Could Cannabis Stocks Hit Wall Street by the Mid-2030s?

October 4, 2026

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On June 10, 2026, Trulieve started trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker TRLV. Three weeks later, on June 30, Glass House Brands joined it as GLAS. These were the first plant-touching cannabis companies to list on a major US exchange, full stop -- not OTC pink sheets, not the Canadian Securities Exchange, not a Toronto venue that American investors had to route through a workaround to access. A company that grows and sells marijuana, trading next to industrials and banks on the same exchange that lists Coca-Cola and Walmart. Five years ago, most people covering this industry would have called that scenario fanciful. Three years ago, it still looked like a multi-administration-away kind of event.

Here's the catch, and it matters more than the headline: both companies only qualified by restructuring into medical-only entities, after an April 2026 federal order moved FDA-approved marijuana products and state-licensed medical marijuana into Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act. Adult-use cannabis -- the overwhelming majority of US cannabis revenue -- stayed exactly where it's been since 1970, Schedule I, federally illegal, no different in classification than it was under Nixon. Trulieve and Glass House didn't walk through an open door for the cannabis industry. They found a narrow gap, cut their recreational operations loose, and squeezed through it.

So the real question isn't whether cannabis has arrived on Wall Street. It's whether this beachhead widens -- whether adult-use multistate operators eventually follow, whether Nasdaq listings join the NYSE pair, whether S&P and Russell index funds start holding cannabis names the way they hold anything else. That outcome depends on at least three specific, unresolved things: a DEA ruling on full rescheduling that hasn't been issued yet, a D.C. Circuit court challenge with no fixed timeline, and a federal banking bill that has already failed to clear Congress seven separate times. What follows isn't a prediction of a date. It's an attempt to reason forward from exactly where the regulatory gears are sitting right now.

What Actually Happened in 2026 -- and What Didn't

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The order that made TRLV and GLAS possible came from Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on April 23, 2026. The Final Order placed FDA-approved marijuana products and state-licensed medical marijuana into Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act, with an effective date of April 28, 2026. That's a real, dated, enforceable change -- the first movement in marijuana's federal scheduling since Schedule I status was assigned under the original 1970 Controlled Substances Act. It's worth being precise about what it actually changed: Schedule III drugs are recognized as having accepted medical use and lower abuse potential than Schedule I or II substances, which matters enormously for tax treatment, research access, and how the DEA registers and tracks the supply chain.

What the order did not do is reschedule marijuana generally. Adult-use and recreational cannabis -- grown, sold, and taxed in states from Colorado to Michigan to New York -- remains Schedule I under federal law, legally indistinguishable from heroin in the eyes of the Controlled Substances Act, regardless of what any state ballot measure or legislature says. That bifurcation, medical-in versus recreational-out, is the hinge this entire story turns on. Every forecast about cannabis equities for the next decade has to pass through that one fork before it means anything.

Layered on top of the April order is a separate, broader proceeding: a DEA hearing on rescheduling marijuana across the board, which ran from June 29 through July 15, 2026. As of this writing on September 11, 2026, no ruling has come out of that hearing. There's no published date by which one is required to arrive. Administrative proceedings of this scope have, historically, taken months to years to resolve once hearings close -- and this one touches an industry worth tens of billions of dollars in annual state-legal sales, which tends to invite exactly the kind of careful, slow-walked review that frustrates anyone hoping for a quick resolution.

Then there's the courts. Legal challenges to the April Schedule III order are pending before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and appellate review timelines are notoriously hard to predict -- they depend on briefing schedules, oral argument calendars, and how aggressively either side pushes for expedited treatment. Nothing about this case has a fixed resolution date attached to it. So the industry is sitting on top of two separate, independently uncertain processes -- an unissued DEA ruling and an unresolved appellate challenge -- either of which could reshape or unwind what the April order established.

Trulieve and Glass House Prove It Can Be Done -- Narrowly

Trulieve and Glass House didn't get onto the NYSE by simply filing paperwork and waiting for Schedule III to take effect. Both had to restructure. NYSE listing standards and DEA registration requirements don't accommodate a company that's simultaneously handling federally Schedule I recreational product and federally Schedule III medical product under one corporate roof -- so both companies legally segregated or eliminated their adult-use operations to present a clean, medical-only entity to the exchange and the agency. Glass House went further than a paper reorganization: it restructured into a medical-only company and completed DEA registration before its June 30 debut, a sequence that took real operational work, not just a press release.

