Holden Leads Blog
Data, outreach strategies, and market intelligence for cannabis B2B professionals.
Cannabis policy in America has rarely felt as bifurcated as it does this week. On one track, marijuana is moving — haltingly, contentiously — toward looser federal control. On another, the hemp-derived products that have flooded gas stations and smoke shops are being squeezed toward extinction.
Read more →For years, the American cannabis industry has operated like a business hiding in plain sight: legal in most states, banned by the federal government, and walled off from the ordinary machinery of capital and commerce. This week, two of those walls quietly came down at once.
Read more →Science can sometimes feel like it moves slower than the culture around it. For cannabis, that gap has been a defining feature of the last decade — millions of Americans using a substance while the research needed to understand its risks and benefits lags years, sometimes decades, behind the conversation.
Read more →Cannabis product news this week told a story that has become increasingly familiar in 2026: the industry is maturing fast, but it's doing so unevenly, with some categories racing ahead while others fight for shelf space in an increasingly crowded market.
Read more →The clock is now running on one of the most consequential proceedings in American drug policy history. The Drug Enforcement Administration's formal hearing on whether to reschedule marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act is officially set to begin.
Read more →The cannabis industry had a week of quiet but consequential momentum, driven less by splashy announcements than by the accumulating weight of numbers that are starting to tell a coherent story: markets are maturing, winners are consolidating their positions, and the question of who survives the next two years is coming into sharper focus.
Read more →There are two ways to know that cannabis has gone fully mainstream. One is when the federal government reschedules it. The other is when you can buy a THC seltzer at Target while picking up toilet paper — in Texas.
Read more →Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger's decision this week to veto legislation creating the state's first licensed adult-use cannabis retail market is, on one level, a familiar story: a governor and a legislature disagreeing over the details of a cannabis bill.
Read more →A new study from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that patients using medical cannabis for chronic pain reduced their opioid consumption by an average of 65% over a five-month follow-up — with seven of 29 participants stopping opioid therapy entirely.
Read more →The cannabis industry has spent years arguing it deserves to be treated like any legitimate business. This week, it got exactly what it asked for — in the form of a 320-page federal complaint invoking the same legal framework that took down the mob.
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