Cannabis has never been a single experience. It was never one molecule, one effect, one intention, or one lane. It has always been plural—used for healing, ritual, relief, escape, communion, and survival, sometimes all at once. The plant made room for contradiction long before regulators tried to flatten it into categories that could fit on a spreadsheet.
Somewhere along the road to legitimacy, that plurality got lost. Hemp became something else. Medical became a loophole. Adult use became a market. Pharmaceutical became a threat. Culture became collateral damage.
What we call cannabis now often says more about who’s allowed to sell it than what it actually does.
Adam Rosenberg has lived inside every one of those boxes—and spent most of his career trying to explain why none of them actually make sense on their own.
Rosenberg isn’t a talking head parachuting in with a theory. His perspective was shaped by work in urine-testing labs, caregiver collectives, hemp fields, dispensaries, classrooms, boardrooms, and policy meetings. He’s worked with patients, farmers, investors, students, regulators, and brands. Today, he serves as chairman of the board of the National Cannabis Industry Association (NCIA), but his worldview was shaped long before titles entered the picture.
What he keeps coming back to is simple, and deeply inconvenient for modern cannabis discourse: the plant never asked to be divided this way.
The First Fracture Happens at the Consumer Level
One of the quiet casualties of legalization has been language. Consumers are expected to navigate THC, CBD, THCA, Delta-8, hemp-derived, marijuana-derived, full spectrum, isolate, medical, recreational, pharmaceutical—often without the education to tell one from the other. That confusion isn’t accidental. It’s structural.
Walk into enough dispensaries or scroll enough online menus and you start to see it: the plant reduced to acronyms, percentages, and disclaimers. The problem isn’t that cannabis education has been dumbed down or exaggerated; it’s that it exists in fragments, with no shared language or throughline holding it together.
“I agree completely that this bifurcation of hemp and marijuana has resulted in more confusion,” Rosenberg said. “And at the end of the day, the solution is to focus policy on the end product’s safety profile and intoxicating potential, not whether it comes from a hemp or a marijuana plant, because that’s a subjective definition in and of itself.”
When cannabis is chopped into opposing identities, the people using it are forced to pick sides they don’t actually belong to. Patients become consumers. Consumers become liabilities. Culture becomes a compliance problem.
Rosenberg continued, “Let’s prioritize responsible policy and move past this artificial divide that has drained resources on internal conflict rather than advocacy for the plant.”
What gets lost in these fights isn’t just regulatory clarity, it’s the momentum. Every internal argument over labels, lanes, and legitimacy is energy not spent protecting access or educating the people actually using the plant.
When Education Lags, Culture Pays
Rosenberg’s conviction around education didn’t come from branding decks or white papers. It came from conversations with patients—many of them young, many of them desperate, many of them failed by conventional medicine.
While interning at a pain management clinic, he was assigned to the urine testing lab. That’s where he noticed something no syllabus had prepared him for.
“As I was drug testing patients, I discovered many of them were testing positive for THC,” he said. “As I learned more, I came to understand that they were receiving incredible relief from this natural, non-toxic gift of nature without the risks and downsides associated with the opioids that they were being prescribed.”
That experience rerouted his entire life. It also hardwired a belief that still defines how he talks about cannabis today: access without education is incomplete, but education without access is cruel.
Cannabis culture used to teach itself through proximity. Patients talking to patients, growers talking to consumers, budtenders translating lived experience into guidance. As those relationships give way to regulation-first systems, knowledge becomes transactional rather than communal.
When culture loses the ability to pass down knowledge about the plant—how people actually learn it, use it, and make sense of it through experience—it gets replaced by marketing shorthand and regulatory jargon. The result is a public that’s overwhelmed and an industry that argues with itself instead of teaching.
“Consumers aren’t yet informed enough to know how to thoroughly vet cannabis products,” Rosenberg acknowledged. “And that’s not their fault.”
