[PRESS RELEASE] – NORWOOD, Mass., Oct. 23, 2025 – MariMed Inc., a leading cannabis consumer packaged goods company and retailer, announced a licensing agreement with Farm 2 Hand LLC, a New York State cannabis license holder, that will introduce the company’s top-selling portfolio of products throughout New York State. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Farm 2 Hand intends to manufacture and distribute a variety of MariMed’s edible products as permitted under New York regulations. Those are initially expected to include Betty’s Eddies fruit chews; Bubby’s Baked baked goods; and InHouse gummies. The products will be produced in a new kitchen that MariMed will design and equip for Farm 2 Hand at Farm 2 Hand’s Bronx production facility.

“Expanding the availability of our brands to the Empire State and its $6 billion total addressable market marks a significant step forward in our plan to own top-selling cannabis brands across the U.S.,” MariMed CEO Jon Levine said. “The addition of New York to our distribution footprint will help drive wholesale revenue, and being in the nation’s top media and influencer market will also help increase national awareness for our brands.”

The company expects its products will be available to New York’s 500-plus dispensaries in 2026, following the build-out of the kitchen and regulatory approval.

Written by Shaleen Title and Damian Fagon

Federal cannabis bills are not coming to save us. It’s October 2025, and the corporate-led strategy that has dominated the movement is dead. The same bills get introduced over and over, and like zombies, we deliver the same recycled responses, fight the same identical fights, and make no progress. We are no closer to federal legalization than we were five years ago. The attempted corporate takeover has clearly failed, and we’re still pretending that doing the exact same thing will yield a different result. 

The cannabis policy movement needs a reboot. We are ready to pull the plug on this failed approach and start building the cannabis market we actually want instead, and we hope you will join us. It’s time for a complete overhaul, with a new strategy that puts local communities and fair markets at the center.

Wall Street Weed still frames this as a fairy tale in which they are the heroes, fighting valiantly for incremental wins while moral purists hold them back. But the truth is simpler: no one is holding them back. Despite all the money and lobbying, their strategy has failed.

The movement tried selling out to publicly traded cannabis companies – the most ambitious among us even selling out to Big Tobacco – and we remain stalled. Their lobbyists promised momentum and results but delivered nothing. None of their preferred bills passed, and none of their stated goals were met.

The good news is that we can change course by putting people over profits and building local power to bring real change. But first, we have to name the zombie ideas that keep staggering through every legislative session, devouring resources and delivering nothing.

First: “Federal legalization now; we’ll work out the details later.”

That argument made sense when we didn’t yet know what legalization looked like. But we do now. The details are the policy. Most people in the U.S. have access to dispensaries. They don’t particularly care about banking access and tax rates. Instead, we need to tell a clear story supporting a specific federal cannabis package with guardrails that protect all of us – consumers, workers, small businesses, and yes, communities harmed by prohibition.

Thanks to the selfless people who began this movement, the reform of federal cannabis laws remains a massively popular issue across the political spectrum. Our research shows that a majority of Americans believe legalization should benefit people who use marijuana as medicine, people who use marijuana for pleasure, people who have been harmed by past enforcement, workers, everyday people, locally owned businesses, and small businesses. A majority does not say the same for pharma, alcohol, tobacco, or large corporations. It’s time to start working toward that goal. 

Second: “The market will figure it out”

This is not the 1980s. Relying on the so-called “free market” to equitably distribute value back to workers, small businesses, and consumers is a joke, and we all know it. Markets are intentionally constructed through policy and politics, not magic. Corporate free-for-alls don’t distribute wealth fairly; they concentrate it at the top. We can have markets that reward labor and local small businesses, but only if we build them intentionally.

That means structuring markets that separate growing, processing, and retail operations so no company can dominate every stage of the supply chain. It means explicitly limiting ownership concentration, protecting local programs that favor local businesses, and creating real protections for workers. We already have a blueprint from states that have created relatively fair and competitive cannabis markets, far more friendly to small businesses than comparable industries. These aren’t accidents – they’re the result of intentional policy design, and they can be replicated at the federal level. 

Third: “Any marijuana bill is better than no marijuana bill”

No, it isn’t. Marijuana bills are not universally good. It will take an adjustment, but our movement has to understand and accept that some bills would have genuinely harmful consequences. In our view, a federal legalization bill that hands control of the market to giant conglomerates and continues criminalization in the American South is worse than the status quo. Passing the wrong bill could cement monopoly power for a generation. 

And look, this would be a fair debate if corporate-backed bills were actually passing. But they’re not. So why are we tirelessly supporting their failed bills with our limited time, energy, and resources every session? Do you really think they’ll remember and reward us if they ever get their tax cut or buyout?

Let’s have some self-respect. Any bill without a plan to prevent monopolization should be a nonstarter. Let’s stop conflating justice with profits. Let’s stop pretending that incremental “progress” that only benefits large corporations is progress at all. Because states really are making some progress – they are clearing convictions, funding equity programs, and giving new entrepreneurs a shot. We need federal policy that protects and enhances these efforts, not erases them.

