Germany's Cannabis Landscape and the Impending Farm Bill Renewal: What you need to Know ft Bob Hoban

Germany's Cannabis Landscape and the Impending Farm Bill Renewal: What you need to Know ft. Bob Hoban

Bob Hoban: I think you'll see a lot of those international dollars flood the market, and the international players will gobble up the existing U.S. stores, networks, and distribution systems, because they're going to be far more sophisticated business operators, by and large, than what we've seen in the U.S. [Music] Bryan Fields: What's up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of The Dime. I'm Bryan Fields, and with me as always is Kellen Finney. This week we've got a very special guest, Bob Hoban, global cannabis industry expert. Bob, thanks for taking the time. How are you doing today? Bob Hoban: I'm doing great, gentlemen, thanks for having me. I'm back in Denver, Colorado — actually in our brand new Clark Hill Denver office. I haven't even had a chance to put my photos up yet, so it's a good place to be. Bryan Fields: I love it. Kellen, how are you doing? Kellen Finney: Doing really well, really excited to talk to Bob, really excited to dive into Clark Hill, and it's just refreshing to have another Denver, Colorado representative on the podcast today. How are you, Bryan? Bryan Fields: Yeah, that's absolutely fair. But I think it's really important to always talk about where people start and where they came from, and I know Bob has some history on the East Coast, which makes him maybe 50/50 — a little now and a little in the past. So Bob, for the record — East Coast or West Coast, if you had to pick one? Bob Hoban: This is the old two-pocket-piggy debate, it sounds like. Listen, I'm from Jersey — a Jersey, Garden State guy through and through. I call Colorado home, and the western United States is where I'll continue to stay. I don't anticipate ever moving back to the Northeast, but I have to say, growing up in New Jersey is a great, great thing. I really love it. Bryan Fields: That's a very fair statement for both sides. Bob, for our listeners unfamiliar with you, can you give some background about yourself and how you got into the cannabis space? Bob Hoban: Yeah, 100 percent. I'm an attorney — I graduated from Rutgers University in the great state of New Jersey. I moved west to pursue the lifestyle of an avid mountain biker, snowboarder, and mountain climber, and went to law school out west. I call Colorado home. I was introduced to the cannabis industry around 2005, when my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I was no stranger to cannabis, but at the time I was a stranger to its medicinal uses. It helped my mother through some trying times over a couple of years, and that led me to open a practice and build an entire law firm, the Hoban Law Group, which I operated for 13 years as a leader in the space, building it around the industry. Now you see firms all over the world building practices and business units around an industry rather than just around a practice area like corporate, IP, or tax. That's how we started, and eventually I migrated the Hoban Law Group into Clark Hill in 2021. It's a good place to be — we've seen ups and downs in the industry, but I'm still really pleased to be part of it, and who knows what happens next. Bryan Fields: I think that's the important part — you've likely seen tons of change and advancement from an industry standpoint. One of the things I want to talk about first is the Farm Bill. It was introduced years back and there's an upcoming renewal. Can you give our listeners a high-level overview of what the Farm Bill is and what's on deck? Bob Hoban: One of the things I've prided myself on in my career is always looking at what's next and trying to be innovative for entrepreneurial clients. We opened some of the first dispensaries in Colorado and repeated that in multiple states. We were one of the first firms to really embrace the Farm Bill, and one of the first to work internationally and become a global policy and industry expert. The Farm Bill started in 2014 — it was a derivation of something called the Industrial Hemp Farming Act, a Mitch McConnell bill that got rolled into the Farm Bill. That was the most sweeping reform in U.S. cannabis history, and that language remains today after being renewed in 2018, and it will be renewed again this year as part of the Farm Bill — a package of agricultural policies Congress enacts every five years. 2014 was the first time hemp was mentioned; 2018 removed commercial restrictions; and now we've seen it move from CBD to hemp flower to alternative, rare cannabinoids, with a growing focus on grain and fiber. That's pretty earth-shattering when you think about it — 2014 opened up the CBD industry, 2018 removed commercial restrictions. Now we've got significant challenges heading into this renewal: what do we do about THC percentage, and what do we do about rare or minor cannabinoids — what some call IHDs, intoxicating hemp derivatives? If you do it right from a global supply-chain perspective, all you need is hemp — you don't need marijuana for anything except the flower itself in its natural state, and an oil derived specifically from that high-THC flower. Those are two very limited scenarios. When I say that, it makes people's heads explode, because they say, 'No, you need THC.' But if I grow a thousand acres of hemp, and each acre has 10 to 12 metric tons of biomass, multiply 0.3 percent by a thousand acres — that's a whole lot of THC. So