Home Field: Why Wisconsin Is Fighting to Keep Its Hemp Industry Alive (2026)

Wisconsin’s leadership is asking Congress to protect a hemp industry that supports over 3,500 jobs and $700 million in economic activity across the state. For a company built on Wisconsin soil, this one is personal. Here’s what’s at stake and why it reaches beyond politics.

Every company has a home. Ours is Wisconsin. Not as a marketing detail, but as a physical fact. Our hemp is grown on Wisconsin farmland. Our products are manufactured in a facility in Plain, Wisconsin, a small town in the Driftless region where the soil is good and the work ethic runs deep. When we say American-made, we mean a specific patch of America, with specific farmers, specific processors, and a specific community that depends on the industry we’re part of. So when the future of Wisconsin’s hemp industry lands in the news, it isn’t an abstract policy story for us. It’s home field.

Recently, Wisconsin’s state leadership sent a formal appeal to the state’s congressional delegation, both its U.S. House and Senate members, urging them to take action to protect the state’s hemp industry from a federal change set to take effect later this year. The core argument was economic, and it was framed around something that shouldn’t be controversial to anyone: the livelihoods of Wisconsin farmers, processors, retailers, and the rural communities that have come to depend on hemp as a real source of income.

We’re going to keep this article firmly out of the political weeds, because the economics here don’t actually care about anyone’s party. Jobs are jobs. Farm income is farm income. Rural economic development is something people across the entire political spectrum claim to want. This is one of those issues where the practical stakes are clear even when the politics around it are noisy, and we’d rather talk about the practical stakes.

The Numbers That Actually Matter

Strip away everything else and look at what Wisconsin’s hemp industry actually represents to the state. According to the appeal to Congress, the industry supports over 700 million dollars in economic production and preserves at least 3,500 jobs across Wisconsin. As of last November, the state had 470 federally licensed hemp producers. These are not abstract figures. They represent families, farms, small businesses, and paychecks, concentrated heavily in rural areas where economic opportunities can be hard to come by and where the loss of an entire agricultural sector lands especially hard.

Hemp arrived at a useful moment for a lot of Wisconsin farmers. Agricultural diversification has become increasingly important as traditional commodity farming has gotten squeezed from every direction. Hemp offered a genuine alternative, a new crop with real demand and real value-added manufacturing potential attached to it. For a farmer looking to diversify beyond the usual rotations, or a rural processor looking to build something new, hemp represented an actual opportunity rather than a theoretical one. That’s part of why the industry grew as fast as it did, and part of why its potential disruption is such a big deal for the communities that leaned into it.

The state’s appeal specifically warned that without federal legislative action, the coming changes could force closures, layoffs, and lost investment, and could push Wisconsin producers to abandon hemp cultivation altogether. For a rural farm family that reoriented part of their operation around this crop, that’s not a policy inconvenience. That’s a direct hit to the household budget. The whole point of the appeal was to prevent exactly that outcome, and to ask for what the state’s leadership called the certainty and regulatory clarity the industry needs to keep growing and investing.

What’s Actually Changing, in Plain English

Here’s the background you need, without the jargon. Hemp, defined as cannabis containing less than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC on a dry-weight basis, was federally legalized nationwide under the 2018 Farm Bill. That single piece of legislation created the entire federally legal hemp market, including the CBD and hemp-derived products that millions of Americans have folded into their daily routines. It was a genuine bipartisan achievement at the time, and it unleashed a wave of agricultural and economic activity across states like Wisconsin.

Late last year, new federal legislation changed the definition. Under the revised rules, set to take effect November 12, only products containing 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container will remain legal. That’s a dramatically tighter standard than the original 2018 framework, and it’s tight enough to sweep in a huge range of products, including many that were fully compliant under the old rules. We covered the mechanics of this change in detail when it was first announced, and the short version is that it represents a significant reshaping of what the federal hemp market is allowed to look like.

This is the change Wisconsin’s leadership is asking Congress to address, either by adding provisions to the next Farm Bill or by passing standalone legislation. The specific request was for what the state called a science-based federal framework that supports innovation, protects lawful businesses, and lets Wisconsin farmers and producers compete in a rapidly evolving marketplace. Whatever one thinks of the broader cannabis debate, a call for science-based regulatory clarity that protects lawful businesses and farm income is about as reasonable and non-partisan as policy asks get.

Why This Hits Home for Workman’s Relief

We want to be transparent about our stake in this, because pretending we’re neutral observers would be dishonest. Workman’s Relief is a Wisconsin operation. Our hemp is USDA Certified Organic and grown on Wisconsin soil. Our manufacturing happens in-house at our GMP-certified facility in Plain, Wisconsin. We are one of the businesses that a healthy Wisconsin hemp industry supports, and we’re connected to the farmers, processors, and rural communities that the state’s appeal to Congress is trying to protect. This is our industry and our home, and we care about what happens to both.

There’s something worth appreciating about Wisconsin hemp specifically. The Driftless region, where a lot of the state’s hemp is grown, is a genuinely special piece of American farmland. It’s the part of the upper Midwest that the last glaciers missed, which left it with rolling hills, rich soil, and a landscape that looks nothing like the flat farmland people usually picture in the Midwest. It’s beautiful country, and it grows an outstanding crop. When we talk about the quality of our hemp, a real part of that quality comes from where it’s grown and the people who grow it. That’s not something we could replicate by sourcing cheaper material from somewhere else, and we wouldn’t want to.

So when we make our USDA Certified Organic CBD tinctures, our CBD and D9 gummies, and our Elbow Grease topicals, we’re not just making products. We’re part of a Wisconsin agricultural and manufacturing chain that runs from the farmer in the Driftless hills to the person opening a package on their porch somewhere across the country. Every one of those products carries a publicly available Certificate of Analysis, because the same commitment to doing things right that Wisconsin agriculture is known for is the commitment we bring to what we make. The state’s fight to protect this industry is, in a real sense, a fight to protect the supply chain behind the products our customers rely on.

Wisconsin Isn’t Alone in This

The Wisconsin appeal is part of a broader national conversation happening in Congress right now, and notably, it’s one of the rare cannabis-adjacent issues drawing genuine cross-party interest. Bipartisan members of Congress have filed several bills aimed at delaying, preventing, or altering the scheduled changes to hemp THC rules. The specifics of those proposals vary, and none has yet gained traction with House and Senate leadership, but the fact that lawmakers from different parties are all working the same problem tells you something. This isn’t a fringe concern. It’s a mainstream economic issue affecting real businesses and real jobs across a lot of states, not just ours.

That cross-party interest makes sense when you look at the economics nationally. The federally legal hemp industry has become a meaningful agricultural and manufacturing sector in states across the country, red and blue alike. Farmers don’t check anyone’s voter registration before planting a crop, and the rural communities that have come to depend on hemp income span the entire political map. An issue that threatens farm income and rural jobs tends to find friends in a lot of unexpected places, precisely because it cuts across the usual dividing lines.

We’ve written before about the broader messiness of American cannabis policy, including our honest look at why the whole thing still feels broken despite overwhelming public support, and our breakdown of the separate federal rescheduling fight playing out at the DEA. The Wisconsin hemp situation is one more piece of that larger, slow-moving puzzle. What makes it stand out is how cleanly it strips the issue down to its economic core. Forget the culture war framing. This is about whether a legal agricultural industry that employs thousands of people and generates hundreds of millions of dollars gets the regulatory clarity it needs to keep operating. Framed that way, it’s not really a controversial ask at all.

What Regulatory Certainty Actually Means for the Everyday Customer

Here’s why any of this matters to the person who just buys a CBD product now and then and doesn’t follow policy news. Regulatory uncertainty is bad for consumers, not just businesses. When the rules keep shifting and nobody knows what the market will look like six months out, it creates exactly the kind of instability where sketchy operators thrive and responsible ones struggle. Uncertainty raises costs, disrupts supply, and makes it harder for the good actors, the ones who invest in organic farming, in-house manufacturing, and thorough lab testing, to plan and operate.

The certainty and clarity that Wisconsin’s leadership is asking for would benefit consumers directly. A stable, science-based framework rewards the companies doing things the right way and makes it easier for customers to trust what they’re buying. It’s the difference between a mature, well-regulated market where quality is the norm and a chaotic one where buyers have to fend for themselves. When we say we support a sensible federal framework, part of what we’re supporting is the kind of market where a customer can trust that the product they’re getting is what the label says it is.

What Happens Next, and What We’re Doing About It

The honest answer to what happens next is that nobody knows for certain. Congress could act to soften or delay the coming changes through the next Farm Bill or standalone legislation. Or it could let the November deadline arrive as currently written. The legislative process is slow, unpredictable, and hard to forecast, and anyone who tells you they know exactly how this resolves is guessing. What we do know is that a lot of people across a lot of states are pushing hard for a sensible outcome, and that the economic case for protecting the hemp industry is strong and widely shared.

