How Cannabis Regulation Became a Giant Experiment
Cannabis policy in the United States has been, in many ways, a giant experiment. The drug was recently reclassified by the Trump administration from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug, but remains federally illegal. On the state level, cannabis’s availability to patients and consumers has been determined by voters, not by scientists and regulators. Each state has a different approach to cannabis regulation and product safety, and as a result, a patient using medical cannabis in Florida might be exposed to different risks than a consumer in California, for example.
On this episode, host Kelsey Schoenberg is joined by toxicologist Maxwell C. K. Leung, assistant professor at Arizona State University and the director of the ASU Cannabis Analytics, Safety and Health Initiative, and Symone T. Griffith, an ASU Presidential Scholar and doctoral candidate at Arizona State University. Leung and Griffith, who wrote about cannabis regulation and product safety for the Fall 2025 Issues, explain how the federal-state legal divide has shaped cannabis safety, research, and policy. They also share what it’s like to be a researcher working in this space.
Resources
- Read Leung, Griffith, and Marisa Kreider’s essay, “A Coordinated Approach to Cannabis Policy and Product Safety,” in the Fall Issues.
- Check out Leung and Griffith’s paper on cannabis use and Parkinson’s patients, as well as their lab’s analysis of state-level regulations for cannabis contaminants.
- Read a paper from the Cannabis Regulators Association outlining a research agenda for how science can shape cannabis policy.
- Listen to another episode on cannabis: “Minimizing Cannabis’s Harms to Public Health,” with Sara Frueh and guest Yasmin Hurd.
Transcript
Kelsey Schoenberg: Welcome to the Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academy of Sciences and Arizona State University. I’m Kelsey Schoenberg, associate editor at Issues.
If you’ve ever had a question about cannabis and tried to look up the answer—say, for example, “How can I know if my weed has harmful chemicals in it?” or even “Does cannabis help Parkinson’s symptoms?”—you’ve probably found answers that are wildly conflicting. Some of this confusion arises from the disconnect between federal policy for cannabis–where it is illegal–and the 40 states where it is legal, but in different ways.
I had the pleasure in the fall of working with cannabis researchers, Maxwell Leung and Symone Griffith on their essay calling for a coordinated approach to cannabis policy and safety, and then we got to dig deeper on this podcast. After our conversation was recorded, President Trump issued an executive order directing the Attorney General to downgrade cannabis from a Schedule I drug to Schedule III. So, the federal landscape is about to shift, but many of the hurdles that Max and Symone talk about remain. Max and Symone, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me.
Symone Griffith: Hi, Kelsey. Thank you for helping us.
Maxwell Leung: Thank you for having us.
Schoenberg: So, in your piece you paint a really admirably clear picture of something that’s insanely complicated, and that’s the current state of the cannabis system in the United States. So, just to preface it a little bit, 30 years ago cannabis was illegal everywhere, and now you can buy cannabis legally, whether it’s recreational or medical, in 40 out of 50 states. You talk about in the piece how a lot of the tangles and knots in the system stem from this fundamental disconnect between federal and state policy. So, what’s happening with that? Why are they so out of sync with each other?
Leung: Yeah, the biggest disconnect is how cannabis is defined in the regulation. So, in an individual state—for those that have medical cannabis programs—cannabis is defined as something that a patient with a qualifying condition can use for medical benefits. That’s what medical cannabis is to a patient. But if you think about what cannabis is at the federal level, right? Cannabis is listed as a substance of abuse. So, the definition of how cannabis should be used at the state level and the federal level are completely different. Subsequently, individual states, because all the federal regulation for, say, how the cannabis should be produced, what is the standard for a composition? None of those standards are consistent across the states. Individuals, they have to be coming up with their own program. So, you have got the discrepancy, not only in how cannabis should be used for different patient groups, but also what contaminants should or should not be regulated in cannabis in different state or across the country.
Schoenberg: So, at the federal level we have cannabis scheduled as a Schedule I substance, so no recognized medical applications. And then we have all of these states recognizing different medical applications. What happens when states are left all by their lonesome to regulate cannabis? Why is that a problem?
