4/20 used to feel like something you stumbled into. A park, a friend of a friend, a joint passed without much discussion. It was loose, cultural, a little bit illicit even when it wasn’t illegal anymore. This year, it feels different. Not worse, not better — just more formal. More like a checkpoint.

Because for the first time in a long time, there’s real federal movement to point to. In May 2024, the Department of Justice formally proposed moving cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act, acknowledging in plain language that marijuana has “currently accepted medical use,” according to the Federal Register. That process is still ongoing — there’s no final rule yet — but the tone has shifted. By December 2025, an executive order directed the Attorney General to move the rescheduling process forward “as expeditiously as possible,” signaling that this is no longer a theoretical conversation.

For an industry that has spent years operating in a kind of legal gray zone, that’s a genuinely big deal. So is what comes with it. The most immediate impact of rescheduling wouldn’t be cultural — it would be financial. Section 280E of the federal tax code, which blocks cannabis businesses from taking standard deductions because they’re technically trafficking in Schedule I substances, has been one of the industry’s biggest structural burdens. If cannabis moves to Schedule III, that restriction no longer applies. The DOJ acknowledged that directly in its own rulemaking analysis, noting that 280E would no longer serve as a barrier.

That’s not small. That’s existential. At the same time, normalization is starting to show up in places that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services quietly rolled out a pilot program this year allowing certain healthcare models to furnish hemp-derived cannabinoid products to patients — up to $500 annually — as part of symptom management. The program is tightly controlled, limited to federally legal hemp products and non-inhalable formats, but the shift is still notable. It’s the federal government acknowledging, in practice, that cannabinoids have a role in care.

Even now, that part feels undersold. So yes — there is real progress. Cannabis is closer to normalization than it has ever been. It’s being discussed in policy language instead of culture war language. It’s being modeled, regulated, tested.

But the closer you look, the harder it is to ignore where that progress actually lands. Because legalization didn’t happen evenly, and it hasn’t been implemented evenly either. Take expungement, which has been positioned as one of the moral justifications for legalization from the beginning. There have been meaningful efforts — in 2024, Maryland issued more than 175,000 pardons for cannabis-related convictions, part of a broader wave that has cleared or forgiven around 2.5 million records nationwide, according to reporting from the Associated Press. But that number sits next to a much larger one: over 30 million marijuana-related arrests in the U.S. over the past half century.

And even when expungement is available, people often don’t access it. A widely cited 2020 study from University of Michigan, published in the Harvard Law Review, found that only 6.5 percent of eligible individuals in Michigan actually obtained expungement within five years. The barrier is policy and also process. Applications, fees, time, awareness. The system requires people to navigate it, and many can’t.

That gap between what’s announced and what’s actually delivered shows up everywhere. Los Angeles is one of the clearest examples. The city’s social equity program was designed to help people most impacted by the war on drugs enter the legal market. Instead, many participants have spent years navigating delays, securing leases they couldn’t afford, and waiting on approvals that didn’t come. Reporting from LAist found that the city may have to return up to $10 million in cannabis equity funds after a state audit determined the money wasn’t used as intended. Another $1.8 million earmarked for equity businesses was similarly misallocated.

At the same time, operators were still expected to pay rent. In some cases, those costs reached into the hundreds of thousands before a business could even open, according to reporting from SFGate. The result is attrition: People dropping out, going into debt, or never making it through the system at all.

Illinois tells a similar story from a different angle. Five years into its social equity licensing rollout, only about half of eligible operators were actually up and running, according to MJBizDaily. The licenses exist. The participation doesn’t always follow.

And then there’s the cost of staying legal once you’re in. In California, cannabis businesses have spent the last few years riding a shifting set of financial rules. The state’s excise tax jumped from 15 percent to 19 percent in mid-2025 before being rolled back to 15 percent a few months later after industry pressure. Cities have raised local taxes and licensing fees at the same time sales have declined, with Los Angeles increasing renewal fees and San Diego raising its cannabis tax rate amid budget shortfalls, according to SFGate.

Legalization created markets but the way governments constructed them didn’t make those markets easy to survive in. Which brings us to the part of the conversation that almost no one is having out loud right now — at least not in a sustained, public way: the one about the hemp market.

For the past several years, hemp-derived cannabinoids have quietly built a parallel industry. Not small, not niche — massive and nationwide. Sold online, in smoke shops, in grocery-adjacent retail environments, often outside of the licensed cannabis system entirely. Industry estimates place that market at around $28 billion, supporting roughly 300,000 jobs, figures cited in both The Guardian and The Washington Post in late 2025. And now, that entire sector is facing a deadline.

In November 2025, Congress passed a federal spending bill that included a major revision to how hemp is defined. The change sets a strict limit — no more than 0.4 milligrams of total THC per product — and broadens how THC is calculated to include compounds like THCA. According to the statutory language, those changes take effect one year after enactment.

That puts the timeline squarely in November 2026. Most existing hemp-derived products don’t meet that threshold. Which means that unless something changes, a huge portion of the market will effectively disappear or be forced to reformulate in a very short window. The Guardian reported that the provision could impact the majority of CBD products currently on the market, while The Washington Post described it as closing the “Farm Bill loophole” that allowed intoxicating hemp products to proliferate.

The response from the licensed cannabis industry has been… muted. Some operators have supported the move, seeing it as a way to eliminate competition from unregulated products. That position makes sense on paper. But it also means that a massive consumer base — one that has grown accustomed to buying cannabinoids outside of dispensaries — could suddenly be left without a clear pathway into the regulated market.

And the regulated market, as it stands, isn’t built to absorb them easily. It’s expensive, for example. It’s local. It’s limited by licensing caps, zoning rules, and capital requirements that already exclude a lot of people.

So we end up here, with genuine, measurable federal progress that deserves to be acknowledged however may fall short. With structural inequities that haven’t been resolved, a parallel market that could be reshaped almost overnight, and no clear plan for what comes next.

All of this can make 4/20 feel less like a celebration of a bright future to come and more like a checkpoint, especially when you layer in the marketing opportunities. 420 is a holiday, yes, and smoking weed is something many people do for fun. But it was also always a signal — a moment tied to protest, to access, to a shared understanding that cannabis policy wasn’t neutral, and never had been, and activists rightly seized and worked the day for that purpose throughout legalization’s history. That history doesn’t disappear just because the industry got bigger. If anything, it becomes more relevant.

Now, instead of asking whether cannabis should be legal, we’re asking who legalization actually works for. Who can afford to participate. Who gets relief — financial, medical, or otherwise — and who is still navigating the same barriers, just in a different system. 

It’s a big shift because cannabis didn’t just move into the mainstream but into institutions — into tax codes, federal agencies, healthcare pilots, licensing frameworks. It’s measurable now. It’s trackable. It’s something you can point to and say: this is working, this isn’t. It’s also more mundane and some of the cracks are harder to see with all this official and legal stuff sitting over it. The gaps don’t close on their own and some, like pervasive equity issues and ineffective tax codes, are becoming baked in.

That’s the version of 4/20 we’re sitting with now that we’re tangoing with “The Man” more than ever. The holiday is not counterculture, not quite establishment — it currently inhabits something in between, still being worked out in real time.

There’s no question whether or not cannabis has gone mainstream. It has. The question is whether the system taking shape around it is actually aligned with the people who built it or just more legible to the ones who didn’t.