Whatever happens, we want our customers to know that Workman’s Relief was built to endure exactly this kind of uncertainty. We didn’t build our company on the assumption that the rules would never change. We built it on quality, transparency, organic Wisconsin sourcing, and vertical, in-house manufacturing, because those things create value regardless of how the regulatory winds blow. Our core CBD lineup, the tinctures, the topicals, the CBD gummies, the coffee, operates comfortably within the framework being discussed. We’ve been preparing thoughtfully for the changes on the horizon, and we will communicate clearly and directly with our customers about any product adjustments well before they happen.

That’s a commitment we take seriously. If a specific product needs to be reformulated to stay compliant, our subscribers and customers will hear about it from us in advance, not discover it by surprise. If something is changing, you’ll know why and what your options are. The one thing that won’t change is our standard. Clean, tested, organic, transparent, made in Wisconsin. That’s the promise, and it holds no matter what Congress decides.

The Bigger Picture: An American Story About an American Crop

Step back and there’s something genuinely American about this whole situation. Hemp is one of the oldest crops in human history, and it has deep roots in American history specifically. Some of the founding generation grew it. It was a staple agricultural product for a long stretch of the country’s early history before a century of prohibition pushed it out. The 2018 Farm Bill brought it back into the legal fold, and farmers across the country, including a whole lot in Wisconsin, jumped at the chance to grow a heritage American crop again. There’s a real continuity there, a plant that helped build the early American economy finding new life in the modern one.

The current fight over hemp’s future is, in that light, one more chapter in a very long American story about this plant. The country keeps working out its relationship with hemp and cannabis through its institutions, at its own frustrating pace, with plenty of argument along the way. That’s democracy doing what democracy does. Messy, slow, and eventually, more often than not, landing somewhere workable. The Wisconsin appeal is one voice in that process, making an economic case that deserves to be heard on its merits.

For our part, we’re proud to be a Wisconsin company making an American product from an American crop grown by American farmers. Whatever happens in Washington, that pride and that commitment don’t waver. The research supporting cannabinoids as a legitimate wellness category keeps getting stronger, whether it’s the growing evidence on cannabis and better sleep or the striking findings on chronic pain and reduced opioid use. The demand is real, the science is real, and the Wisconsin farmers and businesses behind these products are real. That’s worth protecting.

From Our Corner of Wisconsin to Wherever You Are

If you’ve ever used one of our products, you’ve been part of this Wisconsin story whether you knew it or not. The relief you felt at the end of a long day traces back to a farm in the Driftless hills, a facility in a small Wisconsin town, and a chain of people who take genuine pride in doing this right. That connection is one of the things we value most about what we do, and it’s a big part of why the future of Wisconsin’s hemp industry matters so much to us.

We’ll keep making clean, honest, lab-tested products from Wisconsin-grown organic hemp for as long as we’re able, and we’ll keep being straight with our customers about the landscape as it evolves. The 15% discount for veterans and first responders remains standing policy. The Subscribe & Save program is there for the routine that builds over time. The lab reports stay public. And the pride we take in being a Wisconsin company making an honest American product doesn’t depend on anything happening in Washington.

Thanks for supporting a Wisconsin business, and the farmers and workers behind it. It means more than you know.

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Another Brick in the Wall: A New Federally Funded Study on Cannabis and the Opioid Crisis (2026)

Another Brick in the Wall: A New Federally Funded Study on Cannabis and the Opioid Crisis

A new study funded by both the U.S. National Institutes of Health and its Canadian counterpart found that people using cannabis to manage opioid withdrawal reported using significantly fewer opioids. Among those in serious pain, the effect was more than six times stronger. Here’s what the research says, and where the honest boundaries are.

The opioid crisis is one of the great American tragedies of the last quarter century. It has killed hundreds of thousands of people, hollowed out communities, and touched almost every family in the country in one way or another, directly or through someone they love. It did not happen because people are weak. It happened because powerful, dangerous drugs got prescribed and distributed at massive scale, and because the transition from a prescription bottle to a street supply laced with fentanyl is a shorter and more lethal path than most people realize. Any research that points toward a way of reducing that harm deserves a careful, serious look.

A new study, published in the Journal of Cannabis Research, adds another data point to a question researchers have been circling for years: can cannabis help people reduce their reliance on opioids? This particular study looked at one of the hardest-hit populations imaginable, and its findings are worth understanding both for what they show and for what they carefully do not claim.

What the Study Actually Found

Researchers from the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and UCLA surveyed 197 people in Vancouver who reported using both cannabis and unregulated opioids, meaning street drugs like fentanyl or heroin rather than prescription medications. This is a population at extreme risk, and studying it directly is difficult and important work. You can read the full study in the Journal of Cannabis Research if you want the complete methodology and data.

About 45 percent of the participants said they had used cannabis to manage opioid withdrawal symptoms in the past six months. Of those, roughly 66 percent agreed that when they used cannabis, they didn’t need to consume as much of the opioids they were taking. After adjusting for factors like age, gender, race, and pain levels, the researchers found that using cannabis to manage withdrawal was associated with more than twice the odds of reporting reduced opioid use.

The effect got dramatically stronger among people in serious pain. For participants experiencing moderate or severe pain, those who used cannabis for withdrawal had more than six times the odds of reducing their opioid consumption compared to those who didn’t. Overall, about 57 percent of participants said they used fewer opioids during periods when they were using cannabis. The study authors summarized it plainly: “Cannabis use for opioid withdrawal was significantly associated with self-reported reductions in opioid use.”

What makes this study notable is that it’s the first quantitative analysis to specifically examine the relationship between intentionally using cannabis for opioid withdrawal and actual changes in how much opioid people subsequently consumed. Earlier research had looked at whether cannabis could treat individual withdrawal symptoms like pain, anxiety, and insomnia, and other studies had examined cannabis and opioid cravings. This one connected the dots between intentional withdrawal management and downstream reduction in use. It was funded by both the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, which is to say this is serious, government-backed science, not industry marketing.

The Honest Boundaries, Stated Up Front

Now for the part that a responsible brand has to say clearly, because the subject matter is serious and the stakes are life and death. This study looked at a specific, high-risk population using street opioids in a harm-reduction context. It is not a claim that any cannabis product, including anything we make, is a treatment for opioid addiction or withdrawal. It is observational research showing an association, and the authors themselves were careful to call for controlled experimental trials to test the relationship properly.

If you or someone you love is struggling with opioid dependency, the right move is not a hemp gummy from any company. The right move is professional medical help. Opioid use disorder is a serious medical condition with established, evidence-based treatments, and there are people whose entire job is to help with exactly this. We will never position our products as a substitute for that care, because doing so would be dishonest and potentially dangerous. What this study does is add to a growing body of evidence that the medical and research community is taking seriously, and that evidence points toward cannabis having a legitimate role in the broader conversation about reducing opioid harm. That’s meaningful. It’s also not the same thing as a product recommendation, and we won’t pretend otherwise.

With that boundary clearly drawn, the study’s authors made a point that transcends the specific population they studied. “Cannabis is associated with markedly lower risks of morbidity and mortality compared to unregulated opioids.” That comparison is the heart of why this research matters at the public-health level. Whatever cannabis’s own risks are, and they are real, they exist on a completely different scale from the risks of street fentanyl. For a population already using the latter, the harm-reduction math is stark.

This Isn’t One Study. It’s a Wall Being Built One Brick at a Time.

The reason this new study matters is not that it stands alone. It’s that it fits into a pattern that has been getting steadily more consistent and harder to dismiss. Over the past several years, study after study has pointed in the same direction, using different populations, different methods, and different research teams, and arriving at broadly similar conclusions. When independent researchers keep finding the same signal from different angles, that’s when a hypothesis starts becoming an understanding.

Consider the recent research we’ve covered on this topic. A five-year study of 241 treatment-refractory chronic lower back pain patients found that opioid use in that group fell from 100 percent to under 5 percent over the study period. A separate study of more than 3,500 patients found that medical cannabis helped people reduce their use of opioids, sleeping aids, and antidepressants, with fewer side effects after switching. A federally funded study found that states legalizing cannabis saw significant reductions in opioid overdoses among adults with employer-sponsored insurance, suggesting a substitution effect. Multiple studies published by the American Medical Association have found cannabis serving as an effective opioid substitute in chronic pain treatment.

The population-level research is just as striking. One study found a consistent negative relationship between cannabis legalization and fatal opioid overdoses, with stronger effects in states that legalized earlier in the crisis, estimating a decrease of roughly 3.5 overdose deaths per 100,000 people. Research on Utah following its medical cannabis legalization found reductions in both opioid use by chronic pain patients and prescription overdose deaths statewide. Even the money side shows it: one study found that medical cannabis legalization was associated with reduced payments from opioid manufacturers to pain doctors, with the authors attributing the decline to cannabis becoming available as a substitute.

No single one of these studies proves causation on its own. Observational research rarely can. But the accumulation is what matters. When this many careful studies, funded by governments and published in peer-reviewed journals, keep finding the same pattern, the responsible conclusion is not to dismiss it. It’s to take it seriously and keep investigating, which is exactly what the research community is doing.

