Meet Me in St. Louis
Cannabis, Commerce and the Art of the Possible
Miles Davis and Chuck Berry both turned 100 this year.
Born in 1926, these two American musical revolutionaries grew up on opposite sides of the Mississippi River in metropolitan St. Louis. Davis reimagined jazz through improvisation. Berry electrified rock and roll.
Neither waited for permission to invent something new.
A generation later, Belleville, Illinois, just across the river, produced Jeff Tweedy and Uncle Tupelo, the roots of Wilco, whose musical journey would eventually lead to Chicago, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Sky Blue Sky.
This January, Wilco's Sky Blue Sky festival returned to Mexico, another celebration of what happens when musicians, communities and ideas come together without rigid boundaries.
There's something wonderfully Midwestern about all this. And something appropriate about gathering in St. Louis this November for another distinctly American experiment: creating legal commercial markets for a plant that remains entangled in federal prohibition, scientific possibility and political contradiction.
Welcome to Midwest Cannabis Forum, Part Two.
The Show Me State shows us something
I spent a delightful 25 minutes Friday in an introductory video conversation with Amy Moore, director of Missouri's Division of Cannabis Regulation.
Moore was warm, thorough and refreshingly comfortable discussing the extraordinary experiment she helps administer.
We began with a remarkable number.
A newly released Missouri cannabis market study estimates that 93 percent of reported cannabis expenditures flow through licensed dispensaries.
That's an extraordinary achievement, if the estimate accurately reflects the marketplace.
I had questions.
In May 2023, I attended a remarkable St. Louis cannabis event that inspired my Grown In dispatch, Fear and Loathing in Missouri's Unregulated Commercial Cannabis Marketplace.
Imagine thousands of bags of grass, tinctures, dab stations, elaborate smoking contraptions, psilocybin mushroom spores and a kaleidoscope of edibles marketed as uppers, downers, laughers and screamers.
An open-air cannabis bazaar operating well beyond conventional licensed retail.
Three years later, Missouri reports that nearly all cannabis spending takes place through licensed dispensaries.
What happened?
Moore acknowledged the inherent challenge of surveying consumers about historically illegal behavior. People may hesitate to disclose purchases outside regulated channels.
Industry insiders also point to Missouri's extensive personal cultivation activity and the possibility that consumers don't always distinguish between legally grown cannabis and products purchased from licensed dispensaries.
But Moore wasn't content to leave my questions unanswered.
Following our conversation, she asked her research team to explain the methodology behind the state's finding.
Their response was substantive.
Researchers surveyed 1,200 Missourians who had consumed cannabis within the previous 30 days, distributed proportionally across the state's eight congressional districts.
They then compared self-reported purchasing patterns against actual transactions recorded in Missouri's track-and-trace system.
Spending by product category, medical patient status, purchasing preferences and regional consumer behavior were among the variables tested against real-world sales.
According to the research team, those comparisons supported the reported spending behaviors within a 95 percent confidence interval.
That's a meaningful methodological cross-check, not simply an exercise in asking people whether they buy legal weed.
It still leaves a legitimate question: Can independently verified dispensary sales fully validate self-reported purchases that occur outside the regulated marketplace?
Probably not. But the methodology deserves serious consideration, as does Missouri's apparent success in bringing consumers into its licensed system.
Particularly because the findings help guide consequential decisions about cannabis licensing and market competition.
I'm not interested in playing gotcha with Moore or her colleagues.
Quite the opposite.
I appreciate her willingness to engage, investigate and share what her team learned.
And I want to understand what Missouri has discovered that other states might learn from.
That's a conversation worth having.
Beer town, meet beverage town
Then there's the beverage business.
Illinois is moving toward a November 12 crackdown on intoxicating hemp products. Missouri has preserved a limited exception for certain hemp-derived beverages through December 11, contingent on federal developments.
Thirty days can mean everything to an entrepreneur, distributor, investor or employee contemplating the future.
And this is St. Louis.