don't tell me you need anything other than hemp for supply-chain development. That's really where we're at in the development of the industry. Bryan Fields: I want to stick with that 0.3 percent concentration that differentiates hemp from cannabis, drafted in the 2014 Farm Bill. Do you know where that arbitrary number came from, Bob, and why it's continued to be our only true way of differentiating hemp from cannabis? Bob Hoban: It's an arbitrary threshold. There's history behind it I won't get fully into, but it relates to some scientific articles and the scheduling efforts tied to the United Nations back in the 1960s. For your listeners, think about it like decaf coffee — decaf still has caffeine in it, about 0.3 percent. My point is it's a very minute amount of THC left in the plant. There's discussion about raising the threshold to 1 percent. It was 0.2 percent in Europe, raised to 0.3 percent — and that's specifically Delta-9 THC. Latin American countries have thresholds of 1 to 1.5 percent. It really comes down to how scared governments are of THC. If we're really scared of it — worried it will cause a scourge on society, which we know isn't true — we keep the threshold low. If we understand it can be tracked, traced, and controlled, and that having THC in the food supply chain doesn't adversely affect society, we're less concerned about moving it up. That said, I do have concerns that raising the threshold to 1 percent sends farmers the bad message that they can get rich growing cannabinoid-rich crops — they can't, not with market saturation. Farmers sit at one end of the supply chain; the value-add pieces come later. So the question, with probably no right answer, is how you balance all these variables when politicians are making rules about a crop they're unsure of, amid THC hysteria, lack of research, and state-to-state variability, so we can reach some unified, sensible policy. Making sense of cannabis policy is something that will take years — it's taken years just to get to today's discussion. There are really four policy lanes: industrial uses, where the framework already exists; pharmaceutical uses, which is essentially FDA-approved medicine, where the framework already exists; nutraceutical or wellness use, meaning non-intoxicating compounds taken for protein or cannabinoid benefits but not in concentrations that make them a medicine; and over-the-counter cannabis or marijuana, meaning flower or oil with high THC that's by design intended to produce a psychoactive effect, whether medicinal or adult-use — it's all over-the-counter cannabis. I think the way you make sense of this — and some countries, like Colombia, are toying with this — is that farmers should be able to grow the plant, and strict regulation should apply based on the use of that plant, not the plant itself. If I'm growing for grain or fiber, why do you care about my THC percentage? But if I'm collecting and concentrating the residual cannabinoids, that's where you regulate. Regulation by use of the plant's materials, rather than regulating the plant itself, is probably the most beneficial way to develop a supply chain. Meanwhile, cocaine is actually scheduled under the Controlled Substances Act despite its dangers, while marijuana remains Schedule I — that doesn't stand to reason. Psychedelics like psilocybin are being advanced for their medical properties — we saw that at the MAPS conference here in Colorado a few weeks ago, which was well attended, with physicians and government actors openly discussing benefits. Yet marijuana is still stuck in this box as the stepchild nobody wants to talk about. Those notions have to give way, and — I hate to say it, but it's a real term — it's called generational die-off. You need generational die-off for cannabis to take the place we know it should, because that's the only way to eliminate some of these crazy notions about the plant. Kellen Finney: Do you think the Farm Bill will do anything to mend one of the biggest issues right now, which is that we've put hemp and cannabis on two different shelves? Realistically there are a lot of similarities — a lot of end products from hemp and cannabis can be generated with the same technology. Do you think we've done the plant a disservice by pulling the hemp portion out with CBD and leaving cannabis regulated at the state level separately, and if so, is there a way for the 2023 Farm Bill to remedy any of that damage? Bob Hoban: Yes, we do the plant a disservice by creating this legal distinction between hemp and marijuana. It creates two different sectors and animosity between them. The rest of the world talks less about a bright line between hemp and marijuana — it's just cannabis, often regulated by use. It's the exact same plant; just the cannabinoid ratios differ. When you tell some policymakers it's all cannabis, they don't believe it's possible. So there has to be continued education, but we also have to look at merging the systems. A marijuana dispensary on its own has proven to be an ineffective economic system — over-taxed, over-regulated — and at its core a dispensary is a retail outlet. So why are dispensary owners fighting so vehemently against things like Delta-8, Delta-10, and HHC? It's the same sandbox. If you're a retail store, your job is to sell as many things as possible; if you take a position against that, your investors should sue you. It's not a perfect world — hemp versus marijuana, synthetic versus natural, it's all the same sandbox. Think about the merging of