Why Cannabinoids Affect Pain in the First Place

The underlying reason cannabis shows up in all this pain and opioid research has to do with the endocannabinoid system, the internal signaling network that runs throughout your body and helps regulate pain, inflammation, mood, sleep, and stress. THC and CBD interact with that system through what are called CB1 and CB2 receptors, influencing how pain signals get processed and how the body manages the emotional and physical weight of chronic discomfort. Crucially, that mechanism operates regardless of how the cannabinoids get into your body. A gummy, a tincture, a topical, or any other format engages the same underlying biology. The receptors respond to the cannabinoids, not to the delivery method.

This matters for everyday people because most folks managing everyday aches and pains are not looking to smoke anything. They want something clean, measured, and easy to fit into a normal working life. And the good news is that the cannabinoid science applies across the whole range of product formats. What changes between a gummy and a topical is not whether the cannabinoids work, but how fast they take effect, how long they last, and whether the effect is localized to one area or distributed throughout the body. Those differences are exactly what let you match the right format to the right kind of discomfort.

Where Workman’s Relief Fits, Honestly and Within Our Lane

Let’s be crystal clear about what we do and don’t claim. Workman’s Relief makes federally legal, hemp-derived wellness products for everyday people dealing with everyday discomfort. We do not make, and would never market, a treatment for opioid dependency or withdrawal. That’s a serious medical matter that belongs with medical professionals, full stop. What we make is a clean, tested, transparent option for the ordinary muscle and joint wear, the restless nights, and the general end-of-day tension that come with living and working in a body that does real things.

For the sore lower back that comes from a hard day of work, our Elbow Grease CBD topicals deliver cannabinoids right to the tissue that hurts, working locally without anything systemic and without any high. For the general daily wind-down, our CBD gummies, including Punch In for daytime and Punch Out for nighttime, offer a measured, easy-to-dose format that fits into a routine. Our federally compliant D9 THC gummies at a measured 5mg per serving give a predictable, clearly-dosed option for people who want it. And for the pain that keeps you up at night, which is one of the most common reasons people build a cannabinoid routine, the overlap between discomfort and poor sleep is something we covered in depth in our look at how two out of three Americans report cannabis helps them sleep better.

Every one of those products carries a publicly available Certificate of Analysis. The CBD is USDA Certified Organic, grown on Wisconsin soil. Everything is manufactured in-house in our own GMP-certified facility. That matters because in a category where the research is only as good as the product delivering it, knowing exactly what’s in the bottle is the whole game. The studies use precisely measured, verified cannabinoids. A product with unknown potency and unknown contaminants can’t reliably deliver what the science describes. Transparency isn’t a marketing angle for us. It’s the baseline requirement for making a product people can actually trust.

Why This Matters for Working America Specifically

The opioid crisis did not hit every part of the country evenly. It hit working America hardest. The people who do physically demanding jobs are the people most likely to develop chronic pain, most likely to be prescribed opioids for it, and most likely to get caught in the long, brutal cycle that so often follows. Construction workers, warehouse workers, tradespeople, truck drivers, miners, veterans. The map of chronic pain and the map of the opioid epidemic overlap almost perfectly, and that overlap is not a coincidence. It’s the predictable result of hard work on hard bodies meeting a medical system that reached for the prescription pad first.

So when the research keeps suggesting that cannabinoids may have a role to play in reducing opioid reliance, the population that stands to benefit most is exactly the population Workman’s Relief was built to serve. That’s not a sales pitch. It’s an observation about who gets hurt by this crisis and who might have the most to gain from a growing body of evidence pointing toward safer alternatives for managing the chronic pain that starts the whole cycle. The people who build and move and fix things in this country have carried a disproportionate share of the opioid burden. They deserve every legitimate tool that might help.

The study authors themselves framed the stakes in public-health terms, calling for immediate efforts to improve access to legal cannabis, especially for the marginalized populations at highest risk of overdose, as a step toward reducing the health and social harms of opioid use. That’s a research team looking at their own data and concluding that access to a safer alternative could save lives. Whatever your politics, that’s a serious conclusion from serious scientists that deserves to be weighed on its merits.

The Frustrating Policy Backdrop

There is a genuine tension worth naming here, and we’ll name it neutrally. On one hand, the federal government is funding this research. The National Institutes of Health helped pay for the study we’re discussing. That’s the government investing real money to understand whether cannabis can help address a crisis it has spent enormous resources fighting. On the other hand, cannabis remains federally scheduled in a way that makes the research harder to conduct and the access harder to expand, and the policy process for changing that has been slow, contested, and uncertain, as we covered in our look at the DEA’s cannabis rescheduling fight.

That tension, between the government funding the science and the government maintaining the restrictions, is part of the broader messiness we explored in our honest look at why cannabis legalization still feels broken despite overwhelming public support. The country is working through a genuinely complicated issue in real time, through its institutions, at the frustratingly slow pace that big changes usually move. That’s not a knock on anyone in particular. It’s just where things stand. The science is moving faster than the policy, and that gap creates real friction for everyone involved.

The one clear thing amid all that uncertainty is that the federally legal hemp market, operating under the settled 2018 Farm Bill framework, gives everyday Americans access to clean, tested, hemp-derived wellness products right now, without waiting for the larger policy questions to resolve. For the working person dealing with everyday pain who wants a trustworthy option, that access already exists and isn’t dependent on how the scheduling fight breaks.

The Long View

Step back and here’s the arc. The opioid crisis represents one of the most catastrophic public-health failures in modern American history, driven in significant part by the aggressive promotion of powerful, addictive pharmaceuticals. In the shadow of that failure, a growing body of serious, government-funded research keeps pointing toward a plant that humans have used for pain and relief across thousands of years as one possible piece of the solution. There’s a hard irony in that, and there’s also real hope.

The research will keep accumulating. The policy will keep grinding forward at its own pace. And the plant will keep doing what the evidence increasingly suggests it does, whether or not the institutions catch up quickly. For the everyday American, the practical takeaway is simple. The science supporting cannabinoids as a legitimate wellness tool keeps getting stronger, the stigma keeps fading, and the option to choose a clean, tested, federally legal hemp product for everyday discomfort is already on the table.

For our part, we’ll keep making those products the honest way. Lab-tested, USDA Certified Organic, manufactured in America under our own roof, with the lab reports public for anyone to check. We’ll keep serving the working people who carry so much of the physical load in this country, and who have carried more than their share of the opioid burden too. And we’ll keep telling the truth about what our products are and aren’t, because in a category this serious, honesty is the only foundation worth building on.

If you or someone you love is struggling with opioid use, please reach out to a medical professional or a treatment resource. That help is real, and it works. For the everyday aches, the restless nights, and the ordinary wear of a working life, we’re here with something clean and honest whenever you want it.

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We Legalized It. So Why Does It Still Feel Broken? An Honest Look at the State of American Cannabis (2026)

Seventy percent of Americans support full legalization. Not one state has reversed course. And the industry built on all that goodwill has lost 97 percent of its investor value. Here’s an honest look at what legalization got right, what it got wrong, and why the everyday consumer keeps winning anyway.

Here is a genuinely strange set of facts. About 70 percent of Americans now support full cannabis legalization. Around 88 percent support medical use. Not a single state that has legalized has ever reversed course, not once, not even partially. The industry is worth north of 30 billion dollars. By every measure of public opinion, this fight is over, and the reformers won it decisively.

And yet. Cannabis exchange-traded funds have lost roughly 97 percent of their value since their peak in early 2021. Dispensary owners across the country are drowning in red ink. Investors have been sitting on their hands for five straight years. There are 39 different state programs, none of which agree with each other on much of anything. And the plant remains federally scheduled in a category that says it has no accepted medical use, a claim that would be funny if it weren’t so consequential.

So how does an industry win the argument and lose the business? That’s the question a lot of people who have spent their careers in this space are asking right now, and the answers are more interesting and more honest than the usual hot takes suggest.

The Hearts and Minds Were Won. The Structure Was Not.

Keith Stroup founded NORML in 1970, back when Gallup had only just started bothering to ask Americans how they felt about legalization. The answer then was 12 percent. Fifty-six years later it’s around 70 percent. That is one of the more dramatic reversals in the history of American public opinion on any issue, and Stroup’s read on it is straightforward: the movement convinced the majority of Americans that prohibition was more harmful than the plant itself. Not that the plant is harmless. That prohibition was worse. That’s a different and more defensible argument, and it’s the one that won.

Stroup also makes a point that gets lost in the current doom cycle. Not a single state has reversed its legalization or its medical program. Not one. In American politics, where policies get repealed and re-repealed constantly, that kind of durability is remarkable. The anti-cannabis voices that remain are loud, but as Stroup puts it, they no longer represent many people. The public verdict is in and it has held.

The problem, according to Adam Smith of the Marijuana Policy Project, is what got built on top of that victory. “We misunderstood when we legalized state by state. We misunderstood that legalizing was not going to immediately replace the illicit market.” The state-by-state approach was a reaction to federal inaction, and it produced exactly what you’d expect from 39 separate improvised systems: inefficiency, incoherence, and costs that make it nearly impossible to operate profitably.

