Cannabis Is Being Rebuilt From The Ground Up
In the latest Trade To Black podcast, presented by Flowhub, hosts Shadd Dales and Anthony Varrell open on a new bipartisan hemp bill, then sit down with Flowhub Founder and CEO Kyle Sherman on where cannabis technology is headed, before Dr. Paul Shields joins for the weekly Vantage Standard segment on CBD dosing and the medical path ahead.
In the headlines: Reps. Andy Barr and Angie Craig introduced the Lawful Hemp Protection Act, which would raise the total-THC threshold to 1% measured on finished products, keep intoxicating hemp legal for age-gated adults 21 and up, ban synthetic conversions like Delta-8 and THCP, establish national testing and labeling rules, set up an alcohol-style three-tier distribution system, and add a federal retail and THC tax. Dales and Varrell doubted the bill’s near-term prospects of attaching to a continuing resolution or stopping the November 12 ban, and reiterated their view that there shouldn’t be two separate industries — that full-spectrum products belong under a single rescheduled, state-regulated framework.
In segment one, Sherman made the case for open cannabis-tech ecosystems, arguing that dispensaries juggling separate systems for POS, e-commerce, payments, loyalty, compliance and analytics need the freedom to choose best-in-class tools rather than being locked into a single vendor’s roadmap. He described what retailers should actually own — their customer relationships, data, brand and choice of technology partners — and walked through Flowhub’s headless commerce offering, Open Ecommerce, which lets operators build custom websites, apps, kiosks and new shopping channels without ripping out their core system. He also explained why credit-card acceptance may still be years away even under Schedule III, argued cannabis will eventually be a bigger category than alcohol as habits shift toward wellness, and cited Flowhub data showing 52% of cannabis retailers already using AI — primarily for data analysis.
In segment two, Shields tackled the roughly 50-year research gap on cannabis efficacy, arguing later-stage clinical trials could move relatively quickly given the existing safety data. He addressed the gap between retail-dose and therapeutic-dose CBD — with effects often starting near 50 milligrams and running to 150–300 — and what that means for consistency and manufacturing, since many users try an underdosed product once, feel nothing, and write off the category. He also covered the real interaction risks cannabinoids carry with medications like blood thinners and antiepileptics, the likely decline of the indica/sativa framing in a medical context, and the open research questions around terpenes and the entourage effect.
