Marijuana Business Owner Running For Congress Says Federal Legalization Is The ‘Only Path’ For ‘National Market Stability’

Federal cannabis legalization is the only path to national market stability. In the blistering glare of MJBizCon’s endless neon, Wanda James didn’t hedge, didn’t wink, didn’t sell hope like a souvenir. She planted a flag. No rescheduling. No half-measures. She framed the stakes like a chef calling a bad plate back to the line: fix the whole system or stop pretending this is a serviceable meal. “Only legalization gives this industry oxygen,” she’s said, and you felt the room inhale. Because the truth is simple and ugly—without descheduling from the Controlled Substances Act, 280E keeps bleeding margins, banking bans keep strangling cash flow, and interstate commerce remains a fever dream. That’s not policy reform; that’s purgatory dressed as progress. For anyone tracking cannabis taxation, compliance, and the broader cannabis industry impact, the choice she offered sounded less like a campaign plank and more like triage.

James’s case is built on lived chaos. Operators hustling in a gray market of green storefronts. Tax bills you can’t deduct against. Accounts slammed shut for the crime of existing. Raids that feel random because, frankly, they often are. If you’ve watched federal posture wobble between tolerance and threat, the whiplash has a paper trail: see how guidance once told prosecutors to pump the brakes—Newly Revealed Biden Marijuana Guidance Rescinded By Trump DOJ Told Prosecutors To Be ‘Extremely Cautious’ About Cannabis Cases—and how internal guardrails later demanded oversight—Newly Revealed Biden Marijuana Guidance Rescinded By Trump DOJ Ordered Prosecutors To Seek Higher-Up Approval For Cases. That’s not a market. That’s roulette. James is betting on the boring, blessed stability of clear federal law: open banking, rational insurance, interstate logistics that don’t require prayer, and a tax code that treats cannabis like any other lawful product. She’s not selling romance; she’s selling the possibility of running a normal business.

The pitch isn’t just freedom-from—the great escape from 280E and enforcement anxiety—it’s freedom-to. Legalization means building national safety standards that travel with a product from cultivation to countertop. Testing that isn’t a state-by-state scavenger hunt. Packaging rules that protect kids and inform adults. And a regulatory spine that actually works: the kind of framework research shows can outperform alcohol policy on public health outcomes—see the science-backed case here: Marijuana Regulations Protect Public Health Better Than Alcohol Rules Do, New Government-Funded Study Finds. James talks antitrust like a small-batch brewer who remembers the first rent check: keep multinationals from swallowing the pioneers. Give mom-and-pop operators a fair shot in interstate commerce. Federal loans. Grants. Guardrails that reward good actors and retire the shell games. The national cannabis market we keep invoking in investor decks only materializes when Congress writes rules a trucker in Kansas and a lab in Oregon can both understand.

There’s also the part of legalization that can’t be measured in SKU counts or EBITDA: equity with teeth. James wants reinvestment of legal cannabis revenue into places that paid the highest price for prohibition—affordable housing, mental health care, childcare, better schools, economic development that remembers who got left behind. Licensing pathways that don’t just invite social equity applicants to the party, but hand them the keys to get home safely: federal grants, low-interest capital, and meaningful technical support. She’s blunt about culture-war crossfire too. The hemp skirmishes? The “split the plant” rhetoric? She calls it a distraction, and plenty of policy voices agree that prohibitionist detours are a dead end—see: Federal Hemp Ban Pushed By GOP Is A ‘Step Backward,’ Democratic Congresswoman Says (Op-Ed). And for veterans, she wants VA doctors free to recommend medical cannabis without a maze of penalties and paperwork. It’s not radical to let physicians be physicians. It’s normal. That’s the point.

James is taking on an incumbent who has her own reform credentials, but she’s staking out the unambiguous lane: deschedule entirely, write federal rules, and let the legal cannabis market breathe. She’s launched that call in public, on stages and in statements, with the conviction of someone who’s done the inventory herself at 2 a.m. and knows which numbers don’t add up. If her platform sounds like a dare, it’s because it is—to Congress, to regulators, to anyone who thinks incrementalism will rescue an industry that remains federally illegal while selling state-legal joints across Main Street America. The next chapter of marijuana policy reform won’t be won with euphemisms. It will be won with clarity, consistency, and the political will to end a half-century mistake in one clean stroke. If you’re ready to meet that moment and explore where quality meets compliance, take a look at our shop: https://thcaorder.com/shop/.