California is the case study. The state passed medical legalization in 1996 and largely left implementation to local governments. When adult use passed later, roughly 60 percent of the state’s counties hadn’t allowed medical in the first place, so most of them didn’t allow adult use either. The result is a state that is famous worldwide for legal cannabis where the majority of the geography has no legal storefront. That’s not a legalization failure. That’s a structural design failure, and it’s been replicated in various forms across the country. The full text and history of California’s Proposition 64 is public if you want to see how the sausage was made, and the state’s Attorney General’s office maintains the medicinal cannabis guidance that governs the older program.

Smith’s larger critique is the one worth sitting with. “What we didn’t set up is a rational cannabis policy that is based on public health, public safety and public access. So the industry rose, and then the industry crashed.” The movement was about ending an unjust prohibition. The industry that followed was about capturing a market. Those are not the same goal, and the second one swallowed the first.

The Money Story: Irrational Exuberance Meets Reality

The financial collapse has its own logic, and it’s not mysterious. Steve Schain, an attorney working in cannabis banking and finance, dates the peak to the first quarter of 2021, when pandemic conditions gave cannabis stocks an artificial boost and everything traded at all-time highs. The fall since then has been on the order of 97 percent in cannabis ETFs. His diagnosis is blunt: the industry got ahead of itself, and there was irrational exuberance about a future that could never have met the predictions.

Morgan Paxhia, who co-founded one of the largest funds in the cannabis space, describes a pattern that repeats with almost mechanical predictability. “People get excited. They love to see pretty plants. That often leads to an overbuild of capacity. In almost every single market we see just inevitably too much capacity relative to the demand, which leads to price compression, which leads to companies that have high cost structures going out of business. Every state is watching this happen over and over again on repeat.”

Schain’s harshest observation is about the operators themselves. He describes a generation of entrepreneurs who borrowed heavily without any realistic plan to repay, who wanted their money out in eighteen months, and who never intended to build anything durable. His line about it lands hard: the phrase “serial entrepreneur” now means getting in with as little money as possible and getting out fast. “No one said I’m building this for my grandkids.”

That’s the part of this story that should matter to consumers, because it explains a lot about the product quality problems that have dogged this space. A market flooded with operators who are optimizing for a quick exit is a market where corners get cut, testing gets treated as an obstacle rather than a responsibility, and the customer is a means to an end rather than the point of the whole exercise. Paxhia’s advice to his own portfolio companies is the antidote: “Just build patiently, build profitably, and at some point, you will be paid for that.”

The Counter-Argument: This Isn’t a Backlash, It’s a Maturation

Not everyone in the industry reads the current moment as a crisis. Ricardo Baca, who became the first cannabis columnist at a mainstream American newspaper back in 2013, offers a more measured take. “I don’t know that I see a backlash. I see the inevitable maturation of a complex, federally illegal industry that finally has years under its belt so we can actually learn what this really looks like.”

That framing is worth taking seriously. Every emerging industry in American history has followed a version of the same arc. Boom, overbuild, bust, consolidation, and then a slower, healthier equilibrium where the operators who actually know what they’re doing survive and the tourists go home. Railroads did it. Radio did it. The internet did it twice. Cannabis is doing it now. The wreckage looks catastrophic from the inside, but from a distance it looks like a market figuring out what it actually is.

Scott Vasterling, who runs a sun-grown farm operation, sees something even more optimistic in the current moment. “What I am seeing is that the state of the market in cannabis is actually becoming more normalized than it ever has been. We’re seeing the proliferation of hemp-derived products now, and we can have the conversation about regulation and testing and things, and the needs for those types of quality control measures that I think are critically important to the industry. But it’s the same plant, right? So I think that what that’s doing is it’s normalizing cannabis as an agricultural crop.”

That’s the shift that matters most. Not cannabis as a countercultural symbol, not cannabis as a speculative asset class, but cannabis as an agricultural crop with quality standards, testing requirements, and the same expectations of consistency that apply to every other thing Americans grow and sell. Vasterling also describes something encouraging happening on the ground: farmers sharing genetics, operators collaborating instead of hustling each other, and the in-fighting of the green rush era giving way to actual professional relationships. Boring, in the best possible way. Boring is what a mature industry looks like.

An Honest Word About Risks, Because Pretending Otherwise Isn’t Credible

Here’s where a lot of cannabis industry commentary loses the plot, and where we’re going to do the opposite. This plant is not risk-free, and any brand that tells you otherwise is selling you something. The research on the risks is real, published in serious journals, and deserves to be part of an honest conversation rather than dismissed as prohibitionist propaganda.

The New England Journal of Medicine has published a substantial review on cannabis-related disorders and toxic effects that documents genuine clinical concerns, including dependence, effects in adolescents, and interactions with mental health conditions. The Journal of the American Heart Association has published research on associations between cannabis use and cardiovascular outcomes that raises real questions worth taking seriously. These are not fringe sources. They are among the most respected medical journals in the world, and their findings belong in this conversation.

Baca makes the point well from inside the industry: “You have really valuable medical research coming out about the efficacy of cannabis, but also about the risks, which are real, because this plant is not without its risks.” He also notes, correctly, that a lot of early-stage research with small sample sizes is being taken too seriously in both directions, by boosters and critics alike. What the field needs is larger studies, better methodology, and the patience to let the evidence accumulate rather than cherry-picking whatever confirms the position you already held.

Our position on this is simple. The risks are real and consumers deserve to know about them. So are the benefits, which are also increasingly well documented in serious journals, including the growing research on cannabis and sleep quality and the anti-inflammatory effects documented in dermatological reviews. Grown adults are capable of weighing both sides and making their own informed decisions. That’s what the research is for. Anyone who tells you this plant is a miracle with no downsides is as unreliable as anyone who tells you it’s a menace with no upside. Reality lives in the middle, and it’s more interesting than either extreme.

The Part That Explains Why Your Hemp Products Are Doing Fine

Here’s the thing that most of the doom coverage misses entirely. While the state-licensed marijuana industry has been putting itself through a brutal boom-bust cycle, the federally legal hemp market has been quietly building something more stable on a completely different legal foundation.

The reason is structural. Hemp was federally legalized nationwide under the 2018 Farm Bill. That means hemp-derived products operate under one federal framework rather than 39 conflicting state ones. They have access to normal banking. They ship across state lines. They aren’t subject to the punishing federal tax provisions that have strangled state-licensed marijuana businesses. None of the specific structural problems that Smith, Schain, and Paxhia describe apply in the same way. It’s a different market with a different set of rules, and those rules happen to be dramatically more workable.

This is why the CBD topical you buy for your sore back, the tincture in your medicine cabinet, and the federally compliant hemp gummy in your kitchen drawer have been steadily available and steadily improving while the headlines have been full of dispensary bankruptcies. They’re not part of that story. They’re part of a parallel one that has been much less dramatic and much more functional.

That’s not a victory lap. The hemp market has its own regulatory challenges working through the system, and plenty of bad actors have taken advantage of the looser oversight to sell junk. But structurally, the hemp side of this plant has been doing exactly what Vasterling described: normalizing as an agricultural product, building quality control expectations, and serving customers without the boom-bust theatrics.

What Actually Fixes This

Nobody in this conversation has a magic answer, but a few themes keep surfacing from people who have been at it the longest, and they’re worth noting because they’re unglamorous and probably correct.

The first is regulatory coherence. Suehiko Ono, an attorney working with Massachusetts cultivators, describes a system where regulators pile on costs that no other business in the world has to contend with, often without understanding the operational realities of what they’re regulating. He points to New York, where regulators misinterpreted school-distance requirements and voided a batch of dispensary licenses as a result. That’s not malice. That’s a regulatory apparatus being asked to do a job it has never done before, without federal guidance, and getting the details wrong. Ono’s point is that the over-regulation ultimately harms the operators and the consumers both, because somebody pays for all that compliance cost, and it’s usually the person at the register.

The second theme is patience. Paxhia’s advice to build patiently and build profitably runs directly against everything the green rush encouraged. The operators who survive this shakeout are going to be the ones who treated it like a real business from the start, with real cost discipline, real quality standards, and a plan that extends past the next funding round.

The third theme, and the one Paul Armentano of NORML raises, is that none of this progresses on autopilot. “I think we’re in an environment where, because of our past successes, many people among the public are no longer as engaged in this issue as they once were. They think that legalization at this point is just sort of a fait accompli, that it’s just going to kind of happen on its own, not understanding that social and political changes really only happen when there’s advocates who are consistently and diligently advocating for those changes.” Winning the argument is not the same as finishing the work. That’s true of most things worth doing.

Building It for the Grandkids

Of everything in this conversation, the line that stuck with us hardest was Schain’s observation about the industry’s entrepreneurs: “No one said I’m building this for my grandkids.”

