California was supposed to be the global standard blueprint for cannabis industry success.
We had everything a real legal market needs: the deepest consumer base in the country, the most famous cultivation regions on Earth, decades of legacy knowledge, the cultural credibility that birthed modern cannabis, and a global audience waiting to learn from whatever we built.
When voters approved Proposition 64 in 2016 and adult-use sales began on January 1, 2018, the world didn’t just watch California for entertainment. They watched because they assumed California would lead.
Seven years later, we have to say the quiet truth out loud: California didn’t lead.
California wandered into a mess of its own making, and a big reason why is that the Department of Cannabis Control spent too long operating with a leadership vacuum. The previous administration inherited a complicated transition, sure — but instead of stepping into the storm with urgency, clarity, and accountability, it let too much slide, delayed too many hard decisions, and hid behind optimistic messaging while real problems compounded in plain sight.
Now we’re in the part of the story where those problems aren’t just problems anymore — they’re consequences.
A new DCC director is stepping in. That alone tells you the state knows something has to change. But leadership changes don’t magically reverse market damage. California cannabis is paying today for years of weak direction and soft oversight. If we want to be honest about what comes next, we’ve got to be honest about how we got here.
This isn’t about personal vendettas or politics-as-sport. This is about outcomes. Because when an entire industry is hurting and the agency tasked with protecting it keeps acting like time will fix what governance won’t, that’s not regulation. That’s neglect.
The Promise of Prop 64 and the Reality We Built
Prop 64 was sold as a practical dream. A safer, regulated market. Real consumer protections. A smooth transition for the people who built cannabis culture long before it was fashionable. A tax structure that would fund public needs without crushing the very businesses collecting the revenue. And an equity framework meant to repair harm and open doors for communities targeted hardest by prohibition.
Even people who had doubts about legalization still wanted to believe California could pull it off. The plan wasn’t naïve. It was rooted in the idea that California understood cannabis better than anyone else. We weren’t inventing the wheel; we were legalizing a wheel we already knew how to drive.
But legalization didn’t arrive like a clean upgrade. It landed like a messy migration. Local bans created a patchwork market from day one. State rules evolved fast, sometimes weekly. Businesses applied for licenses while the rules under their feet kept shifting. Compliance costs were intense, and taxes were stacked early before operators had a chance to stabilize. That transition needed a regulator with a spine, a playbook, and a willingness to say “no” even when the political heat got uncomfortable.
What we got instead was a stretch of leadership that too often acted like the market would right itself if everyone just waited long enough.
That’s not how fragmented, heavily taxed emerging industries work — especially not one born from a legacy ecosystem forced into a bureaucratic framework overnight.
When a Leadership Vacuum Meets a Growing Crisis
The DCC was created to unify California’s cannabis oversight. It was supposed to be the agency that brought clarity to confusing rules, accountability to safety systems, and stability to a market that needed predictable governance just to breathe. From day one, it had to be more than an administrator. It had to be a leader.
Instead, what the industry experienced was an agency that frequently sounded like it was narrating someone else’s movie.
Year after year, businesses begged for certainty around testing, licensing pace, compliance enforcement, and market realities. What they got in response were tidy statements about “ongoing improvements” and “strong foundations” even as the ground beneath the industry was visibly cracking.
Here are the most important ways that vacuum showed up — not in theory, but in real-world damage:
- Consumer safety and testing credibility were allowed to wobble for too long. Operators and consumers heard about contamination issues, lab inconsistency, and the lingering perception that testing could be gamed. Whether every headline was fair or not, the failure was letting mistrust outpace enforcement and clarity.
- Equity programs became a slow-motion disappointment. Grants rolled out unevenly. Local execution got tangled in bureaucracy. People who were supposed to be supported ended up stuck waiting while costs piled up. There were wins in pockets, but California promised equity at scale — and didn’t deliver it that way.
- The DCC’s public posture stayed upbeat while the market was screaming. Wholesale prices slid. Businesses closed. Licenses quietly went dormant or got surrendered. Yet the tone rarely matched the urgency. California didn’t need a cheerleader. It needed crisis leadership.
The core problem wasn’t that the DCC had challenges. Every new market does. The problem was that the agency didn’t meet those challenges with the level of urgency and candor the moment demanded. When leadership goes quiet or cautious during a crisis, the crisis writes the agenda instead.
The 2018 Licensing Pivot That Changed Everything
You can’t talk about California’s current chaos without talking about 2018. That year wasn’t just the first year of adult-use sales. It was the year California decided what kind of market it actually wanted.
At rollout, there was a real opportunity to transition legacy operators first, pace licensure responsibly, build strong regional protections, and give small businesses a fighting chance. California could have built a gradual model that respected the people who carried this plant through prohibition and understood the cultural terrain better than any outside investor ever could.
Instead, a late-stage licensing shift in 2018 opened the door wide to big capital far earlier and more aggressively than the market was ready for. That was a fork in the road. California took the road that favors scale over stewardship.
Let’s be straight about what that meant. Big money doesn’t enter a fragile new market to “participate.” Big money enters to dominate. And when a market is already struggling to transition legacy businesses into a complex regulatory environment, pouring fuel on capitalization and expansion turns the ecosystem into a survival contest.
Oversaturation hit fast. Licenses proliferated in a market that wasn’t growing consumers at the same pace. Prices dropped. Margins evaporated. Smaller operators were forced to compete in a battlefield they didn’t choose, at a tempo they didn’t set, under rules they were still trying to learn.
