Let's End the Year of the Prohibitionist.

Access gets you in the room. Influence gets you results.

Access is a transaction. Influence is leverage.

Cannabis has confused the two for too long.

The fly-ins, the donations, the polite meetings where staffers say, "we'll take care of this." It sounds like progress. It feels like progress. But none of it has moved the needle.

That is the trap.

The industry gets the meeting. It gets the handshake. It gets the follow-up line. Then everyone leaves, and nothing changes.

Gretchen Gailey spent 20 years on Capitol Hill watching how industries actually get what they want. The ones that win are not the ones with the most access. They are the ones politicians cannot afford to ignore.

Because influence in Washington comes from one place: the fear of not getting reelected.

Politicians do not move because your tax burden is unfair. They do not move because 280E is irrational. They do not move because patients, jobs, or economic impact make a better moral case.

They move when ignoring an issue becomes politically expensive.

Until cannabis can create that kind of pressure, it stays at the bottom of the pile.

That is the harder truth here. Cannabis may be popular, but popular is not the same as important. Important gets protected. Important gets prioritized. Important does not get pushed aside every time a bigger headline hits the board.

Cannabis gets pushed aside constantly.

And that is where I keep getting stuck.

Maybe I am missing part of how Washington actually works. Maybe some of this is more nuanced from the inside. But from the outside, it is hard to look at the results and call the current approach a strategy.

It looks more like patience dressed up as progress.

I understand why this happens. Public company CEOs have a fiduciary duty to shareholders. Private operators are trying to survive. Trade groups need consensus. Individual incentives do not always line up with what would actually strengthen the industry as a whole.

That is the prisoner's dilemma.

Everyone has a reason to protect their own position, even when the collective outcome keeps getting worse.

Meanwhile, prohibitionists are gaining ground. Momentum does not feel real. It feels overstated. The industry talks like change is coming, but the scoreboard keeps saying otherwise.

I do not have a perfect answer for how to fix that.

But I am sure of this: the current playbook does not look like enough.

The industry does not need more access.

It needs leverage.

Thanks for the title, Ben Larson.