That’s the whole problem in nine words. An industry full of people optimizing for an exit is an industry that produces bad products, cuts corners on testing, treats regulation as an obstacle to route around, and leaves the customer holding whatever’s left when the founders cash out. The wreckage that Smith and Schain and Paxhia describe is not primarily a regulatory failure or a market failure. It’s a failure of intent. A lot of people showed up to extract value from this plant rather than to build something worth keeping.

That’s not everyone, obviously. Vasterling’s description of farmers sharing genetics and operators building actual relationships is what the other version looks like. There have always been people in this space who treated it as a craft and a responsibility rather than a payday. They’re the ones still standing.

For our part, we’ll say plainly where Workman’s Relief comes down on this. We’re not a startup chasing an exit. We’re a manufacturer. We own our facility in Wisconsin, we grow USDA Certified Organic hemp on American soil, we run every batch under our own GMP-certified roof, and we publish a Certificate of Analysis for every single product so you can see exactly what you’re getting. That’s not a marketing posture. It’s the operational reality of a company that intends to be here in twenty years serving the same working people it serves today.

The industry’s mess isn’t our mess. We built outside of it on purpose, in the federally legal hemp lane, with an old-fashioned manufacturing philosophy that treats quality control as the entire point rather than a compliance expense. When the shakeout finishes and the tourists have gone home, the companies left standing are going to be the ones who were building for the long haul the whole time. We intend to be one of them.

The Honest Verdict

So did legalization fail? No. Legalization worked. Public opinion moved 58 points in 55 years. Not a single state has gone backward. Millions of Americans have legal access to a plant that people used to go to prison over. The American dad who can now talk openly with his kids about responsible cannabis use is living in a country his own father couldn’t have imagined. That’s not failure. That’s one of the more complete policy reversals in modern American history.

What failed is the business architecture that got improvised on top of it under impossible conditions, with 39 conflicting rulebooks, no federal coherence, a tax code designed to punish, and a flood of capital chasing a story rather than a business. That’s a genuinely hard problem, and it’s going to take another decade of unglamorous work to sort out. Meanwhile the underlying thing, the plant, the research, the consumers, keeps chugging along regardless of what the stock chart says.

America has always been messy about the things it eventually gets right. We argue, we overbuild, we crash, we sue each other, we regulate badly and then better, and somewhere in all that noise the thing gets built anyway. That’s not a bug in the American system. That’s how it has always worked. Cannabis is just the current one going through it.

In the meantime, the people who just want a clean, honest, tested product for their sore back or their bad night of sleep don’t have to wait for any of it to resolve. That option already exists. It’s been here the whole time, quietly working, while everyone was watching the fireworks.

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The Hearing You Can’t Watch: What the DEA’s Cannabis Rescheduling Fight Means for Everyday Americans (2026)

A federal hearing that could reshape cannabis law is underway. It won’t be livestreamed, the invited participants all oppose the reform, and even the final outcome may not be binding. Here’s a plain-English breakdown of what’s happening and why it matters, minus the political noise.

There is a certain kind of government proceeding that generates enormous headlines and very little clarity, and the DEA’s cannabis rescheduling hearing is shaping up to be a textbook example. If you’ve seen the phrase “Schedule III” floating around your feed and weren’t entirely sure what it meant, whether it was good news, or whether it affected you at all, you are in very good company. The whole thing is procedurally dense, politically charged, and structured in a way that makes it genuinely hard to follow. So let’s cut through it and lay out what’s actually happening, what it could mean, and why an everyday American who uses hemp products should care.

The short version: the federal government is holding a hearing that will help decide whether marijuana gets moved from Schedule I, the most restrictive category in federal drug law, down to Schedule III, a much less restrictive one. The hearing began June 29, 2026, and runs through mid-July, with a break around Independence Day. When it wraps, an administrative law judge will issue a recommendation, and then the DEA and the Justice Department decide what to do with it. That’s the process. The details are where it gets complicated.

What Schedule I Versus Schedule III Actually Means

First, some plain-English background, because the scheduling system is one of those things everyone references and almost nobody explains. The Controlled Substances Act sorts drugs into five schedules. Schedule I is reserved for substances the government classifies as having no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. That’s where marijuana has sat since 1970, grouped alongside heroin. Schedule III, by contrast, is for substances with accepted medical uses and a moderate-to-low potential for dependence. It includes things like ketamine, anabolic steroids, and certain codeine formulations.

Moving cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III would be a significant symbolic and practical shift. It would formally acknowledge, at the federal level, that the plant has legitimate medical uses. It would ease some of the tax and banking burdens that have strangled state-legal cannabis businesses for years. What it would not do is make marijuana federally legal, or turn it into something you can buy at any store nationwide. Schedule III is a reclassification, not a legalization. That distinction gets lost constantly in the coverage, and it matters.

One important thing already happened. As of April 2026, medical cannabis and FDA-approved cannabis products already moved to Schedule III. So the hearing that started June 29 is narrower than it sounds. It’s weighing only whether the rest of the plant, beyond medical and FDA-approved forms, should follow. That’s a meaningful narrowing of scope that most of the headlines have glossed over.

The Part That Has Everyone Talking: Who Got a Seat in the Room

Here’s where the proceeding gets genuinely unusual, and where we’ll stick to the documented facts rather than the political spin. The DEA released its roster of invited participants, the parties it designated as “interested persons” allowed to take part in the hearing, on June 18. There are seven of them. According to the reporting, all seven have positions opposing the rescheduling reform. No designated supporter of the reform made the final list.

The reason, per the DEA’s own stated logic, comes down to a technical definition. To qualify as an “interested person,” the agency decided a party had to be “adversely affected or aggrieved” by the proposed rule. The agency’s reasoning was that since reform groups support moving cannabis off Schedule I, they can’t claim to be harmed by it, and therefore don’t have standing to participate. That single interpretation swept out a long list of would-be participants, including organizations that have represented cannabis consumers for decades and the country’s largest licensed cannabis wholesale distributor.

For context on how much of a departure this is, it’s worth noting that an earlier version of this same proceeding, under the previous administration, seated a much larger group that included both supporters and opponents of the reform. That earlier process had 25 designated participants. This one has seven, all on the same side. The rule didn’t change and the definition didn’t change. The administration running the process did. We’re going to leave the political interpretation of that to the reader, because reasonable people land in different places on it, and our job here is to report what happened, not to tell anyone how to feel about it.

It’s also worth noting where public sentiment sits, since it’s part of the documented record. Researchers at Johns Hopkins and UC San Diego analyzed the roughly 43,000 public comments submitted on the proposed rule and found that about 92 percent supported the Schedule III move or wanted further reform. Whatever one thinks of the hearing’s structure, the public comment record itself leaned heavily in one direction.

A Public Hearing You Can’t Actually Watch

For a proceeding that everyone keeps calling historic, it’s remarkably difficult to observe. The administrative law judge overseeing it ruled that the hearing will not be televised, livestreamed, or broadcast in any form, and barred recording devices from the courtroom. If you want to watch one of the more consequential cannabis policy hearings in a generation, you have to physically travel to a DEA facility in Arlington, Virginia, and hope to claim one of a small number of available seats.

The judge acknowledged in the same order that the national public interest in the issue points toward transparency, even while declining to allow cameras. The earlier version of this hearing under the previous administration was livestreamed. This one is not. Various parties have formally asked the judge to reconsider, arguing that a public hearing isn’t meaningfully public if access depends on physically getting a seat in one room in Virginia. The scope has also been narrowed in other ways, including a ruling that there will be no closing arguments. Take from all of that what you will. We’re reporting it because it’s part of the factual record, not because we’re grinding an axe about it.

Why the Whole Thing Might Not Settle Anything

Here’s the part that should temper anyone expecting a dramatic resolution in either direction. Nothing about this hearing is binding. There’s no verdict at the end. The judge will eventually issue a recommendation, but the DEA and the Justice Department are free to follow it or ignore it, and there’s no deadline forcing them to act at all. Legal experts following the process have noted that both the judge and the DEA operate under no time pressure whatsoever. The judge can take as long as he wants to issue a recommendation, and the DEA can take as long as it wants to respond, if it responds at all.

The recommendation isn’t even limited to a simple yes or no on Schedule III. The judge could recommend Schedule II instead, a tighter classification that would wrap the existing multibillion-dollar cannabis industry in pharmacy-style controls. He could recommend leaving cannabis on Schedule I, exactly where it is. Or he could recommend the move to Schedule III. And whatever he recommends, it’s likely to be challenged in court regardless. Multiple coalitions have already filed petitions seeking to freeze or overturn the rescheduling effort. The courts are probably going to have the last word here, not the hearing itself.

We saw how fragile this kind of process can be last year, when the earlier version of these proceedings stalled out and was ultimately scrapped before reaching a conclusion. Policy experts tracking this one have been openly cautioning that there may be no neat resolution any time soon. So if you’re waiting for a single dramatic moment that clarifies the federal status of cannabis once and for all, this hearing is probably not going to be it. This is the slow, grinding, procedural middle of a story that has been unfolding for decades and will keep unfolding for a while yet.

