Welcome to The Hot Cut—where pop culture gets sliced, scandal gets spiced, and secrets get exposed.
I’m Lisa T., and this is where satire meets scar tissue.
You didn’t hear it from me… but let’s dive in.
Welcome to the Trap
Come to California. Smoke the weed. Get arrested for it.
And God forbid you try to make a decent, honest living from it as a small-batch business.
That’s the real motto these days. The state that was once hyped as the epicenter of cannabis freedom has become a regulatory maze designed to trap its own people.
While glossy billboards and influencer dispensaries lure tourists with the promise of legal highs, residents are left dodging new bans, navigating legal gray zones, and praying their CBD shipment doesn’t get flagged at the border.
SimplyMary.co—just one of many small vendors operating within the legal boundaries of the 2018 Farm Bill—is now barred from shipping to California. Not because they did anything wrong. But because the state keeps moving the goalposts, criminalizing natural cannabinoids in real time, with no public understanding and zero scientific clarity.
The California Dream? For many, it’s become a bureaucratic nightmare.
The Legal Illusion
We were sold the fantasy of legal weed. What we got was a corporate monopoly and an endless game of "gotcha."
The 2018 Farm Bill legalized hemp at the federal level—defined as cannabis with less than 0.3% Delta-9 THC. It also opened the door for cannabinoids like THCA, Delta-8, and others that don’t get you high in raw form but convert during combustion. For years, that was the loophole. And it was legal.
Until California said, actually—no.
In 2024, the California Department of Public Health enacted an emergency ban on intoxicating hemp cannabinoids, including THCA, without any legislative vote. Then in June 2025, they moved to make that ban permanent. Now, vendors can’t ship products into the state, even if those products are federally compliant.
Ask yourself: if a product is legal in 49 states—but not here—who’s really being protected?
The language is confusing on purpose. “Total THC.” “Converted THC.” “Synthetics.” Even lawyers can’t agree. And that’s the trap. If you can’t understand the law, you can’t follow it. Which means anyone can be made a criminal.
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Big Pharma’s Backdoor Deal
This ban isn’t about safety. It’s about power.
If California were truly concerned about the health of its citizens, it wouldn’t greenlight pharmaceutical ads for synthetic opioids while banning natural cannabinoids that have never caused a single fatal overdose.
Instead, what we see is a pattern: crack down on homegrown medicine just as Big Pharma and Big Cannabis move in with patents, proprietary strains, and lab-grown isolates. The state creates scarcity—and then sells access back to you at ten times the price.
Newsom’s donors are doing just fine. Companies like Glass House—run by ex-cops like Kyle Kazan, who spent years enforcing cannabis prohibition—now dominate the licensed market. They, along with other multi-state operators with deep political connections, are consolidating the market.
And let’s not forget: during the COVID lockdowns, Newsom designated cannabis growers and dispensary workers as "essential" employees, allowing operations to stay open and cash to keep flowing while Californians struggled with existential dread, insomnia, and financial collapse.
But now, when citizens try to access non-intoxicating hemp-derived options like THCA and CBD from reputable sources, they’re told it’s too risky. This kind of hypocrisy feels too familiar—it echoes Newsom’s French Laundry scandal, where rules for the people didn’t apply to the powerful.
Was cannabis essential to public health in 2020 only because it helped the state’s bottom line? Or was it simply another industry he was willing to exploit—until the corporate deals were done?
Newsom’s buddies are still doing just fine. Small farmers? Not so much.
The “Safety” Scam
The state says it’s about safety. That’s the go-to justification for tighter restrictions, higher licensing fees, and surveillance-level compliance.
But let’s get honest:
Wine is full of pesticides, molds, and heavy metals. No one’s requiring QR codes for every grape.
The spirits industry isn’t forced to test each bottle for microbials. You can still legally sell bathtub gin if you slap a craft label on it.
Cigarettes kill nearly half a million Americans annually—and they’re still sold at every gas station.
