Parabola Center for Law and Policy

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Parabola Center for Law and Policy Parabola Center is a nonprofit think tank of cannabis policy experts coming together to protect peopl

We don’t take money from big business. So we started a club.The People Over Profits Club opens today. It’s $10 a month, ...
10/13/2026

We don’t take money from big business. So we started a club.

The People Over Profits Club opens today. It’s $10 a month, about the price of a joint, and it’s how we keep everything we make free for everyone.

That includes The Illusion of Competition, which found that products from independent craft growers made up 27% of what Illinois dispensaries sold but just 8.1% of the sales dollars. It took months to put together, and it’s free, because the growers it’s about shouldn’t have to pay to read it.

Members get new reports a week before they go public, a members-only chat, and a quarterly survey that helps shape what we research next.

Not a monthly person? You can give once, any amount, at givebutter.com/pop-club. Or send this post to a friend who’d use our work. Passing our work on is how a small think tank like ours gets found.

Help us get to 75 members this fall. Link in bio.

In the last three months of 2025, products from independent craft growers made up 27% of what Illinois dispensaries sold...
10/10/2026

In the last three months of 2025, products from independent craft growers made up 27% of what Illinois dispensaries sold, but just 8.1% of the sales dollars. That’s what a market looks like when it’s built for the biggest players.

Small businesses need you. On Tuesday, October 13, we’ll show you how to help.

Everything we make is free to use at parabolacenter.com.

📸 Tauhid Chappell at our 2026 People Over Profit Leadership Training.

Legalizing cannabis and creating a commercial industry are two separate decisions. In Mexico, the courts have spent a de...
10/09/2026

Legalizing cannabis and creating a commercial industry are two separate decisions. In Mexico, the courts have spent a decade expanding the right to grow and use cannabis, while lawmakers have yet to write the rules for a market. We think it’s one of the most interesting experiments in cannabis policy right now.

Read the full post on The Parabola Papers 🇲🇽🌱

Who decides whether an AI product is safe for your kid at school? Right now, too often, the company selling it does.AI p...
10/08/2026

Who decides whether an AI product is safe for your kid at school? Right now, too often, the company selling it does.

AI products are showing up in classrooms before anyone has proven they’re good for students, and some are turned on by default. That’s why we built the Student-First AI Policy, with Fairplay and the Critical Internet Studies Institute: so local school districts have a tangible way to protect students from AI products that were never proven safe for them in the first place.

The idea underneath it is simple. If a product is going to be used on kids, someone should have to prove it’s good for them first. That means independent evidence that it improves learning more than the methods schools already use, that it protects student privacy with no addictive or unsafe design, and that it won’t deepen the inequities students already face.

It also puts the decision where it belongs. Any student, teacher, school administrator, or parent or caregiver can petition their school board to review a product, and the school community leads, not the companies selling it.

Read it, then take it to your district.

🔗StudentFirstAIPolicy.com

It’s Croptober in California, and much of this year’s crop won’t make it into a licensed store. The state’s own estimate...
10/06/2026

It’s Croptober in California, and much of this year’s crop won’t make it into a licensed store. The state’s own estimate puts out-of-state diversion at about 9 million pounds per year.

Regulators are finally acting, with a new testing law and proposed rules to address “burner distros” and lab shopping. But will the new costs push small operators out?

In Parabola Papers, we look at what’s changing and who ends up paying for it.

Maryland is looking for a nonprofit to run its cannabis incubator, a shared, state-owned processing space for about 60 s...
09/25/2026

Maryland is looking for a nonprofit to run its cannabis incubator, a shared, state-owned processing space for about 60 small cannabis businesses. Responses to the state’s RFI are due Monday, Sept 28, through eMMA.

There’s still no building. The state pulled its last site, the Catonsville armory, in July 2025 and hasn’t named a new one.

Our full piece is at the link in bio.

Emerging industries shouldn’t mean emerging monopolies.Over the last three years, cannabis regulators, researchers, pati...
09/15/2026

Emerging industries shouldn’t mean emerging monopolies.

Over the last three years, cannabis regulators, researchers, patient groups, and traditional growers met in Salem, Prague, and Rio to compare what happens after cannabis laws change. Our new report with Open Society Foundations brings those lessons together for governments and advocates shaping legal markets today.

Read it: parabolacenter.com/RioReport 🌱🌎

New on The Parabola Papers just in time for the first day of school! What happens to a kid in Massachusetts who gets cau...
09/08/2026

New on The Parabola Papers just in time for the first day of school! What happens to a kid in Massachusetts who gets caught with w**d at school?

Faith English, One of Parabola’s public health researchers, interviewed eighteen students, ages 16 to 19, for her recent study. They told her about teachers standing outside the bathroom whose whole job that period was figuring out who smelled like something, about dogs going through lockers, and about a two-day suspension in eighth grade that one girl was still worrying about when she thought about college applications.

Massachusetts legalized cannabis for adults in 2016. The rules for how schools handle it haven’t changed since, and the students know it. What they told Faith they wanted was honest information and an adult who would actually talk to them, not a suspension.

The study is out this month in the International Journal of Drug Policy. The full essay is up now, link in bio.

Until this week, a small New York cannabis farm selling at a licensed showcase event gave the retail margin on every sal...
08/06/2026

Until this week, a small New York cannabis farm selling at a licensed showcase event gave the retail margin on every sale to the host dispensary. That has changed.

Why the margin on a jar sold at a farmers market matters more than it sounds. From damian.fagon on The Parabola Papers.

Link in Bio.

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