The Most Important Point for Everyday Consumers: This Is About Marijuana, Not Hemp

Now for the part that actually matters most to the everyday American reading this, and the part that most coverage skips entirely. This entire hearing is about marijuana and its federal scheduling. It is not about hemp. And that distinction is the whole ballgame for the products most people are actually buying and using.

Here’s the difference in plain terms. Marijuana is cannabis above the federal THC threshold, and it’s the plant this DEA hearing is fighting over. Hemp is cannabis at or below that federal threshold, and it was federally legalized nationwide under the 2018 Farm Bill. The CBD products, the federally compliant hemp-derived products, the topicals and tinctures and gummies that millions of Americans have folded into their daily routines, those come from hemp. They already exist in a legal framework that the Schedule I versus Schedule III fight does not directly touch.

This is why the federally legal hemp market has been such a steady, mainstream presence even as the marijuana scheduling debate has dragged on year after year without resolution. The hemp aisle didn’t wait for the DEA to hold a hearing. It got its legal footing in 2018 and has been serving customers ever since. The research supporting the wellness case for these products has kept building the entire time, whether the scheduling fight moves forward or stalls. The recent work on how two out of three Americans report cannabis helps them sleep better and the studies on CBD’s anti-inflammatory effects on skin landed independent of any scheduling decision. The science doesn’t wait for the politics.

None of which means hemp is completely insulated from the broader regulatory picture. It isn’t, and we’ve written about the separate federal hemp rules working their way through the system. But the specific thing happening in that Arlington courtroom, the Schedule I versus Schedule III fight over marijuana, is not the thing that determines whether your CBD topical or your federally compliant hemp gummy is legal. Those are governed by a different framework entirely, one that has been settled and operating since 2018.

The Most Important Point for Everyday Consumers: This Is About Marijuana, Not Hemp

Now for the part that actually matters most to the everyday American reading this, and the part that most coverage skips entirely. This entire hearing is about marijuana and its federal scheduling. It is not about hemp. And that distinction is the whole ballgame for the products most people are actually buying and using.

Here’s the difference in plain terms. Marijuana is cannabis above the federal THC threshold, and it’s the plant this DEA hearing is fighting over. Hemp is cannabis at or below that federal threshold, and it was federally legalized nationwide under the 2018 Farm Bill. The CBD products, the federally compliant hemp-derived products, the topicals and tinctures and gummies that millions of Americans have folded into their daily routines, those come from hemp. They already exist in a legal framework that the Schedule I versus Schedule III fight does not directly touch.

This is why the federally legal hemp market has been such a steady, mainstream presence even as the marijuana scheduling debate has dragged on year after year without resolution. The hemp aisle didn’t wait for the DEA to hold a hearing. It got its legal footing in 2018 and has been serving customers ever since. The research supporting the wellness case for these products has kept building the entire time, whether the scheduling fight moves forward or stalls. The recent work on how two out of three Americans report cannabis helps them sleep better and the studies on CBD’s anti-inflammatory effects on skin landed independent of any scheduling decision. The science doesn’t wait for the politics.

None of which means hemp is completely insulated from the broader regulatory picture. It isn’t, and we’ve written about the separate federal hemp rules working their way through the system. But the specific thing happening in that Arlington courtroom, the Schedule I versus Schedule III fight over marijuana, is not the thing that determines whether your CBD topical or your federally compliant hemp gummy is legal. Those are governed by a different framework entirely, one that has been settled and operating since 2018.

What This Means If You’re Just Trying to Live Your Life

Strip away the procedural drama and here’s the practical takeaway for a regular person who uses or is curious about hemp products. In the near term, very little changes for you regardless of how this hearing goes. The federally legal hemp products you can buy today, you’ll still be able to buy tomorrow. The scheduling fight is about a different category of cannabis and a different set of regulatory questions. If the reform eventually goes through, it mostly affects the state-licensed marijuana industry, its tax burden, and its banking access, not the federally compliant hemp market that most everyday wellness customers actually shop in.

In the longer term, the direction of travel is worth understanding, because it’s part of a broader normalization that has been reshaping how Americans relate to this plant. The fact that the federal government is holding any hearing at all about moving cannabis off Schedule I would have been close to unthinkable a couple of decades ago. Whatever the outcome, the mere existence of the proceeding reflects how far the mainstream conversation has moved. That shift shows up everywhere, from the way American dads talk openly with their kids about responsible cannabis use to the growing body of research treating cannabinoids as a serious wellness category rather than a fringe curiosity.

The honest bottom line is that federal cannabis policy is going to keep being messy, slow, and contested for a while yet. That’s just the reality of a big country working through a complicated issue with a lot of competing interests. In the meantime, the federally legal hemp market keeps doing what it’s been doing since 2018: serving customers, funding real research, and operating in a settled legal framework while the marijuana scheduling fight grinds on separately.

Why Buying From a Transparent Brand Matters More Than Ever During Uncertain Times

Here’s the throughline that connects the political noise to a practical decision you can actually control. When the regulatory environment is uncertain and constantly shifting, the single best thing you can do as a consumer is buy from brands that operate cleanly and transparently no matter what the rules are doing. A brand that publishes its lab results, sources its hemp responsibly, and manufactures under strict quality standards is a brand that’s built to weather regulatory change, because it’s already operating above the bar that any new rule is likely to set.

That’s the entire operating philosophy behind Workman’s Relief. Every product carries a publicly available Certificate of Analysis showing exactly what’s in it and confirming it’s screened for contaminants. The CBD is USDA Certified Organic, grown on Wisconsin soil. Everything is manufactured in-house in our own GMP-certified facility. Our products are federally compliant hemp-derived products, operating in the settled framework the 2018 Farm Bill created, not in the contested marijuana-scheduling space that Arlington courtroom is fighting over.

When the news is full of closed-door hearings and shifting federal positions, the value of a brand that just does the right thing consistently goes up, not down. You shouldn’t have to be a policy expert to know whether the product you’re putting on your body or in your body is clean and honest. The lab report tells you. The organic certification tells you. The in-house manufacturing tells you. That’s the kind of certainty that doesn’t depend on which way a federal hearing breaks.

The Long View: America Is Slowly Working This Out

Step all the way back and there’s a bigger, more optimistic story here than the procedural mess suggests. The United States has spent about a century wrestling with how to regulate a plant that humans have used for many thousands of years. The current hearing, with all its awkwardness, is one more chapter in that long, slow, deeply American process of sorting out a hard question through public institutions, legal challenges, and the steady pressure of public opinion. It’s messy because democracy is messy. It’s slow because getting big things right usually is.

What’s genuinely encouraging is that underneath the political noise, the country keeps moving toward a more honest, evidence-based relationship with cannabinoids. The research keeps getting better. The stigma keeps fading. The federally legal hemp market keeps giving Americans access to clean, tested, transparently made products while the larger legal questions get sorted out through the proper channels. However this specific hearing resolves, and it may not resolve cleanly, the broader direction has been remarkably consistent.

For our part, we’ll keep doing what we’ve always done. Making clean, lab-tested, federally compliant hemp products for working Americans who want a trustworthy option, and letting the policy process play out in Washington while we focus on the thing we can actually control, which is the quality of what we put in the bottle. The 15% discount for veterans and first responders remains standing policy. The Subscribe & Save program is there for the routine that builds over time. The lab reports stay public. The standard doesn’t move, no matter what happens in that courtroom in Virginia.

The politics will sort themselves out eventually. In the meantime, the plant, the research, and the people who want clean products aren’t waiting around. Neither are we.

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Five Years, 241 Patients: The Cannabis Back-Pain Study That Cut Opioid Use by 95% (2026)

A new five-year study followed 241 chronic lower back pain patients who had already failed everything else. The results were large, durable, and hard to ignore, including a drop in opioid use from 100 percent of patients to under 5 percent. Here’s what the research actually found.

Chronic lower back pain is one of the most democratic afflictions in America. It doesn’t care what you do for a living, though it shows up early and stays late for the people who work with their bodies. It doesn’t care how tough you are. It doesn’t care how many times you’ve been told to stretch more, lift with your legs, or lose a few pounds. Roughly one in five adults on the planet is dealing with it at any given moment, and it remains the single leading cause of years lived with disability worldwide. If you’ve got it, you already know all of this. If you don’t, count yourself lucky and knock on something wooden.

The standard menu of treatments for serious chronic back pain has never been great. Opioids, which come with a dependency risk that has fueled a national crisis. Anti-inflammatories, which chew up your stomach and kidneys over years of use. Antidepressants and nerve medications, which come with their own long lists of side effects. Physical therapy, which helps but rarely solves it. For the people whose back pain doesn’t respond to any of that, the options get thin and the outlook gets bleak. These are the patients who have tried everything and are still in pain, still taking pills that aren’t working well enough, and still looking for something that does.

That’s exactly the population a new study zeroed in on, and the results are significant enough to warrant a careful, honest look.