So why is cannabis—a plant with no fatal overdose history—the most overregulated agricultural product in the country?
The answer isn’t public safety. It’s public gatekeeping.
California requires individual barcode tags on every plant. Track-and-trace software. Quarterly fees. Lab testing bottlenecks. Labeling mandates so precise they’d bankrupt most backyard farmers.
And who gets pushed out? The small-scale, living-soil cultivators. The legacy growers. The ones making medicine, not product. The ones who could easily sell at your local farmers market if the law allowed.
But the state doesn’t want sovereign citizens growing sovereign plants. It wants surveillance, not soil.
It’s Not “Too Strong”—You’re Just Disconnected
Let’s address the concern I hear most from skeptics:
"Cannabis is too strong these days. It’s not like it used to be."
To those people, I ask:
Are you as discerning about how your cannabis is cultivated as you are with the food you eat?
Did it ever occur to you that maybe the cannabis of your youth was just weak?
Could it be that your body is reacting so strongly because it’s been deprived of something it actually needs?
What if what you’re feeling isn’t intoxication—it’s recalibration?
We have cannabinoid receptors for a reason. They’re part of our endocannabinoid system, which regulates mood, appetite, pain, inflammation, and more. Maybe cannabis feels intense today because we’ve spent decades starving that system.
It reminds me of a friend who once told me that butter lettuce upset her digestion. Turns out, it didn’t upset her—it reset her. Her bowels were so backed up that a basic plant was treated like an invader. But a daily dose of fiber would’ve prevented the whole issue.
Cannabis is like that. It’s not necessarily too strong. We’ve just grown too disconnected.
Paranoia Isn’t the Problem—It’s the Mirror
Here’s something else I’ve noticed over the years:
People who say they get “paranoid” when they’re high? They’re often the ones who emotionally mask the most.
Cannabis doesn’t create paranoia. It removes your filters. It opens the door to the thoughts you’ve been suppressing. Old memories. Buried grief. Uncomfortable truths.
It doesn’t cause discomfort. It reveals it.
For those who live their lives wearing armor—people-pleasing, suppressing, surviving—cannabis can feel like an ambush. But that flood of awareness isn’t damage. It’s the beginning of healing.
If a plant can bring up buried truth in fifteen minutes, why would a system built on silence ever let that stay legal?
The Culture Is Medicine, Too
This isn’t just about cannabinoids and commerce. It’s about culture—and that’s under threat too.
The cannabis community didn’t just preserve the plant. It preserved the ethos—the spirit of care, curiosity, nonconformity, and healing. And now, that culture is being rewritten in corporate fonts and packaged for TikTok ad buys.
It’s the ancestral growers who kept these strains alive when it was still dangerous to do so. It’s the herbalists and backyard farmers, the old-school glassblowers, the podcasters and plant educators, the spiritual seekers and medical refugees who turned suffering into sovereignty.
These are the people who made cannabis sacred. Who made it safe. Who taught others how to use it wisely.
But they don’t fit the new model. They're too messy. Too honest. Too independent. So they’re being replaced—by influencers, branded dispensaries, and clinical white-label packaging that strips away everything that made cannabis human.
And at times, most hypocritically, the very police officers who used to participate in cannabis busts are now retired and more than happy to make money off a system that rewards those with the deepest pockets.
What’s being lost isn’t just access. It’s memory. It’s culture. It’s the collective intelligence of a people who dared to build community around a plant.
The culture is medicine, too. And it deserves to be protected.
Compassion Was the Point—And It’s Being Erased
California’s cannabis movement began with compassion.
Proposition 215, passed in 1996, was the first medical marijuana law in the United States. It protected patients suffering from AIDS, cancer, and chronic illness—and empowered caregivers and small collectives to grow and distribute medicine with minimal oversight. For two decades, this system sustained a decentralized, community-based model built on trust, healing, and lived experience.
