Policy, Decoded

Policy, Decoded is the Sunday briefing for leaders in regulated industries. Each week, we unpack one consequential policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and adjacent markets. Grounded in law, governance, and political reality, this is calm, structured analysis from a former regulator’s perspective. No noise. No theatrics. Just what matters and why it matters.Subscribe: https://policy-decoded.beehiiv.com/Episodes may be AI-assisted and are reviewed prior to publication.

Policy, Decoded is a news podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 41 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts Policy, Decoded, a news show with 41 episodes published.

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  Policy, Decoded

  The Power of Presence (August 9, 2026)

  Aug 8, 202614 min

  ️ Powered by THC Group , Policy, Decoded steps back from the churn to unpack one policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and regulated markets. This week: the Senate tabled the hemp amendment at two in the morning, an entire market got a crash course in civics on the way out, and fire drills only reward the people who practiced. We say plainly where we land, and it costs us something to say: the most effective advocate is the person actually affected, almost never the professional, and this publication is paid to be the professional. So we unpack a career spent on the receiving end of lobbying, the survey in which nearly nine in ten career EPA staff admitted a story moved them, the eighty percent of federal dockets that draw ten comments or fewer, and the Colorado rulemaking where hearing testimony ranked dead last because the rules were settled months earlier in workgroups. We trace Tip O'Neill's neighbor who wanted to be asked, and the North Carolina hemp businesses who watched their own senator lead the charge against them. The former regulator's bottom line: the quiet years are where the leverage lives, and you are the one a policymaker will remember. The Power of Presence: A Guide to Policy Advocacy This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight. Sign up to receive Policy, Decoded delivered daily to your inbox.

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  Policy, Decoded

  The Government Rests (July 19, 2026)

  Jul 18, 202614 min

  ️ Powered by THC Group, Policy, Decoded steps back from the churn to unpack one policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and regulated markets. This week: the DEA's rescheduling hearing is over, the evidence is in, and the file it produced will matter longer than the headlines about it. For two and a half weeks, in a sealed hearing room with no cameras and a handful of public seats, the government argued under oath that cannabis belongs in Schedule III, and seven designated opponents argued back. We read the file the way a former regulator would. A government case that reversed fifty years of institutional position in a single morning, on the record for good. An opposition that put DEA's own scientist on the stand and watched its marquee witness concede the statutory question in a five-minute cross. And the 1988 precedent every operator should know: the judge who read the record most closely lost to the administrator who signed the order. The recommended decision is advice, the transcript is the document, and the real audience sits at the D.C. Circuit. The people who built this industry did their part without a hearing. The least the process can do is finish. https://www.homegrown-group.com/blog/government-rests This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight. Sign up for Policy, Decoded .

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  Episode #39

  The Government Takes The Stand (June 28, 2026)

  Jun 28, 202618 minS1

  🎙️ Powered by THC Group , Policy, Decoded steps back from the churn to unpack one policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and regulated markets. This week: after fifty years of calling cannabis dangerous and useless, the federal government has to stand up in a courtroom and argue the opposite, and the reform is overdue, right, and far easier to lose than anyone wants to admit. For fifty years the federal case against cannabis fit in a single sentence: dangerous, useless, Schedule I, filed next to heroin. On Monday, in a hearing room in Arlington, the same government has to prove the reverse, that the plant is medicine. We say plainly where we land. It is right, and it is fifty years overdue. The question is not whether it happens. It is whether the government can do the overdue thing without losing it on a technicality, or breaking the people who built the industry on the way in. So we unpack what the hearing actually is, dull administrative procedure, stacked with only opponents, deciding nothing by itself, and where the real fight has already gone, across the river to the D.C. Circuit, where April's medical reschedule is under challenge for the very shortcut that made it fast. We trace the shockwave already loose in the market, medical now in Schedule III and adult-use still in Schedule I, a fault line cutting through the same companies, the same shelves, the same customers. And we land where the rule never will, on the budtender, the grower, and the family that signed a personal guarantee, the people a Schedule III order will reach and never name. The former regulator's bottom line: a decision you cannot defend on appeal is just a reversal with a delay on it, and the fastest way to lose this reform is to win it badly. 🔗 https://www.homegrown-group.com/blog/government-takes-the-stand This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight. Sign up for Policy, Decoded .

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  Episode #38

  To The Class of Schedule III (May 31, 2026)

  May 30, 202622 minS1

  🎙️ Powered by THC Group , Policy, Decoded steps back from the churn to unpack one policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and regulated markets. This week: the cannabis industry just graduated to Schedule III, and the commencement address it is not going to get anywhere else. Every spring a famous stranger in rented robes tells a graduating class that the world needs them and the future is theirs. The cannabis industry got that speech in April, the morning the federal government moved part of it to Schedule III. The trade press called it a coming of age. This week we give the industry the other speech, the one a former regulator gives when the assignment is the truth. The diploma it collected is a receipt. It changed the tax bracket and little else. It could not hand over the one thing the industry was never permitted to keep. We walk the cast waiting outside the auditorium: lenders who already hold a lien on the bet, patients who trusted a number printed on a jar, and a tax code that still treats the graduate like the drug trafficker it was written for. We make the harder case underneath all of it, that the industry has no institutional memory, no one to carry a lesson from one state to the next, which is why Colorado wrote the book on oversupply and Michigan flooded its own market anyway. And we land where rescheduling cannot, on the responsibility the industry now owes the patients and customers who trusted it, the one that says do not make them pay twice for a lesson the state next door already learned. 🔗 https://www.homegrown-group.com/blog/class-of-schedule-iii This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight. Sign up for Policy, Decoded

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  Episode #36

  Vote No On Weed? (May 17, 2026)

  May 17, 202619 minS1

  🎙️ Powered by THC Group , Policy, Decoded steps back from the churn to unpack one policy story shaping cannabis, hemp, alcohol, and regulated markets. This week: the campaign to repeal cannabis legalization in Massachusetts, and how the argument against legal weed quietly changed. Six kids went to a Detroit hospital this spring after getting into edibles at their elementary school. They are fine. They bought nothing. The product came from a house. By November some version of that story will be in Massachusetts mailboxes, because the repeal campaign has figured out something the industry has not. The old argument against legal cannabis was moral, and it lost. The new one leads with emergency rooms, lab fraud, and untested gas-station product. Most of it is true. That is what makes it work. We grant the prohibition case its strongest form and show what actually follows: every failure it names is an argument for governing the market better, not ending it. We follow the 1.55 million dollars behind the signature drive, from a source that will not say who funds it. And we land where the campaign does not want voters to land, on what repeal actually does, which is not return Massachusetts to a time before cannabis but to a time before the rules. 🔗 https://www.homegrown-group.com/blog/vote-no-on-weed This podcast may include content written or produced with the support of AI tools under human direction and editorial oversight. Sign up for Policy, Decoded: https://policy-decoded.beehiiv.com/

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