Griffith: The reason why this is a problem is that it presents certain exposures to a certain patient population that it doesn’t present to another one. For example, a more strict regulation policy is present in California where they regulate, I think in the article we cited over 60 pesticides, something like that. Whereas somewhere else, some of those pesticides aren’t regulated at all. Or if they are regulated, they may regulate it at a different level. So, for the regulations to be different, it kind of begs the question of, “Okay, what risks are being presented to a patient in California that’s not being presented to a patient in, let’s say, DC or Arizona?” So, that’s kind of the concern.
Leung: Our lab have conducted an analysis of the regulation of all the legalized program in the U.S. in 2022. In that analysis we find that there are over 600 contaminants across all categories, including pesticides, solvents, microbial contaminants, toxic elements. So, over 600 contaminant that are regulated across the country of all different cannabis program. But if you look at in the regional states, the number of contaminant that each state are regulating, like between 50 to 150, huge variation. So, the reason why is each of the states, they come up with their own regulatory policy. Now, that is very different from other agricultural commodity in the U.S.
The thing about it, right, you get a watermelon from a grocery store. The watermelon might have … It can have its own contaminants too. Pesticides are used. You can have microbial contaminants, but we wouldn’t expect that one contaminant to act completely differently in one state versus the other state.So, it actually makes sense to have a standard, but such standard is not there for cannabis. For example, there is no U.S. Department of Agricultural Program tracking the pesticide residue in cannabis produced in the United States. But you have pesticide data program that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is keeping track of the contaminant, the pesticide residue, in different agricultural commodities. So, that’s one.
Also, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, they are the agency that provide guideline on how and what pesticide should be used in different agricultural commodity. Such guideline also is not available for cannabis. And then lastly, you have Food and Drug Administration, right? The issues potentially caused by using cannabis. So, the whole federal infrastructure for safety for the most part do not apply on cannabis, which is very different from other agricultural commodity in the U.S.
Schoenberg: Right. Okay. I was actually in LA this weekend, and to prepare for this conversation I stopped at the dispensary for some on the ground research, and I had your essay in mind. So, I went in and I told the budtenders that I was looking for something low potency and that I was sensitive to certain pesticides. So, is there a brand or a product that they trust to be contaminant free? And what happened was the person who was helping me looked around for some low potency joints, and I think the lowest she found was like 23% THC, and had no clue about the rest. So, she asked another budtender, who first said, “First of all, they’re all made with chemicals,” and then pointed me toward, I think, flower products that were grown in what she called organic live soil. So, in your professional opinion—and this is a California dispensary so this is where they should be the most highly regulated products—how’d they do?
Griffith: I think that they did their best. I’m glad that she at least tried to ask another budtender about if they knew anything about the pesticides, but I think that was a great example of the issues that are presented here when there’s no standard. Because if there was a national standard for things like that, you could just point them to that direction. But since there’s not, they would have to do some deep research and try to find or check out our labs paper to try to find the regulations that are present in California specifically for pesticides, which also change pretty frequently.
Even when I worked at a dispensary—I worked at a dispensary in my undergrad for about a year—and we did have occasional budtender trainings, like educational seminars and things like that, but not one of them had ever spoke about contaminants in any way. I did find some programs talking about like, okay, these certain cannabinoids, like CBD is good for X, or THC is good for this, or CBG or CBGA or the more minorly presenting cannabinoids, what they’re helpful for, like sleep or those types of things. But as far as sensitivities or specific risks, those were not the things that were mainly talked about when getting training at my dispensary in particular in Arizona. So, I think they did a generally good job as they could, but they don’t have the information either.
Schoenberg: No, I totally agree. They were really kind, and I even got a flat tire in the parking lot on the way out and they helped me change my tires. So, nothing against the budtenders. I agree with you. It really points to the fact that if the person who’s trying to buy a product or who needs a product for a specific reason struggles to do the research themselves, and so they go to the source of that product and that person doesn’t even have access to the information that is relevant to a patient’s needs, then we’re looking at a much bigger, higher up problem.
