💸 The Tape

Trulieve announced a new partner in Gainesville, Georgia this week: Riverside Pharmacy, an independent community pharmacy that has served Hall County for more than 70 years and now hosts a Trulieve-branded kiosk staffed by the company’s own patient educators. It’s a small announcement with a large subtext. Trulieve now supplies nearly 20 independent pharmacies across Georgia that hold both state licensure and DEA registration, a retail channel that exists nowhere else in American cannabis and that only became fully viable in April.

Kim Rivers called it “a step toward integrating medical cannabis into the broader healthcare landscape.” Scottie Barton, who runs Riverside, framed it as “another way to serve the healthcare needs of our community.” Both are describing the same thing from opposite ends: a cannabis company that wants to be seen as medicine, and a pharmacy that wants to sell what its patients are asking for.

Why Georgia went this way

Georgia’s program was designed by a legislature that didn’t trust dispensaries. The 2015 Haleigh’s Hope Act allowed registered patients to possess low-THC oil but created no legal way to buy it, which left families driving to Colorado or ordering online for four years. When the state finally authorized in-state production under HB 324 in 2019, it did so with the tightest frame it could: a 5% THC cap, six production licenses, a 100,000-square-foot canopy limit for the two Class 1 growers, and a dispensary allocation of five stores per licensee plus one additional store for every 10,000 patients added to the registry.

The pharmacy provision came from the same instinct. Georgia has hundreds of independent pharmacies, many in rural counties with no hospital and no prospect of a dispensary, and lawmakers saw them as a trusted, already-regulated distribution network that could reach patients without building a retail cannabis industry. The Board of Pharmacy adopted rules in 2023 allowing independent pharmacies to dispense low-THC oil, and roughly 120 signed up. Chain pharmacies were excluded, partly to protect independents and partly because CVS and Walgreens had no interest in testing federal law.

Then the DEA sent a letter. In late 2023 the agency reminded Georgia pharmacies that dispensing a Schedule I substance violated the Controlled Substances Act and put their DEA registrations, the license that lets them fill every other prescription, at risk. The pharmacy channel froze. Trulieve and Botanical Sciences, the two Class 1 producers, were left with a handful of their own stores and a 5% oil product that most patients didn’t want.

What changed in 2026

Two things, in sequence. In April, the Attorney General’s order moved state-licensed medical cannabis to Schedule III, which resolved the DEA problem overnight. A pharmacy with a DEA registration can lawfully handle a Schedule III drug. The letter that stopped the program in 2023 no longer applies, and Trulieve’s partner pharmacies now carry explicit DEA registrations alongside their state licenses.

Then on July 1, SB 220 took effect. It replaced the 5% THC cap with milligram-based dosing, authorized flower and vaporization products for patients 21 and over, added lupus, HIV and inflammatory bowel disease to the condition list, and removed the “end-stage” requirement for cancer, MS and Parkinson’s. Trulieve’s Georgia traffic rose sevenfold in the following quarter, and the registry passed 40,000 patients by August, up from the high 20,000s a year earlier. Every 10,000 new patients earns each licensee another dispensary.

The landscape today

Georgia’s retail map is now two-tiered. The dispensary tier is small by design: Trulieve has seven or eight stores and Botanical Sciences a similar number, with the Class 2 licensees still building out. Georgia law caps total storefronts through the patient formula, so even with explosive registry growth the state will have a few dozen dispensaries at most by the end of 2027. These carry the full formulary including flower and vapes.

The pharmacy tier is where the reach is. Trulieve’s nearly 20 partners are spread across the state’s mid-sized and rural communities, places like Gainesville, where the alternative is a 90-minute drive to a Trulieve store in metro Atlanta. The kiosk model matters: Trulieve isn’t just shipping product to a pharmacist’s shelf, it’s embedding its own staff to handle education and dosing conversations, which keeps the brand experience consistent and relieves pharmacists of a product category most weren’t trained on. What’s not yet clear is which products are moving through pharmacies versus dispensaries. The release doesn’t specify, and the flower and vape authorization under SB 220 is new enough that pharmacy formularies may still be oil-heavy.