The home of Anheuser-Busch.
Think about the brewing infrastructure, beverage formulation expertise, distribution networks, marketing talent, capital and institutional memory surrounding one of the world's great beer enterprises.
Now introduce carefully formulated, sessionable cannabis beverages.
Could St. Louis become a national or global leader in this emerging category?
Moore appropriately stayed within her office's regulatory mandate rather than speculate about industrial policy or matters beyond Missouri's licensed cannabis program.
Fair enough.
Regulators regulate. Entrepreneurs innovate. Legislators legislate.
And somebody needs to bring them together.
Research and the art of the possible
Perhaps our most intriguing conversation concerned Missouri's emerging cannabis research-facility framework, with a new regulatory milestone approaching November 30.
Moore described an intentionally open-ended approach, allowing prospective researchers to propose possibilities rather than follow a narrowly prescribed government agenda.
There may not be substantial state dollars attached.
But there is an invitation to experiment.
Missouri has extraordinary agricultural, pharmaceutical, biotechnology and university research assets. Illinois has its own, including cannabis research initiatives at the University of Illinois Chicago.
What happens when these institutions connect?
Cannabis agriculture, product formulation, medicine, consumer behavior and public health all deserve rigorous examination.
One of the remarkable stories of American legalization is that dozens of states have become laboratories of democracy, regulating a formerly illegal industry while the rules, science and economics are still evolving.
Meanwhile, Washington signals potential medical rescheduling while leaving fundamental contradictions unresolved.
We're all working without a complete instruction manual.
Two states, one Midwest
Illinois and Missouri share a river, metropolitan economy, commercial relationships and increasingly interconnected cannabis marketplace.
But their political and regulatory approaches differ profoundly.
Illinois has developed a highly structured adult-use system emphasizing social equity, licensing controls and significant taxation. Its approach has parallels across Democratic-led legalization regimes in the Midwest, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.
Missouri has pursued a different path, with voter-approved constitutional protections and its own licensing and commercial framework.
Neither is perfect.
Both offer lessons.
And neither resembles Minnesota's distinctive experiment in cannabis legalization.
Rather than declare a winner, perhaps we should examine what works, what doesn't and what might come next.
Pot, Politics & Policy
On Thursday, November 12, Grown In and Cultivated return to St. Louis for the second Midwest Cannabis Forum, hosted at 2nd Shift Brewing.
We'll convene licensed operators, hemp entrepreneurs, regulators, industry veterans, researchers and policy leaders from Missouri, Illinois and beyond.
The timing couldn't be better.
The midterm elections will be nine days behind us. New Missouri hemp restrictions will be taking effect, with a temporary exception for certain beverages. And the state's research framework will be approaching its next milestone.
We'll explore cannabis commerce, scientific discovery, regulatory innovation, public health and the endlessly shifting boundaries between legal and prohibited activity.
Perhaps we'll even uncover opportunities for Missouri and Illinois researchers, entrepreneurs and policymakers to collaborate across the river.
This isn't another industry grievance session. Nor is it a gotcha interrogation of regulators.
It's a gathering of informed people who see the world differently but understand that the next chapter of cannabis requires meaningful conversation.
That's Grown In.
That's Cultivated.
That's the Midwest Cannabis Forum.
And that's the spirit of St. Louis.
Miles Davis found new possibilities between the notes. Chuck Berry turned familiar sounds into something revolutionary. Jeff Tweedy carried the creative energy of Belleville through Chicago and out into the world, reminding us with Wilco's Sky Blue Sky that there's always another horizon.
Cannabis policy could use a little of that improvisation.
A willingness to listen, collaborate, experiment and occasionally abandon the arrangement when somebody discovers a better melody.
Meet me in St. Louis.
Bring your ideas. We'll see what happens.
Midwest Cannabis Forum: Pot, Politics & Policy
Thursday, November 12, 2026 | 4–8 p.m.
2nd Shift Brewing | St. Louis, Missouri
Presented by Grown In and Cultivated.