A Whole Plant Trapped in Artificial Categories
One of the most persistent cultural myths in cannabis is that medical, recreational, and pharmaceutical uses are mutually exclusive. Rosenberg rejects that outright—not philosophically, but practically.
“My principle is that nature provided us with an absolutely perfect gift,” he said. “And the only problems we have ever had are in how we use it or misuse it and in how we enforce against it.”
Personally, he gravitates toward full-spectrum products and traditional preparations. “If I’m using it personally, therapeutically, or for people in my life, I’m going to recommend something like a Rick Simpson oil,” he said. “That is also just my belief that our bodies are meant to eat whole foods and use nature in its natural form.”
But he’s also realistic about where culture meets reality. Not everyone wants flower. Not everyone will ever smoke. Not everyone will accept cannabis unless it looks like something they already trust.
“The other opportunity that the more biopharmaceutical side offers is in healing people that would not otherwise use cannabis,” Rosenberg said. “The grandmas that would say, well, I’m not touching the devil’s lettuce, but they’ll take a pill that’s prescribed by their doctor.”
That tension between purity and pragmatism has always existed in cannabis culture. The mistake is pretending it’s new or pretending it has to be resolved by choosing one side.
Why Unity Feels So Hard Right Now
The deeper cannabis pushes into legitimacy, the more it mirrors the fractures of every other American industry. Hemp versus marijuana. Legacy versus licensed. Patients versus profits. Each group is responding to real pressures, but rarely sitting in the same room long enough to recognize shared stakes.
“To me, it starts with patient access,” Rosenberg said. “But patient access is meaningless without the tools to provide the products, and that’s the industry. And that’s why we need to also support growing a healthy industry.”
That belief has guided his work inside NCIA, where he works to bring competing factions together.
“We hold a responsibility that’s greater than our own individual business or our own individual position,” he said. “We’re all part of this greater movement that is going to help save a lot of lives and improve a lot of lives just by making progress together.”
It’s not a kumbaya sentiment. It’s a warning. When cannabis culture collapses into silos, it becomes easier to regulate, easier to exploit, and easier to forget why legalization mattered in the first place.
Remembering What the Plant Actually Is
Cannabis is not a brand category. It’s not a loophole. It’s not a single compound or a political football. It’s a plant that has survived decades of misuse, prohibition, and misunderstanding—largely because people kept using it anyway.
The cultural challenge now isn’t whether cannabis will be accepted. It’s whether it will be understood.
“There’s a misperception for the vast majority of people that medical cannabis is one entity,” Rosenberg said. “When actually, cannabis is a series of thousands of individual components.”
Culture has always been cannabis’ best teacher. When that culture fractures, education becomes transactional and access becomes conditional. The plant doesn’t change—but the meaning does.
If cannabis is going to move forward without losing itself, it may need to remember something deceptively simple: it was never one thing to begin with.
United We Stand, Divided We Get Regulated to Death
Cannabis culture has never been fragile, but it has become fragmented.
The plant survived prohibition because people understood it intuitively, shared knowledge freely, and trusted each other more than the system. What threatens it now isn’t backlash or regulation alone. It’s the slow erosion of common ground from inside the house.
When the industry can’t agree on language, when hemp and marijuana are treated as opposing identities instead of expressions of the same plant, when internal squabbles consume more energy than collective progress, we make it easier for outsiders to define cannabis for us, and harder to protect it from being overregulated into something unrecognizable.
Federal legalization, however it arrives, will not be gentle. If cannabis can’t present itself as a coherent culture with shared priorities, it risks being carved up by regulatory frameworks that were never designed to respect nuance, history, or lived experience.
Cannabis was never one thing. That was its strength. Pretending it’s many unrelated things—with no obligation to each other—may be the fastest way to lose control of its future. Remembering that shared strength just might give the culture a way forward together.
All photos courtesy of Elsa Olofsson via Unsplash.
Holly Crawford
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