What the Study Actually Did

Researchers at Rabin Medical Center in Israel followed 241 adults with treatment-refractory chronic lower back pain over a full five years, from 2020 to 2025. The word refractory matters here. Every single patient in the study had already documented failure of at least a year of conventional treatment, including opioids, anti-inflammatories, and physical therapy, with the majority having also failed antidepressants and nerve medications. These were not first-timers looking for an easy fix. These were people the existing medical system had run out of answers for. The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Biomedicines, used each patient as their own historical control, comparing their documented pain and medication use during the failed conventional-treatment period against their outcomes over the following five years. You can read the full study on the publisher’s website if you want the complete methodology and data.

The scale of the improvement is what makes this study stand out from the usual noise. On the standard 0-to-10 pain scale, the average patient went from a severe 8.1 down to a mild 2.7 by year five. That’s not a marginal improvement. That’s a transformation of daily life. Disability scores, pain severity, and pain interference all improved by large, statistically robust margins, and critically, those improvements held steady across all five years rather than fading over time. The study authors summarized it directly: cannabis was associated with “large, sustained, and statistically robust improvements in pain, disability, and pain interference.”

The Opioid Number That Stops You Cold

Here’s the finding that made this study news. At the start, 100 percent of these patients were on opioids. That was part of the entry criteria. By year five, opioid use had fallen to 4.6 percent. Read that again. A group of chronic pain patients who all started on opioids ended up almost entirely off them. The study describes this as a within-patient absolute risk reduction of 95.4 percent, which in plain terms means the overwhelming majority of these patients stopped needing the opioids they had been dependent on for years.

The same pattern held across the other drug categories. Anti-inflammatory use fell from 100 percent to about 7 percent. Antidepressant use dropped from around 80 percent to 5 percent. Nerve medication use fell from about 39 percent to 2.5 percent. This near-total displacement of an entire pharmacy’s worth of daily medications is, from a public-health standpoint, the most important thing in the study. In a country still fighting an opioid epidemic that has caused staggering loss, a finding that a group of refractory pain patients almost entirely stopped needing opioids is not a small thing.

The safety profile held up over the five years, too. Across more than a thousand patient-years of tracked use, 99.8 percent of the recorded side effects were mild, and there was no evidence that patients developed tolerance requiring ever-higher doses to get the same relief. The effect that showed up in year one was still there in year five. That durability is the part short-term studies simply cannot measure, and it’s the reason a five-year window like this one is genuinely valuable.

This isn’t a lone finding hanging out on a limb, either. It lands in the middle of a steadily growing pile of research pointing in the same direction. A separate study of more than 3,500 patients found that medical cannabis helped people reduce their use of opioids, sleeping aids, and antidepressants, with fewer side effects after switching. A federally funded study found that about one in three Americans who use CBD take it as an alternative or supplement to at least one medication, particularly painkillers. Multiple studies published by the American Medical Association have found cannabis serving as an effective substitute for opioids in chronic pain treatment. Research on states that legalized cannabis has repeatedly found reductions in opioid prescriptions and, in several cases, reductions in fatal opioid overdoses. The Israeli back-pain study is one more careful brick in a wall that keeps getting taller.

The Honest Caveats, Because the Researchers Led With Them

Here’s what makes this study trustworthy rather than hype. The researchers were relentlessly honest about what their data can and cannot prove. This was an observational study, not a randomized controlled trial. There was no separate control group taking a placebo. That means the researchers were careful to say, repeatedly, that their findings show an association, not a proven cause-and-effect relationship. They openly acknowledged that some of the improvement could reflect things like regression to the mean, patient expectancy from a treatment they actively chose, and the general benefit of being in structured, supportive medical care for five years.

Their conclusion reflected that restraint. The data, they wrote, “support consideration of cannabis as a potentially clinically meaningful, opioid-sparing option in patients who have failed multimodal conventional therapy, pending confirmation in randomized comparative trials.” That’s a scientist’s sentence. It says this is promising and worth serious attention, and it says the definitive proof still requires more rigorous trials. Both halves of that are true, and the researchers deserve credit for stating both plainly instead of overselling a genuinely striking result.

One point the researchers made carries extra weight. The binary fact of stopped opioid prescriptions is much harder to fake than a self-reported pain score. A patient might unconsciously rate their pain lower because they want the treatment to work. But a patient either is or is not still filling opioid prescriptions, and that’s a hard, objective data point. The 95 percent reduction in opioid use is the finding least vulnerable to wishful thinking, and it’s the one that held up most strongly.

Why Cannabinoids Work on Pain in the First Place

The study looked specifically at one delivery method, but the reason cannabis affects pain at all has nothing to do with how it gets into the body. It has to do with the endocannabinoid system, the internal signaling network that runs throughout your body and helps regulate pain, inflammation, mood, and stress. THC and CBD interact with that system through what are called CB1 and CB2 receptors, influencing how pain signals get processed, how inflammation gets managed, and how the body handles the emotional weight of chronic discomfort. That underlying mechanism is the same regardless of whether the cannabinoids arrive through a topical, a tincture, a gummy, or anything else.

This is the important part for everyday consumers, because most people managing back pain are not looking to smoke anything. They want something that fits into a normal working life. And the cannabinoid science that makes the Israeli study interesting applies across the whole range of product formats. The receptors don’t care about the delivery method. They respond to the cannabinoids. What changes between formats is the onset time, the duration, and whether the effect is localized to one area or spread throughout the body. Those differences are exactly what let you match the right product to the right kind of back pain.

A topical, for instance, works locally. Applied directly to a sore lower back, it delivers cannabinoids right to the tissue that hurts, interacting with the receptors concentrated in that area without putting anything systemic into your bloodstream and without any high whatsoever. A tincture or an edible works differently, distributing cannabinoids throughout the body for a longer, broader effect that can be useful for pain that’s harder to pin to one spot, or for the sleep disruption that chronic pain so often drags along with it. Neither is universally better. They’re different tools for different versions of the same underlying problem.

Where Workman’s Relief Fits, Honestly

Let’s be straight about what we do and don’t sell. Workman’s Relief does not sell smokable products, and the study above looked specifically at inhaled cannabis in a supervised medical program. We’re not going to pretend our products are the same thing the researchers studied, because they aren’t. What we will say is that the science underneath that study, cannabinoids interacting with the body’s receptors to influence pain and inflammation, is the exact same science our products are built on. The delivery method is different. The biology is shared.

For the working American dealing with a chronically sore lower back, our Elbow Grease CBD topical line was built for exactly that job. The 1500mg CBD cream and the roll-on stick, available in cooling and warming variants, are formulated to be worked directly into the lower back, the shoulders, and the joints that a hard day leaves aching. It’s a localized tool for localized wear, no high, no impairment, no systemic effect, just cannabinoids delivered to the tissue that’s asking for attention. This is the same kind of muscle and joint wear that sends so many working people looking for relief in the first place.

For pain that comes paired with poor sleep, which chronic back pain almost always does, our USDA Certified Organic CBD tinctures and CBD gummies are built for the longer, broader kind of wind-down that helps the body rest despite the discomfort. We covered the growing sleep research in detail in our look at how two out of three Americans report cannabis helps them sleep better, and the overlap between pain and sleep is one of the most common reasons people build a cannabinoid routine in the first place.

Here’s the honest bottom line on the medical side. If you’re dealing with serious, treatment-refractory chronic pain, the right move is to talk to your doctor about your options, including the kind of supervised medical cannabis program the study describes. We are not a substitute for that conversation, and we would never claim to be. What we are is a clean, lab-tested, federally compliant option for the everyday muscle and joint wear that a working life produces, made for people who want a trustworthy product without a prescription or a doctor’s visit. That’s the lane we’re in, and we’re honest about its boundaries.

The Bigger Picture: What Opioid-Sparing Actually Means for Working America

Step back from the single study and look at the pattern. The opioid crisis has hit working America harder than almost any other group. The people who do physically demanding jobs are the people most likely to develop chronic pain, most likely to be prescribed opioids for it, and most likely to get caught in the long, brutal cycle of dependency that follows. Construction workers, warehouse workers, tradespeople, truckers, veterans, first responders. The demographics of chronic back pain and the demographics of the opioid epidemic overlap almost perfectly, and that overlap is not a coincidence.

So when a study finds that a group of refractory pain patients almost entirely stopped needing opioids, the significance goes beyond the 241 people in the study. It points at a possible path out of the cycle for exactly the population that has been hurt worst by it. The research on legalization backs this up at the population level. Studies have consistently found that states with legal cannabis see reductions in opioid prescriptions, and several have found reductions in fatal opioid overdoses, with one analysis estimating a meaningful drop in overdose deaths in states that legalized earlier in the crisis. The signal keeps showing up across different study designs, different populations, and different states. That consistency is what makes it credible.

None of this is a call to throw out conventional medicine. Opioids have a real, appropriate place in acute pain management and end-of-life care. The point is narrower and more honest. For the specific population of people whose chronic pain has not responded to conventional treatment, and who are stuck on long-term opioids that carry serious risk, the growing body of research suggests cannabinoids deserve to be part of the conversation. That’s not a radical position anymore. It’s increasingly the mainstream one.