Other major operators are watching and moving, cautiously. Curaleaf and Verano have both filed for uplisting and completed reverse stock splits to get their share prices above NYSE minimums -- a mechanical step, but a necessary one. The harder problem for both is that they still run substantial adult-use operations, which is precisely the complication Trulieve and Glass House solved by cutting that business out. Whether Curaleaf and Verano can thread that needle without walking away from the bulk of their current revenue is an open question nobody has answered yet.

It's also worth sitting with how skeptical serious market observers remain. A Forbes piece from July 24, 2026 quoted an analyst describing the sector as a Death Valley for investors -- a reference to persistent stigma among institutional allocators and the thinness of market infrastructure (research coverage, specialized custodians, liquidity) even for names that have cleared the legal hurdle. That's not a fringe opinion; it's a reasonable read of how little changes overnight just because an exchange technically allows the listing.

The honest way to read the Trulieve and Glass House moment is as proof of concept, not a sector-wide gate swinging open. It demonstrates that a major US exchange can accommodate a cannabis equity under the right corporate structure. It does not demonstrate that the sector as a whole -- the MSOs whose revenue is overwhelmingly adult-use -- has any near-term path to follow, unless they're willing to amputate the majority of their current business to get there. That's a trade very few operators can afford to make today.

The Banking Problem Schedule III Doesn't Fix

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Schedule III status solves a specific, well-understood financial problem: Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code, which bars businesses trafficking in Schedule I or II substances from deducting ordinary business expenses. For state-licensed medical operators now sitting in Schedule III, that penalty disappears, and it's a real, immediate, already-priced-in financial win -- part of why Trulieve and Glass House could credibly present themselves as viable NYSE listings in the first place. Removing 280E exposure materially improves effective tax rates and free cash flow for the medical-only slice of the business.

What Schedule III does not touch is banking. Federal banking law still treats cannabis activity that falls outside FDA-approved channels as federally illegal, full stop, regardless of what schedule it sits in. Banks, custodians, and market makers operate under federal charters and federal anti-money-laundering obligations, and nothing in the April order changes their underlying legal exposure for touching cannabis-linked funds. Schedule III moves the tax picture; it does nothing for the wire transfers, custody accounts, and clearing relationships that institutional capital actually depends on.

The legislative fix for that gap has a name and a long history: the SAFE Banking Act, refiled in June 2026 as S.4942 by Senators Merkley, Warren, Murkowski, and Daines, with a House companion from Representative Dave Joyce. The bipartisan sponsor list looks encouraging on paper -- it's crossed party lines in every version going back years. But the track record is the thing to actually weigh here, not the sponsor list. The House has passed versions of this bill seven separate times between 2019 and 2022, and every single time it died without a Senate floor vote. In 2023, the Senate Banking Committee advanced a broader version, the SAFER Banking Act, out of committee -- and it still stalled before reaching the floor.

Seven House passages and zero Senate floor votes over roughly five years is not a close call or an unlucky streak. It's a pattern, and patterns are what this blog reasons from. Without a banking fix, custodians and market makers face compliance friction that doesn't disappear just because a company's tax bill improved. That friction is exactly why big index funds and most mainstream brokerages remain cautious even toward Schedule III-compliant names like TRLV and GLAS -- the tax problem is solved, but the plumbing problem isn't.

What History Says About How Long This Takes

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The closest full analog to what cannabis is going through is alcohol after Prohibition's repeal in 1933. Repeal didn't instantly produce a national retail alcohol industry with uniform rules -- it produced a patchwork, state-by-state three-tier distribution system (producer, wholesaler, retailer) that took years to standardize, and some pieces of that system, like interstate shipping restrictions, were still being fought out in courts decades later. The 2005 Supreme Court case Granholm v. Heald, which addressed direct interstate wine shipping, came more than seventy years after repeal. Federal legalization of a substance does not mean national market infrastructure arrives on the same calendar.

Cannabis's own state-level legalization history tells a similar story of gradual accumulation rather than a single switch flip. Colorado and Washington legalized adult-use cannabis in 2012. It then took roughly a decade of additional states joining one or two at a time before medical programs became close to universal and adult-use programs covered a majority of the US population. Nothing about that process was sudden; it was a slow accretion of individual state decisions, each with its own timeline and political fights.