Griffith: Right. And just to add to that, I think the main concern comes with the fact that cannabis is marketed for medical use as well. And not to say that if it was just solely recreational that it wouldn’t be of concern, because of course you want to protect the safety of all customers, but when you’re talking about certain patients, like you, who come in saying you have a certain sensitivity to a pesticide, they could be treating a medical condition. Some patients, even though they’re treating a medical condition, may still be purchasing recreationally. That is the concern that’s I guess the scariest is like, with patients who have immunocompromisation with cancer patients or things like that, or with Parkinson’s disease patients, pesticides are something that they should very much look out for, because sometimes even exposure to pesticides can exacerbate their conditions. So, that’s really the concern on my end is, how do we protect those who are looking for something to help them to make sure that the product is minimizing any risks that they may be further exposed to and maximizing the benefits that they could have by using it?
Schoenberg: Absolutely. Well, let’s zoom out for a second. So, for the last 50 years a bunch of grassroots organizing and activism has led to the fact that you can legally buy weed in 40-odd states. But that decision about whether or not cannabis is or isn’t a medicine was made by the people who went to the ballot box, which when you think of it, it’s kind of a crazy thing, because like you said, that’s the opposite of the process that most medicines go through in this country in order to reach people through that federal infrastructure for safety.
So, we had someone on a podcast a couple of months ago who described this sort of stated affairs as a huge experiment, because we’re reversing that typical patient clinician relationship. And so, instead of a clinician giving guidance, like you said, Symone, we’re telling the public basically to figure it out for themselves how different dosing regimens and administration routes affect them. So, first of all, what do you think about this framing of this situation as a big experiment, and what are some of the consequences of that experiment that we’re doing on the public, and what have we learned from it?
Griffith: Yeah. I think one of my main or first motivations to get into this type of research is this one statement that I keep coming across is that the science is following the policy in this case. The policy is coming before the science is the problem. Like you said, the ballot box, people are going to vote for whether cannabis is going to be medical or recreational in their state, but it’s not backed up by the science. So, that’s why it seems that there’s such a patchwork between everybody, because we’re letting people set standards without having that backed up research to have that clinician and patient relationship where the clinicians and the researchers have already done the work. We’re playing catch-up now. It’s already there. People are already using it for certain conditions. It’s very prevalent in multiple patient populations, multiple age groups, but the research is trying to catch up to, “Okay, how does this work? Why does it work? Why are people using it,” instead of the other way around?
Leung: Yeah. I want to comment from the science and technology perspective. A lot of people are comparing how we regulate alcohol versus how we regulate cannabis. The history of alcohol, like production and regulation. You are talking about a commodity, having a century of research on how it’s produced and being sold as a commodity. You’ve got all the food science, what is the production standard, what’s the safety standard? I mean, you can get a extension certificate on brewery science. So, not only that you have the research for the production and safety, and you also have workforce development.
So, fast-forward, if you are thinking about cannabis regulation, while we have all the legalization effort both at the state level and at the federal level, one thing that have not been catching up is the research behind cannabis production, cannabis safety. A lot of the research that we have been doing on cannabis for the past few decades, focusing on cannabis as a substance of abuse. But now we are talking about, okay, there are many state that are legalizing cannabis. So, how about the safety science, the regulatory science research that should go behind how to actually make it as a safe, sustainable commodity? Now, those research is not there. I think that that’s the biggest problem.
Schoenberg: Absolutely. And a lot of that stems back to that federal disconnect because of issues around funding, some of what you touch on in your piece, and I was shocked to read, to learn from you guys that there’s only one U.S. supplier for all NIH funded cannabis research. So, even the product that they’re studying isn’t representative of what’s on the market to a large extent. That was mind-blowing to me.
Griffith: When you went to LA and when you asked for low potency, I almost laughed when you said that the one they gave you was 23% CHC for low potency. And I think that, correct me if I’m wrong, Max, but I think the highest potency, the government’s sample of cannabis is around 13, 15%-
Schoenberg: Oh, my gosh.
