The Legal Cannabis Industry Calls Itself a Movement. These Men Are Still Waiting for It to Act Like One.

Ryan Richmond’s lawyers told him something striking just before he surrendered to Morgantown Federal Prison in West Virginia: as far as they could find, he might be the only American sent to federal prison on a criminal prosecution built around IRS Code 280E.

Not for selling marijuana. Not for running a cartel. For the tax code.

Richmond had operated Clinical Relief, the first licensed medical marijuana dispensary in Michigan, starting in 2009. He was raided an average of every 26 days for four years. No charges stuck. So prosecutors changed the tool. When the drug counts wouldn’t hold, federal authorities reached for Section 280E — an IRS provision written in the early 1980s to prevent drug traffickers from deducting business expenses — and weaponized it not in civil tax court, where 280E fights traditionally play out, but as the spine of a criminal indictment. He was convicted, sentenced to two years, and hit with roughly $2.8 million in combined taxes and penalties.

He’s out now. Probation ending. But the constitutional question he raised — whether 280E becomes cruel and unusual punishment when deployed in a criminal case — went to the U.S. Supreme Court and was declined without comment.

About 1,200 miles from Morgantown, Frank Rogers has no such resolution. Rogers, serving time on a federal marijuana conspiracy conviction, has already spent more than a decade behind bars. While he’s been inside, the legal cannabis industry has grown into a $50 billion machine. Dispensaries open every week. Conferences fill convention centers. Brands run national ad campaigns. Rogers hasn’t been freed. And for the roughly 32,000 people still incarcerated nationwide for cannabis-related crimes — figures cited by advocacy groups across federal and state systems — legalization has been largely an abstraction.

The Tax Code as a Weapon

Richmond’s case illuminates something that gets glossed over in the cannabis industry’s origin mythology: the government didn’t stop pursuing state-legal operators because it gave up. It adapted.

When raids and prosecutions on marijuana charges repeatedly failed — dismissed cases, no convictions — the tools changed. 280E treats any business trafficking a Schedule I substance as ineligible for standard deductions. Rent. Payroll. Security costs. The things that keep any business alive. Most 280E battles play out in civil tax court — brutal, but survivable for a business with enough margin. What happened to Richmond was rarer: prosecutors used the civil tax structure as the backbone of a criminal case. His lawyers couldn’t find another instance where it had been done quite that way.

He took the constitutional question about whether that crossed a line all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court said nothing and looked away.

280E has become somewhat less operationally central since the full legislative tracker began the rescheduling process — but cannabis remains Schedule I today. For federal prosecutors with the will to use it, the weapon is still loaded.

The Clemency Math Nobody Wants to Do

Frank Rogers’ situation is less legally novel and more simply human. He’s been inside for over a decade on a federal conspiracy charge tied to marijuana. The only path out for most people like him — without a successful appeal — is presidential clemency.

Clemency is constitutional, but it is not a process. It is a political act that requires sustained advocacy and a president willing to spend capital. The Biden administration granted some cannabis pardons in 2022, but they were narrow: simple possession under federal law, largely symbolic, leaving untouched the larger population serving time on distribution, conspiracy, or trafficking charges.

That’s where Rogers sits. That’s where thousands of others sit.

The cannabis industry now has resources and lobbying infrastructure to push for clemency at scale. The Last Prisoner Project, the Cannabis Regulators of Color Coalition, and a handful of others have been doing exactly that — with limited help from the billion-dollar companies that owe some portion of their market existence to the conditions created by people like Rogers.

The moral math is uncomfortable: the industry publishes DEI reports. It funds scholarship programs. It talks about equity at every conference. What it has been slower to do is fund sustained clemency advocacy at the scale that would actually move federal prisoners out of cells.

What the Industry Actually Owes

Cannabis companies didn’t put Frank Rogers in prison. The federal government did. But there’s an argument — made with increasing urgency by criminal justice advocates — that the industry carries a specific obligation that other sectors don’t: it built a legal economy on the bones of an illegal one, and the people most likely to be sitting in federal prisons for that illegal one are Black and Brown men, prosecuted at rates that bore no resemblance to actual cannabis use across racial groups.

That disparity is documented, extensively. It predates legalization. It persists in states where enforcement continues.

Richmond’s case is about a white business owner caught in a particular kind of prosecutorial creativity — the government reaching for whatever tool remained. Rogers’ case is part of a much older, larger pattern. Both of them are reminders of the same thing: the word “movement” implies obligations the market doesn’t enforce on its own.

The legal cannabis industry raised billions in equity funding last year. It is not short of resources.

In too many places, it is short of will.

Maya Torres covers national cannabis policy, expungement, equity, and medical access for CannabisInquirer.com. Tips and sources: [secure contact]