This wasn’t a natural evolution. It was design. When you speed-run licensing without building the scaffolding for stability, you don’t get a healthy market. You get a market that looks busy while quietly bleeding out.
And here’s the part regulators never truly confronted head-on: California’s global strength was always legacy. The craft. The regions. The farmers. The culture. The authenticity. When you structure a system that treats those people like an afterthought, you’re not only reshaping commerce. You’re stripping the thing that made California cannabis world-class in the first place.
California should have been the example to follow because we should have done what nobody else could do — scale legal cannabis without selling out its soul. We didn’t.
Taxes and Compliance: Death by a Thousand Cuts
Even with flawless leadership, California would still have faced a brutal structural challenge: the cost of legality.
Taxes here were stacked early and stayed heavy. Excise taxes, local taxes that vary city to city, plus compliance costs that don’t flex based on your size — all of it created a legal product that couldn’t stay competitive for mainstream consumers. The state treated legal cannabis like a luxury commodity while expecting it to behave like a mass consumer good.
We’ve watched this play out year after year. The bigger the tax wedge between legal prices and what everyday consumers will tolerate, the more pressure the legal market feels. Operators don’t just lose customers. They lose runway. And when operators lose runway in a business with high fixed costs, they close. Not slowly. Suddenly.
The DCC doesn’t set taxes, but leadership still matters here. One of the regulator’s jobs is to tell policymakers what the market can realistically sustain. You can’t regulate a market to health while fiscal policy is snapping its neck. If you see the market shrinking and you don’t ring the alarm hard enough, you’re part of the shrinkage.
For years, warning signals were obvious. But the state response didn’t match the scale of the threat. The result is a legal market now struggling with contraction at the exact moment California should be consolidating strength ahead of federal reform.
The Price We’re Paying Now
When a regulator leaves a leadership vacuum long enough, the market doesn’t just wobble. It reorganizes around the wobble. That’s what we’re seeing now.
California’s legal ecosystem is thinning. The industry is consolidating not because consolidation is automatically evil, but because smaller players don’t have oxygen. Communities that built the culture are watching their operators disappear. Consumers are more skeptical. Retailers are more cautious. Brands are more stressed. Everyone is fighting their own version of survival mode.
And California’s reputation has taken real hits. Other states didn’t just copy our successes; they studied our mistakes. Some built tighter systems. Some paced licensing more responsibly. Others structured taxes more realistically. California — the cultural nucleus — became the market others pointed to when they wanted to justify doing things differently.
That’s a hard pill to swallow, especially for the people who put their lives into this plant.
What the New DCC Director Has to Understand on Day One
A new director doesn’t control every lever in California cannabis. But leadership sets posture. Posture shapes priorities. Priorities determine whether an agency is useful or ornamental.
The first thing new leadership has to do is acknowledge that the previous era wasn’t “fine but challenging.” It was defined by a lack of clear direction at critical times. A regulator that won’t name failures can’t fix them. A market that sees denial won’t trust a fix anyway.
The second thing is to treat transparency as a core tool, not a slogan. California needs clear data, clear timelines, and clear public communication about what’s changing and why. The industry is tired of vague promises wrapped in upbeat language. Say what’s broken. Say what’s being done. Talk about when operators will feel it.
Third, the new director has to rebuild credibility with small and mid-sized operators, not just the biggest license holders. California’s health isn’t measured by how well a handful of large companies do. It’s measured by whether the ecosystem stays diverse, regional, culturally rooted, and economically sustainable.
Finally, leadership has to remember what California cannabis actually represents to the world. This market isn’t just transactions. This market represents history, culture, medicine, and the standard other places measure themselves against. If the state keeps governing like cannabis is just another taxable commodity, it will keep eroding what made it exceptional.
California Can Still Lead — But Not on Autopilot
Let’s not pretend the story is over. California still has the culture. Still has the consumer base. Still has the genetics and innovation that shape global trends. The foundation isn’t gone. But the foundation has been damaged by years of weak leadership and hands-off oversight, and now it needs repair at an adult pace, not a political pace.
If new DCC leadership is willing to be honest about what the previous administration allowed to slide, and if policymakers are willing to stop treating the legal market like an ATM that can survive infinite pressure, then California can still become the example to follow.
But it’s going to take what we haven’t had enough of:
- Real direction instead of vague optimism.
- Real urgency instead of slow-motion “process.”
- Real accountability instead of PR patches.
Because California didn’t just legalize weed. California inherited a responsibility to lead the world. We fumbled that responsibility. Now we either rebuild it, or we accept permanent second-place in the market we invented.
That’s the crossroads we’re standing at today.
Beard Bros’ Two Cents
We’ve been here from the beginning — long before Prop 64, long before the DCC, long before cannabis was a line item on a state budget. We know what California cannabis is supposed to look like because we lived it. We know what it costs when leadership goes missing because we’ve watched friends and partners get squeezed out by it.
So we’re saying this with love and with fire: California doesn’t get to coast on culture forever. If we want to lead, we have to govern like leaders. If we want to be the example, we have to act like an example. And if the state wants this industry to survive, it has to stop asking the plant and the people to carry the weight of bad policy and weak oversight.
The new director has a chance to change the arc. The industry has a right to demand that he does.
California should have been the example to follow. It still can be — but only if we stop pretending a leadership vacuum is acceptable regulation.