systems: dispensaries in the future will sell psilocybin, MDMA, or whatever the legal equivalents become — a holistic place to buy natural plant compounds that produce an intoxicating effect. A marijuana-only dispensary selling just flower, pre-rolls, edibles, drinks, and concentrates hasn't proven it can sustain itself given high taxes and over-regulation, so it has to sell more products. The people you want in the marijuana sector often don't even go to dispensaries — they grow their own or use a network of caregivers producing smaller-batch, cheaper, untaxed product. So the merging of the systems has to happen, though I don't think the Farm Bill — which is fundamentally an agricultural bill about what farmers should plant and how to support that infrastructure — can really address that. Bryan Fields: There's a ton to unpack there. I want to ask about Delta-8 specifically. Here in New York we have real issues with the gray market — there's a CBD store that sells Delta-8, and I watched an employee explain the difference between it and THC to a customer, who essentially concluded there was no real difference. The problem is that store wasn't a licensed dispensary, and customers don't know that. I think that's the biggest disconnect, and licensed operators are frustrated that they have to clear all the cannabis hurdles — insurance, compliance costs — while others don't. I'm not sure how you'd fairly separate the two. Bob Hoban: You make great points — consumer protection is really at the core here for these new compounds. Someone working at an unlicensed quasi-dispensary shouldn't be telling people what a product is or how it will make them feel — but frankly, neither should a budtender at a licensed dispensary. Go do your own research, the same way the supplement industry works: nothing about echinacea claims it will boost your immune system, you have to research it yourself, but the industry ensures a safe, consistent product. The same thing happened with CBD as early as 2011-2012 — marijuana businesses complained that CBD companies shouldn't be allowed to sell, and now it's transformed into Delta-8 and other compounds. Why fight it instead of building a nimble structure? All of our clients participate on both sides — they just don't publicize it. They create separate holding companies for licensed marijuana businesses and for hemp-derived businesses, and they play on all sides, because that's what a business owner has to do. But I do worry about consumer protection, because these products are now everywhere — I remember seeing Delta-8 and HHC products in a gas station in Florida a few years ago, and now HHC is all over Europe. How does the consumer know what it is or whether it's safe? States are actively starting to regulate Delta-8, not ban it — and by the way, this is red-state weed. Red states won't have dispensaries like we're used to; they have a freer market. Go to Nashville, Tennessee — Delta-8 and those compounds are legal and regulated there, in a freer marketplace than Colorado or any adult-use system, with better economics. We have to stop fighting internally, because the moment one side of the industry says something shouldn't be allowed, it doesn't get banned — it gets regulated, and you're back to needing to participate on all sides. Kellen Finney: Do you think eventually there will be no more marijuana, strictly from an economics perspective — states cap canopy, you can only grow so much, whereas in hemp you could grow 50,000 acres and convert it to Delta-9, with the chemistry there to provide every form factor to consumers. Given that, is it even wise for entities to keep pouring resources into the cannabis space in these mature dispensary-model markets? Bob Hoban: A lot of people still think a license itself is the holy grail, and that those licenses will sell for millions of dollars — those days are over except in very narrow, severely limited licensing situations. I did a deal in early 2022 for an Arizona license that cost nine million dollars; in Colombia licenses used to cost four to ten million dollars, and now they're a hundred thousand dollars, if that, because you still have to put it into motion. To assess the value of this industry, you have to look at connecting with consumers and what they want. If consumption is trending away from smoking flower toward ingesting compounds, oils, and vapes, then it's about formulations. I'm a purist myself — I like consuming flower in traditional ways — but I don't impose that on the rest of the industry. You're going to see more products built on formulations: grow a hundred acres of hemp, separate every terpene and cannabinoid into its own bucket, and build formulations from those buckets. That's the blueprint pharmaceutical companies and consumer product companies have always used. If flower becomes less relevant to consumers, it becomes less relevant to the market, even though a market for it will always exist as long as it's legal to possess and cultivate. On IHDs like Delta-8, yes, some products are far more potent than a Delta-9 THC gummy, but the vast majority are actually far less potent — and that's what the next generation wants: less potent, non-paranoia-inducing products. Counterintuitively, teenagers and college kids I know would almost prefer a Delta-8 product to a Delta-9 product because it feels more like a glass of wine than hard liquor. So it's a world of formulated, packaged products now, which takes away some of the mystique of flower, but there will always be a market