The April order rescheduling DEA-approved medications and state-licensed medical marijuana to Schedule III set off a scramble in the capital markets. Two questions sit at the center of it: Can plant-touching companies finally list on the major U.S. stock exchanges, and will banks finally open their doors to the industry? On the first question, the change has been faster and more concrete than I anticipated. On the second, progress is real but incremental, and the guidance banks said they were waiting for still hasn’t come. (For the groundwork on the capital-access question, see our earlier coverage.)
Uplisting: From “Someday” to a Date on the Calendar
The headline development is real, and it is historic. Trulieve, the Florida-based multistate operator, began trading its subordinate voting shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker TRLV on June 10, 2026. With that listing, Trulieve became the first U.S. plant-touching cannabis company to trade on a major American exchange — not a Canadian listing, not the OTC markets, but the NYSE itself. For an industry that has spent years stranded on the OTCQX and Canadian exchanges, that is a genuine milestone.
Trulieve isn’t alone in positioning for the window. Curaleaf announced a 1-for-3 reverse stock split, effective on or about June 5, 2026, undertaken in consultation with major U.S. exchanges and designed specifically to clear the per-share price thresholds those exchanges and many retail brokerages impose. Verano has signaled similar intentions. The mechanics here are worth understanding: A reverse split consolidates shares to raise the per-share price without changing market capitalization — it creates no new enterprise value. It is a structural step taken to satisfy a listing requirement, not a vote of confidence in the underlying business. But it tells you these companies believe an uplisting window is opening and they want to be ready to step through it.
A word of caution that I’d underscore for any operator or investor reading this. An approved listing for one company is not a blanket policy shift. The April order rescheduled DEA-approved medications and state-licensed medical marijuana. It did not, by its terms, guarantee exchange access, and the NYSE and Nasdaq retain their own listing standards and discretion. Trulieve’s approval is enormously encouraging, but the path for the next company will still run through each exchange’s policies, the SEC’s processes, and the unresolved questions about clearing and custody that have long dogged the sector. “First” is not the same as “routine.”
Banking: The Guidance That Still Hasn’t Come
The banking story is moving more slowly. The core point hasn’t changed: The federal money laundering statutes have not been amended, and Schedule III status reduces the risk to financial institutions without eliminating it. A controlled substance is still a controlled substance.
The single most consequential update on the banking side isn’t really a banking measure at all — it’s tax. Treasury and the IRS announced that they plan to issue guidance on the tax consequences of the final order, acknowledging that rescheduling carries significant positive tax consequences for the medical marijuana industry. With Section 280E no longer disallowing ordinary deductions for state-licensed medical operators, those businesses become dramatically more creditworthy borrowers: cash flow improves, financial statements normalize, and underwriting gets simpler. The final order even encouraged Treasury to consider retrospective 280E relief, though nothing on that front is settled. Better-looking borrowers are, indirectly, the most tangible banking benefit rescheduling has delivered so far.
What hasn’t arrived is the thing banks actually told us they were waiting for: updated FinCEN guidance built for the Schedule III world. The 2014 FinCEN framework — the Cole Memo-era guidance, with its Marijuana Limited, Marijuana Priority, and Marijuana Termination SAR categories — technically remains in full effect. It was constructed around the assumption that all marijuana commerce was inherently suspect because the substance sat on Schedule I. That premise no longer describes qualifying medical activity, yet the guidance still governs, and banks are still filing cannabis-specific SARs and running enhanced due diligence accordingly. Until FinCEN updates that framework, many compliance officers will keep waiting before meaningfully expanding cannabis banking services.
And the legislative safe harbor still isn’t there. The SAFE/SAFER Banking Act has not passed Congress, and rescheduling is not a substitute for it. A separate bill, the CLIMB Act, was reintroduced in March 2026, and would, among other things, create a safe harbor in the Securities Exchange Act for national exchanges listing cannabis-related businesses — which would address the uplisting question more directly than rescheduling alone. But “introduced” and “enacted” are very different words.
The Two-Tier Market Is Now Visible in the Stock Ticker
Here is what ties the two stories together. Everything good that has happened — the uplisting approvals, the 280E relief, the warming bank interest — flows to state-licensed medical operators. Adult-use operators remain right where they were: Schedule I, no federal authorization, the same banking desert. Because the vast majority of large multistate operators run both medical and adult-use lines, they now face a genuinely thorny problem: how to segregate the Schedule III medical side from the Schedule I adult-use side for purposes of banking, investment, and a public listing. That is not theoretical. It is an expensive, ongoing compliance and accounting question, and the companies racing to uplist are the very ones who will have to answer it most carefully. The broader DEA hearing scheduled to begin June 29, 2026, could narrow this divide if it extends Schedule III to all marijuana — but that proceeding is just getting underway, and its outcome is not foreordained.
The Bottom Line
The medical marijuana capital markets are warmer than they’ve ever been, but not yet at full temperature. The exchange door has opened faster than the banking system has adapted: A company could be trading on the NYSE within days, while the FinCEN guidance banks asked for still hasn’t come, the SAFER Banking Act still hasn’t passed, and the medical/adult-use split is now etched into who gets to list and who doesn’t. The difference between what a law says and what a law does is where the real work lives — and on the financial side, the work is very much still underway. Bradley’s Cannabis Industry team will keep tracking it here at Budding Trends as the picture develops.
Thanks for stopping by.
