By: Theresa Yarbrough Founder/Director, Georgia Cannabis Industry Alliance December 4, 2025

Grassroots Legacy vs. Corporate Capture

For decades, cannabis reform was driven by grassroots growers, patients, and activists who believed in the plant’s cultural and medicinal power. They also believed it should be cultivated in its purest form, too valuable to be reduced to a commercial product. Homegrown was their rallying cry — a way to preserve the plant, build seed banks, and ensure access. At most, they envisioned a craft industry, small‑scale and community‑rooted, to protect cannabis from the distortions of commercialism that now dominate the market. Distortions like:

• Monopoly & Consolidation Billion‑dollar acquisitions (e.g., Jazz Pharmaceuticals buying GW Pharmaceuticals). Corporate operators squeeze out small growers and craft producers — and in the process, damage consumers by relying on remediation techniques and “impact boosting” to make products more marketable. Instead of honoring the plant’s natural integrity, they sterilize, reprocess, and artificially enhance cannabis to reduce loss and inflate profits, leaving consumers with products that are less authentic, less safe, and stripped of the qualities grassroots growers fought to preserve.

• Patent & Proprietary Control Lab‑engineered extracts and formulations locked behind patents. Restricting access to seed banks and genetic diversity.

• Pharma‑Style Branding Marketing distillates and isolates as “pharmaceutical‑grade” while dismissing hemp’s identical products as “synthetic.” Elevating lab products over whole‑plant medicine.

• Regulatory Capture Lobbying for laws that privilege corporate marijuana while criminalizing or banning hemp extracts. Framing hemp reform as a “safety issue” when it’s really about market control.

• Cultural Erasure Marginalizing homegrow traditions and grassroots cultivation. Replacing community‑rooted craft with sterile, mass‑produced commodities that erase cultural identity.

Legacy Warnings

As the legacy actors always knew, cannabis cannot be trusted in the hands of corrupt legislators and greedy corporates. They warned that once the plant was captured by monopoly interests, its integrity would be sacrificed for profit. Today, that warning rings true: remediation, impact boosting, and regulatory capture have replaced purity, craft, and community stewardship.

Betrayal and Theft of the Plant

Corporate greed operators have chosen one sector of the plant for capture — marijuana — and in return are attempting to destroy its sibling sector, hemp. This is not innovation; it is betrayal. By turning the plant against itself, they commit an act of theft, stripping cannabis of its wholeness and weaponizing regulation to pit flower against flower. Activists are working overtime to correct this injustice, to restore the plant’s integrity, and to defend the legacy vision that cannabis must remain free from monopoly capture.

The Double Standard

By denying states like Georgia the right to adult‑use cannabis, lawmakers are not protecting public safety — they are protecting corporate medical marijuana operators. This prohibition creates a monopoly where corporate actors can deploy pharma‑styled lab tricks: extracting, distilling, and reprocessing cannabis until the flower is robbed of its whole‑plant healing synergy. These same operators then turn around and villainize hemp producers for using identical extraction methods, branding hemp’s products as “synthetic” or “unsafe.” The result is a double standard that betrays the grassroots vision of cannabis reform and weaponizes regulation to favor corporate profit over community access.

Synergy with Pharmaceutical Giants

Industry reporting shows growing integration between medicinal cannabis firms and established pharmaceutical players. That alignment pushes product development toward standardized, extract‑based medicines and away from whole‑plant craft models. Market forecasts project multi‑billion‑dollar growth in medical cannabis, underscoring how much of the industry’s future value is tied to pharma‑style products and regulatory pathways.

The narrative that hemp extracts are “synthetic” or “fake” is less about science and more about market control. Corporate cannabis operators, backed by pharmaceutical models, want to delegitimize hemp competition while using identical lab processes themselves.

Comparison Table

The evidence confirms what many already sense: the push to ban hemp is not about protecting public safety. It is about protecting corporate interests. People are waking up to the hypocrisy — corporate cannabis operators use the same extraction methods they condemn in hemp, proving that reform is less about science and more about who controls the narrative and profits.

Our Demands:

• Restore the $38 Billion Hemp Industry

• Protect 300,000 Jobs

• Raise the Hemp THC Ceiling and Regulate It

• End the Hemp Ban