Why Quality Is the Whole Game

Here’s the thing the research keeps underlining, directly or indirectly. The results depend entirely on the quality of the product. The Israeli study used pharmaceutical-grade, government-regulated cannabis with known, verified cannabinoid content. That precision is part of why the results were so consistent. When you know exactly what’s in the product, you can dose it reliably and get reliable results. When you don’t, all bets are off.

This is the single most important lesson for a consumer shopping the federally legal hemp market. A cannabinoid product is only as good as its formulation and its testing. A cream that claims 1500mg of CBD but actually contains a fraction of that will not deliver what the science promises. A tincture cut with mystery ingredients is a gamble every time you use it. The way to protect yourself is simple: buy from brands that publish their lab results. We went deep on this quality question in our look at what a scientific review found about CBD and skin inflammation, and the lesson there is the same as the lesson here. The compound can be genuinely useful. Whether the product actually delivers it is a completely separate question that comes down to quality control.

Every Workman’s Relief product carries a publicly available Certificate of Analysis showing the actual cannabinoid content and screening for contaminants. The CBD is USDA Certified Organic, grown on Wisconsin soil, and manufactured in our own GMP-certified facility. When the research says results depend on verified, standardized formulation, that’s the exact standard we’ve operated under since day one. Not because a study told us to, but because it’s the only honest way to make a product people rely on for real relief.

The Long View: An Old Remedy, Finally Measured

There’s a longer arc under all of this. Humans have been turning to this plant for pain relief across an enormous span of recorded history. The documented relationship between people and cannabis goes back many thousands of years, and its use for aches, injuries, and inflammation appears across countless traditions long before anyone could run a five-year clinical study on it. The plant was doing this work for our ancestors. Modern science is now, slowly, catching up to measure exactly how well.

That’s the recurring theme in nearly all the good cannabinoid research. The findings aren’t discoveries of some brand-new property. They’re rigorous confirmations of things people figured out empirically over centuries, now backed by the kind of measurement that lets us understand the mechanism and, crucially, formulate products that deliver it reliably. The five-year pain reduction is a number no ancient healer could have measured. The underlying relief is one they were almost certainly already putting to use.

What makes this era genuinely better is the combination of that old knowledge with modern quality control and honest science. A working American with a bad back today can access a lab-verified, precisely dosed, contaminant-screened product made under controlled conditions and backed by a public Certificate of Analysis. The plant is ancient. The reliability is new. And for the person who just wants their back to stop screaming at the end of a long day, the reliability is the entire point.

For the People Who Carry the Load

If your back has been part of the price you pay for doing honest work, this research is worth your attention. Not because any product is a miracle, and not because you should make any major medical decision based on a single study or a single blog post. But because the evidence that cannabinoids have a real, measurable role in managing pain keeps getting stronger, and the stigma that kept a lot of working people from even considering it is finally starting to fade.

Talk to your doctor about the serious stuff. For the everyday muscle and joint wear that comes with a working life, our lineup is built to help, lab-tested, transparently dosed, and made in America. The 15% discount for veterans and first responders is standing policy, because so many of the people carrying chronic pain earned it in service. The Subscribe & Save program is there for the routine that builds over time. The lab reports are public. The standard doesn’t change.

Your body has carried you through a lot. It’s worth taking care of, with tools you can actually trust.

Browse the full Workman’s Relief lineup →

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Month: July 2026

Wisconsin’s leadership is asking Congress to protect a hemp industry that supports over 3,500 jobs and $700 million in economic activity across the state. For a company built on Wisconsin soil, this one is personal. Here’s what’s at stake and why it reaches beyond politics.

The Numbers That Actually Matter

What’s Actually Changing, in Plain English

Why This Hits Home for Workman’s Relief

Wisconsin Isn’t Alone in This

What Regulatory Certainty Actually Means for the Everyday Customer

What Happens Next, and What We’re Doing About It

The Bigger Picture: An American Story About an American Crop

From Our Corner of Wisconsin to Wherever You Are

Our Recommendations//

D9 5mg Mixed Berry THC Gummies – 30ct – 150MG

Sip n Soothe – CBD Roll On Stick – Elbow Grease Cooling & Warming – 1500MG + D9 Orange Cream Drink 10mg – 4 Pack

D9 5mg Cosmopolitan Crafty THC Cocktail Gummies – 10ct – 50MG

Orange & Unwind Bundle – Orange Cream THC Drink + Full Spectrum CBD Oil

D9 5mg Watermelon THC Gummies – 30ct – 150MG

Workman’s Relief D9 Orange Cream Drink 10mg – 4 Pack

Another Brick in the Wall: A New Federally Funded Study on Cannabis and the Opioid Crisis

What the Study Actually Found

The Honest Boundaries, Stated Up Front

This Isn’t One Study. It’s a Wall Being Built One Brick at a Time.

Why Cannabinoids Affect Pain in the First Place

Where Workman’s Relief Fits, Honestly and Within Our Lane

Why This Matters for Working America Specifically

The Frustrating Policy Backdrop

The Long View

Our Recommendations//

D9 5mg Long Island Iced Tea Crafty THC Cocktail Gummies – 10ct – 50MG

Orange & Unwind Bundle – Orange Cream THC Drink + Full Spectrum CBD Oil

D9 5mg Lemon THC Gummies – 10ct – 50MG

Workman’s Relief D9 Orange Cream Drink 10mg – 4 Pack

Workman’s Relief D9 Orange Cream Drink 10mg

D9 5mg Old Fashioned Crafty THC Cocktail Gummies – 10ct – 50MG

The Hearts and Minds Were Won. The Structure Was Not.

The Money Story: Irrational Exuberance Meets Reality

The Counter-Argument: This Isn’t a Backlash, It’s a Maturation

An Honest Word About Risks, Because Pretending Otherwise Isn’t Credible

The Part That Explains Why Your Hemp Products Are Doing Fine

What Actually Fixes This

Building It for the Grandkids

The Honest Verdict

Our Recommendations//

D9 5mg Mixed Berry THC Gummies – 30ct – 150MG

Sip n Soothe – CBD Roll On Stick – Elbow Grease Cooling & Warming – 1500MG + D9 Orange Cream Drink 10mg – 4 Pack

D9 5mg Cosmopolitan Crafty THC Cocktail Gummies – 10ct – 50MG

Orange & Unwind Bundle – Orange Cream THC Drink + Full Spectrum CBD Oil

D9 5mg Watermelon THC Gummies – 30ct – 150MG

Workman’s Relief D9 Orange Cream Drink 10mg – 4 Pack

A federal hearing that could reshape cannabis law is underway. It won’t be livestreamed, the invited participants all oppose the reform, and even the final outcome may not be binding. Here’s a plain-English breakdown of what’s happening and why it matters, minus the political noise.

What Schedule I Versus Schedule III Actually Means

The Part That Has Everyone Talking: Who Got a Seat in the Room

A Public Hearing You Can’t Actually Watch

Why the Whole Thing Might Not Settle Anything

The Most Important Point for Everyday Consumers: This Is About Marijuana, Not Hemp

The Most Important Point for Everyday Consumers: This Is About Marijuana, Not Hemp

What This Means If You’re Just Trying to Live Your Life

Why Buying From a Transparent Brand Matters More Than Ever During Uncertain Times

The Long View: America Is Slowly Working This Out

Our Recommendations//

Sweet Relief Balance Bundle – Orange Cream THC Drink + Broad Spectrum CBD Oil Bundle

Crafty D9 Blackberry Paloma Beverage 10mg – 4 Pack

D9 5mg Rawberry THC Gummies By Biatch – 10ct – 50MG – Limited Edition

Punch In & Punch Out CBD Gummies – 2 Pack

Workman’s Relief D9 Orange Cream Drink 10mg – 4 Pack

D9 5mg Mixed Berry THC Gummies – 30ct – 150MG

A new five-year study followed 241 chronic lower back pain patients who had already failed everything else. The results were large, durable, and hard to ignore, including a drop in opioid use from 100 percent of patients to under 5 percent. Here’s what the research actually found.

What the Study Actually Did

The Opioid Number That Stops You Cold

The Honest Caveats, Because the Researchers Led With Them

Why Cannabinoids Work on Pain in the First Place

Where Workman’s Relief Fits, Honestly

The Bigger Picture: What Opioid-Sparing Actually Means for Working America

Why Quality Is the Whole Game

The Long View: An Old Remedy, Finally Measured

For the People Who Carry the Load

Our Recommendations//

D9 5mg Rawberry THC Gummies By Biatch – 10ct – 50MG – Limited Edition

Day N Night Bundle – French Vanilla THC Coffee and Orange Cream Refreshers

D9 5mg Cosmopolitan Crafty THC Cocktail Gummies – 10ct – 50MG

D9 5mg Lemon THC Gummies – 30ct – 150MG