criminalized in the early 20th century partly through deliberate association with Black and Brown communities — a way of turning a plant into a threat by associating it with people who were already being criminalized. The South, with its particular history of using law enforcement as a mechanism of racial control, absorbed that logic deeply. Hemp and marijuana became part of a longer story about what gets criminalized and who gets targeted.
That history doesn't vanish because we're in 2026.
But here's what I also believe: it isn't going to hold much longer. People are figuring out — and the data supports this — that cannabis is used across every racial and ethnic group in roughly equal proportions. It's not somebody else's thing. A lot of people in the South like cannabis. They always have. They're going to get it whether it's legal or not, and that's becoming too visible to ignore. People are also waking up to who funds the opposition — certain pharmaceutical interests, the alcohol lobby — and what they're actually protecting. That curtain is coming down.
What I Think Is Really Happening
Taken together — the rescheduling moving forward despite congressional resistance, the governor's council report, the federal deadline, and the obvious commercial demand — I think these represent a genuine shift, not just noise. Something is moving. The question is no longer really whether things change. It's how they change, and for whom.
Here's what worries me more than whether cannabis gets legalized: who gets to participate when it does?
Right now, most of this industry is made up of small operators — independent shops, small farms, boutique producers. We got in early, took the risk, built the expertise and the customer relationships. In a real sense, we are the industry.
What history tells us, in state after state where cannabis has been legalized, is that the licensing structures that follow tend to reward whoever has the most capital and the best lawyers. Compliance costs, application fees, zoning requirements, vertical integration rules — these things look neutral on paper and aren't neutral in practice. Over time, in mature cannabis markets across the country, smaller independents have been squeezed out not because they failed at retail, but because the regulatory architecture wasn't built with them in mind.
There's a version of what comes next in North Carolina where that pattern repeats — where you end up getting your cannabis at a chain pharmacy or a corporate dispensary, and the shops that built this industry from nothing don't qualify for a license.
That's what I'm watching for. And it's the question I'd encourage anyone following the short session to keep in mind: not just whether a bill passes, but who it's actually written for.
Keep Watching
The short session is underway. The June 29 federal rescheduling hearing is on the calendar. The November deadline is real. A lot can happen between now and the end of the year, and I'll keep writing here as it does.
If you want to dig into the primary sources, start with the council's interim report. It's worth reading — not just as a cannabis document, but as a window into how North Carolina is thinking about one of the more consequential policy questions it's faced in a while.
Nobody knows what's coming. But something is.
— Sam Post