The inflection point? Proposition 64, passed in 2016, which legalized adult-use recreational cannabis. On paper, it promised equity, regulation, and tax revenue. In practice, it delivered corporate consolidation, legal complexity, and a slow-motion purge of the people who made the movement possible.
Prop 64 marked a seismic cultural shift: from cannabis as sacred medicine to cannabis as designer vice. Not to mention the purposeful confusion surrounding California ballot propositions, intended to trick voters into voting against their best interest through misleading language and aggressive local advertising.
The neighborhood grower was replaced by the MedMen aesthetic—white walls, red logos, and iPad menus.
Cannabis wasn’t healing anymore. It was branded. Optimized. Commercialized.
And while Prop 64 may have opened the doors to mainstream acceptance, it slammed them shut on the very people who had operated safely, ethically, and transparently for twenty years.
The result? A two-tiered system where healing is pushed to the margins, and profit takes center stage.
Now, the same people who made cannabis legal are being priced out, locked out, or criminalized again.
Veterans who rely on CBD. Parents who treat seizures with hemp oil. Small farmers trying to survive. Regular people who just want to treat their anxiety and insomnia without yet another prescription pill. They're all being crushed under taxes, licensing fees, raids, and arbitrary bans—while corporations with lobbyists and product placement deals thrive.
They’re not banning weed.
They’re banning the people who remember what it’s for.
Speak Now or Be Silenced
California is in the process of making its emergency hemp cannabinoid ban permanent. The public comment period ends July 28, 2025.
This isn’t just about THCA. It’s about sovereignty, access, and truth.
If cannabis helped you quit alcohol... regulate anxiety... reconnect with your body... manage your pain...
Now is the time to speak.
Submit a comment. Email your representative. Share this article. Support vendors who are being targeted not for breaking the law—but for trying to offer healing. Start asking uncomfortable questions. Be curious about this weed that refuses to be stamped out, despite constant uprooting.
Help normalize natural medicine—until it becomes socially unacceptable to deny people the right to heal themselves.
The Closing Cut
They promised us legalization. What they delivered was a contract.
And the fine print says: you don’t get to heal yourself without permission.
The state is banking on your confusion. Don’t give them your silence.
(This PDF includes details and the official public comment process—comments due by July 28, 2025. It also lists the email: Regulations@cdph.ca.gov.)
🚫 Vendors blocked from shipping to California include: – SimplyMary.com – Tweedle Farms (flower/concentrates) – Wyld and other DTC hemp brands with infused products
These bans affect federally legal THCA, CBD, and hemp products due to California’s emergency regulations.
Recommended References
The following sources support the emerging science behind cannabis as a regulator of the endocannabinoid system—not just a substance of intoxication. These studies and experts offer insight into cannabinoid deficiency, trauma healing, and why cannabis may feel “too strong” for systems that have long been out of balance.
In short: it’s not the weed. It’s what we’ve been taught to ignore.
“Ask the experts: Cannabis chemistry in the body” (May 2025) — Dr. Miyabe Shields, PhD, and Riley Kirk, PhD (Leafwell): A deep dive into how THC and CBD interact with CB1/CB2 receptors, influence dopamine, serotonin, and neural plasticity—emphasizing how long‑term endocannabinoid tone shifts receptor sensitivity over time cannabisvoices.buzzsprout.com+1linkedin.com+1cannabisclinicians.org+10leafwell.com+10leafwell.com+10.
Clinical Endocannabinoid Deficiency Reconsidered (2016) — Dr. Ethan Russo: A foundational review linking endocannabinoid deficiency to migraines, fibromyalgia, IBS, PTSD, and how phytocannabinoid supplementation can restore balance nel.edu+10pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov+10cannabisvoices.buzzsprout.com+10.
This has been The Hot Cut—spicy dives, sharp truths. For the deeper wounds beneath pop culture, check out The Hidden Cut. For biblical breadcrumbs and forgotten edits, go to The Deeper Read.
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