Wine Shops, Prison Unions, and $8 Billion

The Cole Memo has been covering Illinois cannabis with more rigor than most outlets covering any state, so it was the right room for a long conversation about Parabola's Illinois market report. The full episode runs well past these excerpts and is available here. Four clips below.

Between 2022 and 2025, Illinois’ incumbent medical operators captured 80 percent of nearly $8 billion in legal cannabis sales while the state promoted itself as a national equity leader.

A Brooklyn wine shop and a Las Vegas dispensary are both retail, but one is built to serve its customers and the other is built to advertise at them. That difference traces back to one rule.

Everyone in Michigan’s market ends up vertically integrated, and almost nobody wanted to be. Damian walks through the sequence that forces it, the same one that played out in California, and where it always ends.

Prisons, contractors, police unions, and political careers kept the drug war expanding for fifty years under both parties. Damian previews new research on what legalization has built to defend itself, and why a decade of reform sits exposed to a single bad election cycle.