“There are still people in jail right now, for stuff that people are boasting about doing online currently,” Rosario Dawson says in a video interview.

She has been arguing about cannabis since before there was an industry to argue with. Her parents grew it on a fire escape in New York. She later took a board seat at a THC beverage company and narrated a documentary about the people legalization forgot. Ask her where the fight stands now and she goes straight past the market, to the gap between who the War on Drugs punished and who the legal industry rewarded. “They weren’t left out of it when penalization was more of the norm,” she says. “But now they're being left out.”

The disparity she describes has outlived every milestone that was supposed to end it. Medical cannabis moved from Schedule I to Schedule III in April , while adult-use stayed Schedule I. President Joe Biden pardoned federal simple-possession offenses in 2022 and 2023 , though the pardons freed no one from prison, since almost no one is held federally on simple possession alone . A series of state pardons and expungements followed, most of them clearing records rather than opening cells. How many people remain incarcerated on cannabis charges is unknown: the Last Prisoner Project , which works to free them, says no reliable nationwide count exists, and its long-cited figure of 40,000 rests on federal data now two decades old.

That is the record Dawson is now invoking on behalf of a drink. She is one of six public figures in “Real Drinkers,” a campaign from the THC beverage maker Cann, alongside NBA champion Dwyane Wade, actor Zosia Mamet, filmmaker Lake Bell, comedian Trevor Wallace and author Cameron Oaks Rogers. None was paid to participate, according to Cann, but none is disinterested. The company confirmed that Wade, Dawson, Wallace and Rogers are investors and that Mamet and Bell are shareholders. Dawson has also served on Cann’s board for more than four years.

What they are lending their names to is a fight against a clock.

The deadline is real, and it is close. The spending deal that reopened the federal government in November 2025 carried a provision, unrelated to the shutdown, that redefines legal hemp and caps finished products at 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container , a fraction of what any intoxicating drink contains. A standard Cann has two milligrams. When it takes effect on November 12, most of the hemp beverage category, along with the gummies, vapes and tinctures beside it, becomes federally illegal unless Congress writes a new framework first. Overnight, a category that spread into gas stations, liquor stores and grocery chains would lose its legal footing, and the drinks Cann sells at Target and Circle K would have to come off the shelves. The broader hemp marketplace contributes about $30 billion to the U.S. economy, according to the office of Rep. Andy Barr, a Kentucky Republican .

This is where her own argument starts to press on her. Hemp beverages reached national scale by selling outside the licensed marijuana system, the same system that taxes and constrains the legacy and social equity operators Dawson has spent years amplifying. If the campaign works and the category survives, does that repair anything for them, or does it build a second market on top of the one that already left them out?

Dawson joined Cann’s board more than four years ago, and describes the role as advocacy rather than endorsement. “I’ve worked with them in more of a capacity of trying to bring attention to certain ills of the War on Drugs, highlight other people in the community and try to right some wrongs,” she says.

The clearest product of that work is a documentary. “Kiss My Grass,” a short film Dawson narrated and executive produced, premiered at the Tribeca Festival in 2025. She describes it as being “about Black women and cannabis, and how challenging it is for people of color and women, and people who are legacy folks to break through in the industry and raise funds and find success.”

Her case starts with a turn she has watched happen. “There’s been such a pivot over these decades,” she says. “Now there’s a lot of money in the space, a lot of options and opportunity, and there's just a lot of folks who are being left out of it. And they weren't left out of it when penalization was more of the norm. But now they're being left out.”

She calls the result a “massive disparity” in an industry that “has just not really come to terms with what the War on Drugs has done.” She traces it to incentives rather than intent: “Each state is kind of doing it differently, and people are being pushed maybe to have dispensaries versus products versus this.” On the federal fight, she is blunter about what drives it. “There's a lot of money.”

For her, the disparity is not abstract. “I think that people should be released out of jail who’ve been wrongly put in there for now stuff that people are able to walk down the street and do,” she says.

