#16 | Designing Cannabis Policy in the Age of AI

Shawn Collins of THC Group and Erik Gundersen of ERG Strategies sit down with Mackenzie Slade of Cannabis Public Policy Consulting (CPPC) to unpack a phrase that gets thrown around in every cannabis hearing and rulemaking: “evidence-based policy.”

They get specific. What does evidence look like when the best data is observational, the politics is loud, and the market evolves faster than regulators can write rules? The conversation moves through cannabis regulatory science, including emerging work using AI to approximate human affect ratings of cannabis imagery, and what that could mean for advertising review, compliance, and defensibility.

From there, they dig into randomized controlled trials and why trial design matters for policy levers that actually move behavior, including taxes, labeling, and consumer trust. Switzerland’s adult-use public health experiments come up as a case study in what policy looks like when government treats research as infrastructure, not window dressing.

They close with hemp through late 2026. Demand exists. Channels are shifting. Definitions and enforcement will decide who captures the spend, and who gets squeezed.

Referenced in this episode:
AI Study (medRxiv preprint): https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.14.25339699
Swiss RCT Study Design (Frontiers in Psychiatry): https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1139325
Swiss RCT Outcomes (Addiction): https://doi.org/10.1111/add.70080
Verasight (representative sampling firm): https://www.verasight.io/

🎧 New episodes drop regularly. Follow @TheHybridPod on Instagram for updates.

🔎 Topics: cannabis regulatory science, evidence-based policy, AI and compliance, cannabis advertising rules, randomized controlled trials, policy experimentation, labeling and consumer trust, hemp-derived THC, market demand, regulatory governance, CPPC, The Hybrid podcast

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