For Trulieve, the economics are compelling. Georgia is a medical-only state, every dollar sold is 280E-free, and the pharmacy channel lets the company expand points of sale without burning dispensary allocations or capex. For the pharmacies, cannabis is a traffic driver in a business that has been losing margin to PBMs and chains for a decade.

Why it matters beyond Georgia

The pharmacy model is the closest thing American cannabis has to the pharmaceutical distribution the DEA has always said it wanted. A DEA-registered pharmacist, a state-registered patient, a Schedule III product and a physician’s recommendation. That is the chain of custody that rescheduling was supposed to enable, and Georgia is the only state actually running it.

If Judge Julius’s recommendation extends Schedule III to all cannabis, other medical-only states will look hard at Georgia’s template. Alabama, Mississippi and Texas have the same rural access problem and the same cultural preference for a medical frame. Trulieve, with conditional licenses in Alabama and Texas and the only operating pharmacy network in the country, would be the company best positioned to replicate it. #Position

📈 Dog Walkers

$CURLF ( ▼ 0.56% ) Is Ready

Curaleaf announced Tuesday that it has every competition clearance required for its hostile bid for Aurora Cannabis. Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs approved the change of control at Aurora’s three German entities on October 20, the Federal Cartel Office confirmed no prohibition on November 3, and Canada’s Competition Bureau issued a no-action letter on November 2. Those were the only two jurisdictions that required review.

Boris Jordan’s framing: “the path is clear for Aurora shareholders to realize the value our Offer provides.” The argument is certainty and speed. Organigram’s rival deal still needs shareholder approval, a B.C. court order and its own German FDI clearance. Curaleaf’s bid, which expires December 4, is now a tender away from closing.

SAFE Is Back On The Menu!

Maryland Governor Wes Moore, chair of the National Governors Association, led 16 governors in a letter to House and Senate leadership Monday urging passage of the SAFE Banking Act. The signatories run from Polis and Pritzker to Whitmer, Hochul, Healey, Beshear and Spanberger. The argument is the one the industry has made for a decade: cannabis businesses “largely operate in cash,” which makes them “targets for robbery and violent crime,” blocks access to payroll and credit processing, and leaves state agencies struggling to deposit tax payments and license fees. The letter calls the bill “a pragmatic solution that respects state sovereignty” and leans on the administration’s rescheduling move as proof the federal posture has shifted.

Every word of that is true. It’s also been true since the first SAFE Banking vote in 2019, and the bill has passed the House seven times without becoming law. The Senate Banking Committee advanced a version in 2023 and it died without a floor vote.

What’s different now is the Senate map. Democrats won both chambers last week and take control in January, which means SAFE Banking gets a committee chair who wants it and a majority leader who doesn’t have to be dragged. What’s not different is the signature list. Not one Republican governor signed, not even from states with legal markets like Ohio, Montana or Alaska. Sixty votes in the Senate still requires Republicans, and a letter that reads as a partisan ask makes that harder, not easier.

The GAO’s September banking report complicates the pitch further: it found no instance of a bank penalized solely for serving cannabis, even as it acknowledged access remains difficult. Opponents will cite the first half and ignore the second.

The governors are right on the merits. The American Bankers Association agrees. The question for 2027 is whether anyone can find eight Republican senators who’ll say so out loud.

📺 Trade To Black

16 Governors Push SAFE Banking, Vireo Closes FLUENT, North Carolina Moves | TTB Presented by Flowhub

• 16 Democratic governors push Congress on SAFE Banking, led by NGA chair Wes Moore, arguing cash-heavy operations invite crime and cost states tax revenue. The bill has passed the House before and never become law. Does rescheduling change the math?

• North Carolina opens a door: incoming House Speaker Robert Reives says decriminalization is “on top of everybody’s minds” after Democrats flipped the chamber. One Senate race remains uncalled, and Gov. Stein’s cannabis commission reports December 31.

• Vireo closes FLUENT and now runs about 74 Florida dispensaries; a Planet 13 close would take it to roughly 107, second only to Trulieve. OMMU data shows its brands growing fast but still fourth in THC and flower sold, so the upside is per-store productivity, not store count.

• The NuggMD Check-In Poll rounds out the show with the week’s read on what cannabis consumers are thinking.