for actual flower — it just won't be the bulk of the market. Kellen Finney: And one of the important things there is that price comes down, because the premium on cannabis versus hemp is largely about intricacy — and the consumers win. But my follow-up: what happens to the infrastructure of these vertically built multi-state operators if the industries merge? We've seen MSOs lay off and shed smaller assets in certain states. Does the infrastructure combine, or move into other industries? Bob Hoban: Distressed assets are a natural thing. Look at MedMen — they came out huge and then faltered and laid people off, but their stores, real estate, licenses, and display cases became valuable to somebody else. That's the way of the world — it's why there are garage sales. That's the risk these companies took. But forget merging systems for a second — think about lobbying for federal legalization and interstate commerce. You'd assume everyone would lobby for interstate commerce, but a multi-state operator that's invested hundreds of millions of dollars building separate production infrastructure in nine states, because state law required it, would actually lobby against interstate commerce, because it would invalidate that investment. Meanwhile, a company with millions of square feet of outdoor greenhouse would lobby for interstate commerce because they could service the whole country at low cost. We haven't even seen that bloodbath yet, because there's no real discussion of federal legalization yet — but it will be a fight as big as marijuana-versus-hemp or Delta-9-versus-Delta-8. That's the danger of investing early in an industry — there's really no first-mover advantage. I told clients to steer clear of California for years; only recently have some gone in and aggregated assets at a discount, building profitable plans by spending a fraction of what it would have cost to build from scratch. That's not good for the early investors, but it's the risk — you either hit a home run or you strike out. Bryan Fields: I think that's important, because executives at these publicly traded companies don't work for the industry — they work for shareholders. I think people forget that once the industry gets a bit wider, outside titans like Procter & Gamble and tobacco companies will come in and move their weight around policy in ways people keep sidelining but that are actually crucial. Bob Hoban: Right — look at it in the CBD context. About five weeks ago the FDA put out a Q&A stakeholder update on CBD, and they were talking about it the same way the industry was talking about it seven, eight, nine years ago — nothing changed in their world even as the industry evolved around them. If you're talking about CBD that way now, you're many steps behind, and where this goes is subject to consumer behavior. The rise of Delta-8 and HHC wasn't a couple of entrepreneurs deciding people would love it — it was a response to consumer demand. This industry has to stop trying to outsmart itself and pull its head out of its own backside, recognizing its only path to survival is creating products consumers actually want, not products companies think they should want or over-engineer with technology. Think of edibles: companies invested in body-absorption technology so edibles would hit in three minutes instead of thirty, and charged more for it — but consumers didn't care and kept buying the cheaper option that took longer. Even in California, where consumers are supposedly more discerning, the lowest-priced product still sells the most. Entrepreneurs need to take their activist hats off and service their customers, not fight against what customers actually want. Bryan Fields: What do you think are better ways for entrepreneurs to get in touch with their consumers? I've seen so many companies chase a Whole-Foods-style, top-shelf positioning, only to be replaced by another brand within six months. Bob Hoban: I'd like to see the safest, most consumer-friendly products out there — organic or at least pesticide- and solvent-free — because the industry doesn't have a chance to grow on a mainstream scale unless it's uber consumer-friendly, and I'm not sure it is yet. It might just be too soon for an industry to support all these discrete sub-sectors — products for specific populations, organic niches, and so on — when consumers overall are still driven mostly by price. The consumers you actually want at a dispensary largely don't go to dispensaries: using a beer analogy, the avid regular consumer of cannabis is more like the person who grows their own or relies on a network of caregivers producing smaller-batch, cheaper, untaxed product, rather than the person walking into a retail store. So predicting consumer behavior is tricky when we don't even fully understand today's core consumer. Bryan Fields: Switching gears — you've been in the cannabis industry a while and speak on the international circuit. Are you finding that other countries are learning from U.S. mistakes when setting up their frameworks, or is each country reinventing the wheel on its own? Bob Hoban: Each country tends to reinvent the wheel, much like individual U.S. states did. Governments often hire pedigreed professionals from big consulting firms, or so-called cannabis experts who've studied the space for six months and aren't really experts, based on connections or where they went to school. I've worked in over 35 countries and continue to offer guidance, but many countries still want to do it their own way based on advice