Holden Leads Blog
Data, outreach strategies, and market intelligence for cannabis B2B professionals.
Two significant studies landed within days of each other, each rigorous, each credible, each pointing in a subtly different direction — and together they illustrate exactly why the science of cannabis and cognition is so difficult to summarize in a headline.
Read more →a brand synonymous with suburban family shopping trips, dollar-bin treasures, and Starbucks kiosks near the entrance — quietly stocking its shelves with intoxicating products that, in a dispensary, would require an ID check and a brief tutorial on onset times.
Read more →The calendar on the wall of every cannabis lobbyist's office is circled in red on two dates this spring: May 24 and June 29. They mark, respectively, the deadline to formally request participation in the most consequential federal cannabis rulemaking in history, and the day the hearing actually begins.
Read more →Controlled Substances Act — an action that technically changed nothing about what's legal where, but is rapidly changing everything about how cannabis companies operate, report earnings, and plan their futures.
Read more →America's second-largest discount retailer announced it is expanding hemp-derived THC beverage sales to more than 300 stores across Illinois, Florida, and Texas — reaching into the second, third, and sixth most populous states in the country — even as a federal law set to ban those exact products takes effect in November.
Read more →The week of May 4–10 captured the contradictions of the current legislative moment in unusually sharp focus: a Southern state filed a bill to put cannabis decriminalization before voters, another moved toward jailing consumers, and federal policymakers left a time bomb ticking under an entire product category while a retail giant doubled down anyway.
Read more →Two significant pieces of research published and amplified this week highlight those gaps from opposite ends of the scientific spectrum: one probing the plant's deepest molecular chemistry, the other examining how real people are actually making decisions about using it. Together, they illuminate both how much we've learned and how much remains unknown.
Read more →The ink on the most consequential federal cannabis policy shift in a generation is barely dry, and the industry is already sorting itself into winners, fast movers, and skeptics.
Read more →Over the past few years, THCA flower — technically hemp under the 2018 Farm Bill's delta-9-only testing standard — became one of the fastest-growing consumer product categories in the country, built on a legal interpretation that allowed high-potency cannabis to be sold nationwide without a dispensary license. This week, the federal government made its clearest statement yet that the gray market's golden age is drawing to a close.
Read more →The same week that cannabis made federal history, Congress reminded the industry just how complicated federal policy can be: as marijuana's rescheduling moved from executive order to law of the land, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a Farm Bill that would fundamentally rewrite the rules for the booming hemp-derived THC market — and not in the direction that industry hoped.
Read more →For years, cannabis operators have been paying more in federal taxes than almost any other industry in America — not because they're unusually profitable, but because of a single line in the tax code that forbids businesses trafficking in Schedule I controlled substances from deducting normal operating expenses.
Read more →The data from this year's holiday week, combined with a handful of notable launches that landed just before or during it, paints a picture of an industry that is maturing in real time: less novelty, more intentionality, and a consumer base that increasingly knows exactly what it wants.
Read more →Two product stories dominated the cannabis space this week, and they couldn't be more different. One involves a Canadian LP crafting ultra-premium, liquid diamond-infused flower for consumers who have, in the company's own framing, already exhausted everything else. The other involves a hemp-derived CBD company positioning its products for elderly Medicare beneficiaries managing chronic conditions. Taken separately, they're interesting brand launches. Taken together, they reveal something meanin
Read more →A landmark study published this week is now forcing a more honest conversation about what the science actually says.
Read more →The reallity of rescheduling is not what it seems, and will not be as fast as it sounds.
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