Asked how to reconcile the hemp market with the licensed one, where social equity applicants carry heavier tax and licensing burdens, Dawson does not claim the answer. She hands it to Amber Senter, co-founder of the Oakland nonprofit Supernova Women, whom she names unprompted. “These are the communities that have been hard hit, and they know how that has affected them, and they have ideas for how to move forward,” Dawson says. “My only interest has been to help amplify that as much as possible and get the mic in front of them. Because I think it’s critical that their voices be heard, and they've been silenced too long.”

Whether saving hemp beverages helps those operators or entrenches a cheaper parallel market beside the one they are stuck in is the question the campaign leaves open.

The provision Dawson is fighting was not debated on its own. It rode into law on the deal that ended the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, and Jake Bullock, Cann’s co-founder and CEO, describes the industry as having been handed an ultimatum. “Folks were basically forced to accept this effective hemp ban in order to get the government back open,” he says.

He traces the language to a coalition with little else in common: prohibitionists, the alcohol industry and parts of the licensed marijuana industry. On alcohol’s motive, he grants the premise and disputes the diagnosis. Their argument, as he puts it, is “you’re directly competing with us, and young people aren't drinking as much, they're drinking THC drinks instead, and that's what's hurting our sales.” His answer: “Partly true. There's a lot else that's going on there with alcohol and why it's down or has been down for almost five years now.”

On the licensed operators, he concedes more than the campaign’s framing suggests. The products lawmakers targeted, he says, were “highly intoxicating, almost always synthetic candies” sold in convenience stores and packaged to appeal to kids. “These are things like Skittles spelled with a Z. 300 milligrams of synthetic Delta-8 THC in them,” he says. “Those products, we don’t believe should be legal. They wouldn't be legal in any dispensary market in the country, so why are they legal in a convenience store in North Carolina?”

That is the distinction the company is trying to hold: dose, not category. Cann’s drinks run from one to 10 milligrams, and Bullock says the original two-milligram formulation remains its best seller, chosen, he says, because “that’s about what the body metabolizes in one hour.” He argues those belong beside beer, and that a 170-milligram bottle sold in a liquor store does not. “No one should be walking out of a convenience store with 100 milligrams of THC,” he says. “So, the marijuana folks are right about that.”

If the ban takes effect unchanged, the shelves clear fast, and Bullock says the alcohol supply chain will do it for the government. “Compliance is built into the system,” he says. “Those retailers will pull us from the shelves the second it becomes illegal. Distributors are already cutting back their purchasing of our products because they don’t want to have anything in their warehouse that’s illegal on November 13th.” Cann has been through smaller versions of this in California, Massachusetts and Arizona. What worries him is the demand that does not disappear with the supply. “They're going to go find it from illicit sources,” he says.

Cann is not the only company with a countdown running. The brands Target stocked when it opened the category include Wynk, Trail Magic, Stigma, Gigli, Wyld and Surly, all of them selling drinks that clear the incoming cap by an order of magnitude. Delta-9 THC beverage sales rose 148% year over year in the 52 weeks ending February 22, 2026, according to SPINS natural channel data. Total Wine, Sprouts and Circle K have all expanded their THC sets in states where the products remain legal. The Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America and the National Restaurant Association have both called on Congress to resolve the question before the deadline.

The stranger signal is that the money kept moving anyway. Target expanded hemp THC drinks to more than 300 stores across Florida, Texas and Illinois in May, six months before a federal change that could erase most of the inventory, and BevNET reported that the retailer is expected to mark the category down in October if Washington has not acted by then. July brought a wave of new bets : B-Real took a hemp gummy multistate, comedian and Jackass cast member Rachel Wolfson launched a hemp flower and edible line, and Cann released its first zero-THC drinks, a hedge against its own core product becoming illegal.

Companies do not launch into a category they expect to disappear. What they are betting on is that a market this visible, sold at this scale, in this many red and blue states, is harder to switch off in November than it was to outlaw in a shutdown deal nobody read.