Griffith: … something like that. It’s not the same. Patients are going in and they’re asking for, at least in my experience, patients are going and asking for high potency. They’re asking for, “It needs to be over 20% for me to purchase it.” That’s what they’re looking for. I think that’s a little bit problematic, but we won’t get into that. But yes, the government-supplied product is not representative of what’s actually in the market right now.
Schoenberg: Right. Okay. So, now we’ve kind of gotten a little bit of an overview of what’s going on with the system, the states, the federal government, issues around contamination and standards. So, in your piece you outlined some major recommendations for how the system should change to become more coordinated and effective. And I think you used the phrase to set a global standard for safe evidence-based cannabis regulation, which is a far cry from where we’re at now. I think we can all agree. Can you summarize that vision for how you’d like that system to look at 10 years?
Griffith: Yeah. So, in our article we have a figure towards the end that kind of compares the current state of the system, which is very fragmented and convoluted as we stated before. But then we also have the proposed system. So, in that proposed system we have three main pillars that would be leaders in making sure that this system is coordinated, which is academia, the federal government, and the clinical side. So, all of those things need to work together to protect patient safety and inform the cannabis industry. I think that yes, having a more consistent mindset on what cannabis is and what it does from the federal state government would paint a better picture for clinicians and research universities and those funding agencies to be able to fund research to help with the confusion that currently is patients’ knowledge, physicians’ knowledge, and the cannabis industry themselves as well.
Leung: I think scientific leadership from research universities is one. Second of all, they need to have some kind of agreement between federal and state definition on what cannabis is. Are we talking about a consumer recreational product, or are we talking about a medical product? And I think last but not least is the relationship between the patient and the physician. Symone, you want to speak on that?
Griffith: Yeah. A lot of people come to their physicians, or they should, for medical advice when it comes to the medications that they’re taking. And cannabis is in addition to some of those medications. And if physicians are not even aware that their patients may be using cannabis, they are unable to then give them helpful advice on potential risks, or they may not even know, which is also sometimes the case. But even within the clinical setting, even the way that we track if patients are using cannabis or not, is also very discombobulated in electronic health records and things like that. It’s not very consistent for physicians to ask their patients if they’re using cannabis. And some patients may be inclined to not disclose that information to their physicians because of maybe their own stigmas or they feel like their physician is going to judge them. It wasn’t that long ago that it was illegal everywhere and now all of a sudden it is, but that doesn’t change the way that people view it right away, especially in a medical setting.
I’ve met a lot of physicians that also are willing to learn and eager and curious about it, but they don’t know where to look either. So, they have to self-teach on cannabis and the endocannabinoid system and how cannabis plays in our body and things like that. So yeah, the patient-physician relationship, I think is greatly affected by the policy of cannabis right now. And different organizations have different stances on it, but they also have different stances on it for different conditions. So, it is very just inconsistent overall, and it puts patients in an interesting predicament where they don’t really know or not really sure where they should go for information. So, it’s a difficult one to navigate.
Schoenberg: Obviously, it’s going to take a while to get to this vision of a coordinated system where the science is really leading where the policy and the guidance from clinicians is based on evidence. So, what do you tell people now about how they can protect themselves from as much risk as possible?
Griffith: What I tell people now, it does depend on what it is that they’re trying to do with their cannabis use. If they’re just trying to use it recreationally and they’ve been using it for, I don’t know how long before, my recommendation for safety would be to buy from legal sources that helps protect them from even more risk from pesticides, contaminants and things that are present in illicit sources. So, if I was giving a recommendation to a recreational patient, that would be my main advice is to figure out what you’re using it for, make sure that you don’t overdo it, and make sure you’re buying it from a regulated source. So, it really just depends. With older adults, that’s my next study is working with older adult patients. I would say if they’re looking for non-intoxicating effects, I would be make sure you go for a CBD high ratio to THC and start at a low potency and go up if you feel like that is not doing anything for you.