Looking Forward

For those of us who’ve been in this fight since before 2012, it’s time for clear-eyed assessment. We helped pass and implement one of the most significant policy changes in modern U.S. history, and that’s worth celebrating. But the playbook we built belonged to a different era, a time when wealth was less concentrated and corporate responsibility still meant something. Today’s inequality demands new tools. The old libertarian formula doesn’t just fail; it fuels the very harms we set out to repair. 

The next phase belongs to a multicultural movement that understands post-legalization realities and sees how monopolies and regulatory capture threaten both justice and opportunity. Those of us who shaped the early reforms can still play a role as mentors helping this new generation take cannabis policy where it needs to go. 

This new generation already has its north star: people first, profit last. As Kassandra Frederique of the Drug Policy Alliance reminds us, “The drug can’t have more rights than the people do.” That principle is not rhetorical; it’s the heart of this fight. If we are still obsessing over banking access and tax deductions while consumers are being criminalized again, we no longer have a movement. Brownie Mary and the AIDS activists who built this fight understood that cannabis was always about the health, safety and dignity of people.

And the people are still with us. Seventy percent of Americans support some form of legalization, but they are not asking for more corporate consolidation or Wall Street control. The cannabis industry doesn’t have to become yet another monopoly that drains more than it provides. But changing that outcome means replacing the old rules with new ones built around fairness, transparency, and justice.

The next era of cannabis reform will not be decided in Congress or corporate boardrooms. It will be built, once again, by people.

Shaleen Title and Damian Fagon are former cannabis regulators with Parabola Center for Law and Policy. Register for Parabola Center’s annual People Over Profits event in NYC this Saturday at parabolacenter.com/crashcourse.

This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.

An Ohio health agency is providing a state university with a $400,000 grant to educate first responders, law enforcement, emergency departments and behavioral specialists about how to deal with potential adverse psychedelic experiences as more people use the substances for medical or recreational purposes.

Amid the expanding psychedelics reform movement, there’s been increased attention to the possible health benefits of substances like psilocybin and ibogaine. But only a handful of states allow for the regulated use of certain psychedelics, typically in medically supervised settings.

Ohio is not among those states yet, but Ohio State University (OSU) is now launching its Psychedelic Emergency, Acute, and Continuing Care Education (PEACE) initiative, with nearly half a million dollars of funding from the state Department of Behavioral Health’s (DBH) SOAR Innovation grant program.

“People have started to learn about the benefits of psychedelics while, at the same time, the federal government categorizes these as controlled substances,” Stacey Armstrong, associate director of the OSU’s Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education (CPDRE), said in a press release last week.

“With the promising outcomes of clinical trials, there has been an explosion of information, but the information has been limited in addressing adverse experiences and harm reduction,” she said.

Funding from the DBH grant will go toward in-person seminars and online training materials that will be made available to those in professions most likely to face instances where someone might need attention after using psychedelics outside of a medical regulatory framework. The seminars and educational materials will come at no cost to qualifying participants.

“We want to arm our first responder and behavioral health workforce with knowledge about how to support someone’s challenging psychedelic experience in a way that’s going to be helpful, not increase risk or harm,” Armstrong said, adding that the center created the psychedelics program “to start educating Ohio’s front-line workers and support them in facilitating quality care, psychedelic-informed crisis triage and referral guidance to health care providers with specialized training in psychedelic harm reduction.”

According to CPDRE, the PEACE initiative is intended to reach over 127,000 professionals across the state, which will also include doctors, nurses, social workers, psychiatrists and other disciplines.

“CPDRE is all about access and affordability,” Tina Romanella, CPDRE’s program coordinator, said. “Too much information in this space is inaccessible, unaffordable or inaccurate. Our job is to make it all three: accessible, affordable and accurate.”

With funding now secured for the PEACE program, the center says psychedelics educational seminars will now be held in January, March and July of next year.

“We’ve created this content, but its value depends on reaching the people who need it,” Angela Douglas, CPDRE clinical research coordinator, said. “With DBH’s network and workforce expertise, we’re confident we can get this training to every corner of the state.”

“They have extensive connections. Their workforce development and policy leads are actively recruiting and gathering information, so we’re talking to the right people to make sure this gets where it needs to go,” she said.

OSU’s efforts compliment research it’s done in the past, including one study conducted in conjunction with Johns Hopkin University in 2023 that found an association between psilocybin use and “persisting reductions” in depression, anxiety and alcohol misuse—as well as increases in emotional regulation, spiritual wellbeing and extraversion.

While Ohio voters approved adult-use marijuana legalization in 2023, there’s been little interest so far within the legislature to pass psychedelics reform. That’s despite the fact that legislatures in red and blue states alike, as well as in Congress, have seen multiple efforts to advance the issue in recent years.

Photo elements courtesy of carlosemmaskype and Apollo.