Dawson frames the same stakes as a question of access. To pull the category, she says, “would be really unfortunate, because I’ve seen a lot of the benefits,” from the socially anxious and the sober-curious to people whose ailments leave them few other options.

Famous Faces, Real Customers

Real Drinkers opens on a title card reading “These aren’t actors,” then cuts to Dwyane Wade. Zosia Mamet says “I’m an actor.” Lake Bell says “I’m a Cann drinker." A Navy veteran from Irvine, California, named Kevin Douglas Stiles talks about service. The reel closes on “Cann isn’t a beverage, it’s a movement” and “Don't ban Cann.”

The celebrities are the delivery mechanism, not the origin. Bullock says the campaign began with a survey emailed to customers, and the responses were meant for lobbying meetings, not for film. The plan was to collect customer testimonials the company could use in Washington. What came back reframed the project. “Cann saved my marriage.” “I’m slower to snap at my kids.” A wife describing a husband with severe PTSD after two decades in the Navy.

His theory of the problem is a recognition gap in Congress. “People didn’t know, and especially elected officials, they didn’t know who the Cann drinker was,” he says. “They had an idea in their head of largely the kid that's going into a gas station to buy some sort of synthetic THC product. And that's not our customer.” He describes that customer as high-income, stressed and almost always a parent.

The distinction the campaign draws between paid endorsement and authentic fandom is real, and it is narrower than it sounds. No participant received a fee. Every one of the named celebrities holds equity in the company whose product the campaign is defending, a structure that predates the fight over the November cutoff. Bullock says Cann has worked with more than 40 celebrity investors since launch, a marketing workaround for a category that cannot advertise through conventional channels. “Real Drinkers” points that same roster at Congress.

Dawson’s own framing of why it matters is quieter than the reel's. What she keeps seeing, she says, is “this happiness that they have an option of something different that they never had an option to before.”

The legislative answer arrived the same week as the campaign. On July 22, Reps. Angie Craig, a Minnesota Democrat, and Andy Barr, a Kentucky Republican, introduced the Lawful Hemp Protection Act , which would replace the November cutoff with a framework modeled on how the government already regulates alcohol and tobacco, with age limits, testing, taxes, warning labels and a ban on synthetic cannabinoids. The bill is backed by the Hemp Industry and Farmers of America, the U.S. Hemp Roundtable and the Hemp Beverage Alliance, and a Senate companion is expected. Barr’s office told The Hill the legislation has White House approval; a White House official did not confirm that, pointing instead to a prior Trump executive order.

Bullock says Cann worked with both offices for months. He is candid that the bill is not what he would have written alone. “Every bill, I could go down and I could give you a list of things I would change,” he says. He’d have drawn the potency line tighter than this one does. What he wants credited is the direction. “This is the clearest sign yet that the hemp beverage industry wants to be regulated. We want rules. What we're fighting for here is regulation. We want to get rid of the bad actors.”

Asked what good regulation looks like, he starts with the uncontroversial: 21-plus, age verification, accurate labels, third-party testing, certificates of analysis. Then the two he treats as tests of good faith. No synthetics, “the alphabet soup of HHC, THCO.” And potency caps. “The idea that you can have these high potency products, that is not something that we should entertain as part of this process.”

Dawson’s version of the same answer is shorter and lands in the same place. “When I see that stuff is being marketed to look like children’s products, clearly that is problematic,” she says. “I think that there should be more warning labels. I think that there should be age limits. These are all kind of normal things that we’ve come to accept on everything from being able to drive a car, to drink, to smoke. We're not reinventing the wheel here. It is a new category, but it's not necessarily a new space.”

What she rejects is the alternative. “I don’t think that trying to just prevent the category from existing at all is going to somehow make people more responsible or somehow make the world less risky,” she says.

“There’s a lot of repair that needs to happen,” Dawson says. Saving a two-milligram drink is within reach. The repair she keeps returning to is not.