Don’t start at a super high potency and go down from there. So, it really does depend. And that’s why it’s so important to have these guidelines for patients, because it’s confusing to navigate, and it’s a lot to keep in your head and it’s not one-size-fits-all. And just like other pharmaceuticals, that’s not unique necessarily. People react better to some drugs than they do to others. And the same can be said for cannabis, I believe.
Leung: Yeah. There are all kind of contaminants that could be in cannabis that are not produced in pristine environment. So, I would say be mindful of the source of cannabis, scrutinizing the certificate of testing. All legalized cannabis program have some standard of testing. They’re different, but the standard is there. So, I think to use from a licensed source of cannabis, that our biggest recommendation.
Schoenberg: And of course, you talk in your piece about the corruption in the contaminant testing and potency testing regime in some states with the laboratory shopping. And so, I don’t think we have time to get into that probably on the podcast today, but just another layer of complexity to these issues that you can’t always trust those certificates nowadays either. But I want to pivot a little bit into your own experiences. We actually haven’t even talked about one very basic thing, which is what is the work that you two are doing right now and how does that fit into all this?
Griffith: Yeah, I’m a doctoral student at ASU in the Laboratory for Cannabis Sativa and One Health. My research primarily looks at cannabis policy and patient and physician education, and looking at risk perceptions in those groups as well. So, the quick overview that I have for the project is to essentially educate older adult patients who are interested in using cannabis or who are currently using cannabis, and seeing if the educational material that we present to them changes any types of their cannabis use patterns, their risk perceptions, their attitudes, or the way that they have stigma about cannabis. Also, another layer to that project is comparing the attitudes and stigma surrounding cannabis from a federally legalized system in Canada versus a non-federally legalized system in the U.S. So, I’ll be sampling patients from both the U.S. and Canada to see if there’s any differences in the way that they are educated or in the way that they might retain that information.
Leung: This is really exciting work. So, at ASU, a couple of months ago we launched a new initiative, ASU Cannabis Analytics, Safety and Health. So, there is a need for scientific leadership in the space of cannabis transitioning from unregulated use to cannabis being a safe, sustainable product. So, our initiative hope to provide that gap in leadership. And safety science is one of the key area of research that include safety education, which what Symone is working on. We are also a leader in the country looking into cannabis contaminant toxicity, like pesticide residue in cannabis, the microbial contaminant, and also the difference between legal and illegal cannabis. Some of the contaminant that have not been tested and potentially can cause harm in patient if they’re not careful with the sources of cannabis they use. And other area that we are interested in is the data analytics. So, the application of genomic data, chemical data, and even some of the public health, electronic health record and business analytics, we’re very interested in how data science can be applied in all aspect of in cannabis industry.
And the last area that we are very interested in is the food and science novel use in food and nutrition. So, by the time this podcast is coming out, you guys will probably see the latest paper that we publish looking into CBD use, one of the cannabinoid supplement, how it’s being used in companion animal. So, as it turned out, over 7% of the dogs in the U.S. are given CBD, and they do make the dog less aggressive over time. So, we are very interested to look at the application of cannabis as one agricultural crop. How can we use it differently for different application? So, this is what I’m doing right now at ASU.
Schoenberg: So, Symone, you mentioned stigma around these topics. What’s it like working in this space, even within academic culture? Are you guys coming up against these stigmas very frequently, or how do you navigate that?
Griffith: In the academic setting it’s not too terrible. I do find that cannabis is very polarizing, and there are some people who are very, very excited about all of its therapeutic benefits and all those things. And then there are some people who think it’s the worst thing ever and it should be illegal and all those other things. And then there’s people like us in the middle where we don’t have a stance on whether people should or should not use it. That’s not the voice I want to portray in my research. The voice I want to portray is, “You should have all of the information that there is to make an informed decision for yourself.” So, in the academic setting, it’s not too terrible. I don’t feel like I have adversaries coming at me about my research and what I should or should not be doing research on, or if my research is wrong or right or anything like that. There’s no hidden agenda here.