SAFE Banking's own history fits the same shape. Seven House passages between 2019 and 2022, a stalled SAFER version in 2023 -- that's a bill that keeps clearing one chamber and dying in the other, often for reasons that have nothing to do with cannabis policy itself, like unrelated riders attached in conference or Senate floor time getting consumed by other priorities. Bipartisan support in committee has not been sufficient to get it across the finish line even once in more than five years of trying.

Extrapolating from these three precedents together, the more plausible near-term path is incremental: more MSOs restructuring into medical-only entities to follow the Trulieve and Glass House playbook over the next two to four years, widening the beachhead company by company rather than all at once. Full adult-use federal legalization, or a banking fix, remains the actual bottleneck for sector-wide Nasdaq and NYSE inclusion. And it has to be said plainly -- no fixed date is knowable here. The pending DEA ruling and the D.C. Circuit outcome are each independent variables that could delay or accelerate this by years, and nobody currently has visibility into either timeline.

The Bull Case and the Bear Case for Mid-2030s Full Listing

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The bull case runs like this: if the broader DEA rescheduling ruling, once it finally issues, comes down favorably and survives the D.C. Circuit challenge intact, more MSOs follow the Trulieve and Glass House restructuring playbook within two to three years. Each additional listing builds a longer track record of compliant cannabis equities trading cleanly on major exchanges, and that track record is exactly the kind of evidence that eventually pressures Nasdaq and index providers like S&P and Russell to revisit their inclusion criteria. There's a real precedent for speed here, too: once Schedule III access proved viable for 280E relief in April 2026, Trulieve moved to list within weeks, not years. Regulatory clarity, once it actually arrives, has historically triggered fast corporate action -- companies don't sit on an open door once they see one.

The bear case is just as grounded. Adult-use sales make up the large majority of revenue for essentially every major MSO operating today. A medical-only carve-out structure puts a hard ceiling on how much of the sector can uplist without abandoning that revenue entirely -- and that ceiling doesn't move unless recreational cannabis itself gets rescheduled or federally legalized, which is a separate and much larger political lift than the April order was. Layered on top of that, SAFE Banking's own track record -- zero floor passage in seven attempts since 2019 -- suggests the banking fix needed for real institutional participation could still be years away even in a scenario where DEA rescheduling resolves favorably on its own.

And then there's the skepticism that isn't about regulation at all. The Death Valley critique holds that stigma and a lack of institutional infrastructure -- specialized custodians, insurance products, sell-side research coverage -- will lag behind the legal gates clearing, regardless of what Washington does next. That's not a theoretical worry; it describes what TRLV and GLAS actually looked like months after their debuts, thinly traded and covered by only a handful of analysts, even after clearing every regulatory hurdle in front of them. Legal eligibility and market readiness are two different problems, and solving the first one doesn't automatically solve the second.

Both cases rest on real evidence, not vibes, and they're not mutually exclusive -- the bull case describes what happens if the gates open, the bear case describes how much friction remains even after they do. The honest position is that both are true conditionally, pointed at different stages of the same process.

Put the pieces next to each other and the mid-2030s timeline looks plausible, but only as a conditional statement, not a forecast with a date attached. It requires at least three independent things to resolve favorably: the broader DEA rescheduling ruling has to land and hold up, the D.C. Circuit has to uphold rather than unwind the April order, and something in the SAFE Banking family has to succeed where seven prior attempts since 2019 have failed. Any one of those three stalling resets the clock for the whole sector, not just the piece it touches directly.

The more useful mental model isn't a single IPO-day event where cannabis arrives on Wall Street all at once. It's a widening medical-only beachhead -- more operators restructuring, more capital slowly getting comfortable with the structure, more of each company's balance sheet pulled onto exchange-compliant footing over time. That's close to how alcohol's path to full commercial normalcy actually unfolded after 1933: not a single day of restored legitimacy, but years of state-by-state and court-by-court resolution that took decades to fully settle.

For anyone tracking this -- investor, operator, or just someone trying to read the industry's direction -- the useful move is watching two concrete signposts rather than guessing at a year. The first is whenever the DEA actually issues its ruling on full rescheduling, and what it says. The second is the next time a SAFE Banking-style bill gets an actual floor vote, in either chamber, rather than dying quietly in committee. Those two events are real, trackable, and falsifiable in a way a calendar guess never is. Everything downstream of them -- Curaleaf and Verano's uplisting attempts, Nasdaq's posture, whether S&P or Russell ever revisit index eligibility -- follows from how those two things resolve, not the other way around.