that misses the mark. Every country also legalizes for a different reason — criminal justice reform, medicine, or revenue and jobs — and that 'why' shapes the program, so there's less cross-country learning than you'd expect, which is disappointing given how many lessons could be transferred. Look at Germany — they've had stakeholders leak draft policy for public comment before official release, but that feedback isn't just policy or commercial feedback, it's activism-driven. I don't malign that, because we wouldn't be here without decades of activist work, but once a movement becomes an industry, the conversation has to shift toward building a viable commercial framework, and globally that shift hasn't fully happened yet. Kellen Finney: That's heavy — also kind of sad. I think the optimistic takeaway from hearing you speak at these conferences is that other countries could learn from U.S. mistakes and implement better institutional steps. Are there any countries you're optimistic about, or that seem to be headed in the right direction? Bob Hoban: I think Germany was on the right track, maybe with a bit of over-regulation and over-taxation, but that discussion got derailed through their work with the European Union and the United Nations. They effectively moved away from an adult-use model toward focusing on their existing medical model, addressing adult use instead through a social-club model, which we've also seen in Spain and the Netherlands. It works, but it doesn't create transferable licenses or aggregate international capital the way a commercial system would. So the German medical system is going to get 'slippery' — more quasi-adult-use, much like Colorado's medical system did once our patient registry hit 100,000 people, especially with a severe-pain catch-all condition that opened the door to a quasi-adult-use system. I think Germany should embrace what it's been given rather than chase a perfect system — as long as people get safe, consistent access, because they're going to use cannabis anyway. Bryan Fields: Are any U.S. operators keeping an eye on international markets, or do you think they should be? Bob Hoban: Many U.S. investors and hemp-derived-product companies are, and they can fairly easily market those products internationally — we help clients with import/export registration and taxation. But a marijuana licensee struggling to bring consumers into a dispensary month to month may see little relevance in what's happening in Colombia, Germany, or the Czech Republic. Still, international players have had to operate under strict import/export and national standards, so I think once the U.S. passes something like SAFE Banking with a Capital markets add-on — known as the CLIMB Act — allowing those dollars to flow through U.S. exchanges, you'll see international capital flood the market and international players acquire existing U.S. stores, networks, and distribution systems, because they'll generally be more sophisticated operators than what we've seen in the U.S. The rest of the world has built its frameworks around future sales, not present sales, and to high international standards, which makes them more sophisticated and able to attract capital globally. That said, some of the same BS and mistakes we heard for years in the U.S. show up from the same types of people in these new markets, even where the legal framework is solid — and some ignore U.S. expertise altogether because the U.S. isn't federally legal, which I've heard from high-level people many times, even though that arguably makes the expertise more relevant, not less. Kellen Finney: That must have taken you for a spin. What's the most surprising, shocking, or ridiculous case or concept you've experienced, outside the standard cannabis nonsense? Bob Hoban: From a policy perspective, I remember Senate committee debates before the 2014 Farm Bill where someone suggested modifying the genetics of all approved hemp varieties so they'd glow phosphorescently when viewed through a special lens flown over a field, to prove they came from approved sources and prevent THC diversion. It's one of the more crackpot things I've heard, but it shows that legislators, bureaucrats, and the mainstream population still aren't fully comfortable with cannabis. They're more comfortable with medical use, and more comfortable that people shouldn't go to jail for it, but they still don't really understand the plant — the stigma and the lazy-stoner stereotype are still very real and color decision-making at every level, even though it's completely normal to those of us in the industry. Bryan Fields: What do you think our industry can do to help push messaging and education forward, especially since Colorado's had legal weed for almost a decade now? What are we not doing that we could be doing more of? Bob Hoban: You can't just sit back — you have to keep pushing, and education is the key, in real time. In Colorado, legislators saw firsthand that cannabis users were professionals, their own children, siblings, cousins — not lazy stoners — and that changed regulation quickly. That stigma fight happens on every side, even with my own teenage son, who avoids being associated with cannabis because of the stereotype. But education showing that commercialization doesn't harm society, doesn't increase teen use, and actually regulates behavior and generates tax revenue is a conclusion multiple governments have already reached. Facts like the gateway-drug theory being false aren't universally accepted globally