Schoenberg: Yeah, absolutely. Where you, Max?
Leung: I guess we are very fortunate to be in an environment like Arizona. It’s an interesting environment, definitely. As Symone has pointed out, there’s a transition in the legalization status of cannabis. The work that we do related to cannabis research has a lot of focus in biotechnology, analytical science, innovation. To that end, this area of research, actually people want to see progress in this area, because these are just science that need to be there to support regulatory decision. So, I feel very fortunate that since I joined Arizona State in 2020 my interaction with the student and colleagues at Arizona State has been great, but even externally, we regularly talk to regulator at the Department of Health Services and they support our work. We also communicate with Arizona Dispensary Association. We are developing testing technology for cannabis. We have a project right now with Mayo Clinic looking into some of the adverse effects for cannabis use, like AI tools to analyze cannabis use pattern and law enforcement also.
I mean, our lab is looking into contaminant in illegal cannabis. So, in Arizona we have an environment that all these, stakeholder, we do work well with each other. And I think that this kind of collaboration is really what we want to see nationwide in order for us to make the transition moving forward.
Schoenberg: Yeah. Well, that’s awesome. Okay. So, we’ve been talking about how complicated this whole system is, and we’ve just scratched the surface. Even just the cannabis plant itself, you have the THC, we have cannabinoids, and you have hybrids and different strains and chemical profiles. And then there’s all the equity issues all the way down the history of racist enforcement of cannabis laws. And you have and wildly skewed incarceration rates. And then there’s the current and growing problem of adolescent use combined with increasing potency of products. Not to mention the fact that half of the cannabis is unregulated, like we talked about, and nearly half of Americans have used cannabis at this point and more people use cannabis daily or near daily than use alcohol now.
I just am prepping for this conversation, spent so much time just trying to wrap my head around the scope of these issues and pretty much failed. But you two live in this world all the time. So, how do you make sense of it? Well, to put it obnoxiously, do you have North Stars that you stick to or tenets that you return to in order to stay grounded and on track and oriented?
Griffith: For me, it’s just that there’s so many patient populations. There’s so many people who are seeking this information out and that want the information from, in my research, mostly the patient and physician level. People want to know it and it’s just that they don’t know where to get the information from. So, I feel like my North Star is really just making sure that I’m giving them that information. And I want to be able to let people make decisions that they’re not confused about, because the policy is confusing, and it’s confusing to me and I’m in it. It doesn’t make sense. I have given up trying to make it make sense, because it doesn’t make sense. So, that’s kind of where I lay.
Leung: I’m a toxicologist by training, so my North Star is always the famous code by the finding father of toxicology, Paracelsus, “Doses make poison.” If you think about all the chemical that we have with the food, beverages, other product that we have, alcohol, like we’re talking about cannabinoid, caffeine, all these, different chemical. It’s a matter of how much people use, whether you can have a desirable effects, or you have an adverse effects. So, I hope to make progress in the safety science, in the toxicology of cannabinoid, so we have a better understanding of if it is a consumer product, people can just get it from a convenience store. What is a safe level? If you go to get a bottle of beer from a convenience store, you know how much ethanol is in there. Even if you get a can of energy drink, you know how many milligram of caffeine is in that energy drink?
It’s a consumer decision. It’s not that easy to tell this day when we are talking about cannabis or even hand product. So, I’m hoping us as a scientific community can keep making more progress in safety science and we just get better and make that best use of cannabis sativa as a growth, which can do many useful thing for us as a society.
Schoenberg: Thank you so much, Max and Symone. This was amazing. And to our listeners, you can read their essay, A Coordinated Approach to Cannabis Policy and Product Safety on issues.org. Our show notes for this episode will include links to their essay and other resources. To listen to more conversations like this one, please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcasts, and write to us at podcast@issues.org. Thanks to our audio engineer, Shannon Lynch and producer, Kimberly Quach. I’m Kelsey Schoenberg, associate editor at Issues. Thank you for listening.