yet, so that education needs to be a constant campaign. Interestingly, psychedelics seem to be gaining mainstream medical acceptance faster than cannabis right now, even though cannabis has the same potential — some days things make sense, and most days they still don't. Kellen Finney: I think that's where cannabis being called a 'gateway drug' actually helped open the door for other substances — helping build broader understanding that these things could have medicinal effects if researched and regulated properly. Bob Hoban: But look at Europe's medical system — it's a bit twisted. You go to a doctor about your condition, and instead of just getting a card like in the U.S., the doctor recommends a specific strain grown in a specific region based on its cannabinoid and terpene profile, which you then bring to a pharmacist to compound. It's a more evolved system that respects the plant, but I'm not sure it's sustainable, since people are going to use cannabis in whatever form they're comfortable with — some will self-medicate with flower, and others will wait for a pill from Pfizer, whether or not that form is equally effective. Different population segments will only use the forms they're comfortable with, and those forms are still evolving. Bryan Fields: We ask all of our guests this — if you could distill your experience into one takeaway or lesson to pass on to the next generation, what would it be? Bob Hoban: I'm a Grateful Dead fan, and one line I live by, from the song 'Scarlet Begonias' — well, from a related lyric — is: 'I sure don't know what I'm going for, but I'm gonna go for it for sure.' That's the fire everyone needs, whether it's cannabis, your job, your life, or your education — you have to have the conviction to go for something even if you don't know exactly what it is. Even in this era of technology and working smarter, you still have to work hard. The person who only works smart never gets as far as the person who works smart and hard. Bryan Fields: Prediction time, Bob — cannabis will eventually be a global game. What steps are needed domestically for the U.S. to operate globally? Bob Hoban: You need federal legalization. Once the U.S. federally legalizes cannabis in all forms, it becomes a major player in the global supply chain and changes how the world treats the product. Right now hemp is federally legal and is already being imported and exported at scale, almost without us talking about it — the 2014 Farm Bill first allowed hemp compound exports, around the same time GW Pharma — now Jazz Pharmaceuticals after that acquisition — was developing marijuana-based CBD products like Epidiolex. But why deal with marijuana's strict controls and costs when you could grow a thousand acres of hemp, separate the compounds into API-grade product buckets, and sell that globally? We're not there yet because our notion of medical cannabis is still built around 'what strain should I use for this condition' — a good question, but not one the U.S. medical community is positioned to answer; people figure it out on their own, while others will simply wait for a pill from a doctor over the next 10 to 20 years. As the FDA gets more involved in cannabinoid production, you'll see the U.S. shape its cannabis position more — but it's evolving beyond just flower into a true supply chain, and supply chains rely on consistent commodities produced efficiently and cost-effectively, which we don't fully have yet. Kellen Finney: I agree with everything Bob said — I'd also add that the U.S. usually leads in scientific innovation globally, and legalization would fund the fundamental research needed to understand things like how a specific THC concentration and terpene profile in a strain like Blue Dream causes a physiological change that treats a specific condition. Once that's established, I think the U.S. can take a leadership role scientifically, the same way it has in other industries, stemming from the NIH issuing more grants and more manufacturers coming online. What do you think, Bryan? Bryan Fields: I'll take the other side — I think the U.S. will actually be behind in these conversations. We're so fragmented state by state, with federal law pulling one way and states another, that I don't think we'll get our act together enough to lead globally. And even if we did, from an adult-use standpoint, I don't think other countries will want U.S. involvement — I think countries will protect their own infrastructure investments through something like protectionism, similar to what we see between U.S. states, and the U.S. will struggle to catch up. Bob Hoban: Really great insight, and I think frankly both perspectives can be right, depending on the source of material. It also depends on when supporting cannabis reform starts winning politicians votes instead of costing them votes — that may determine where we land. In Mexico, for example, there's a Supreme Court mandate to move toward adult use, but politicians who support cannabis there still lose votes rather than gain them, so it gets put on the back burner. The same applies across the U.S. — Cory Booker isn't gaining many additional votes for supporting cannabis, though he may not be losing as many as a Democrat in another state would by taking the same position. That's where the 'generational die-off' concept comes back into play. I've really enjoyed your podcast and your perspectives — keep doing great work, and thanks for having me. Bryan Fields: Thanks for taking the time, Bob — this was a lot of fun.