Parabola Center is a nonprofit education and research center focused on person-first cannabis policy. We work to legalize cannabis in a way that promotes racial and economic justice and prevents cannabis monopolies.

We're a team of attorneys, public health researchers, drug policy experts, entrepreneurs, and small business owners. Cannabis policy is complex, and that complexity tends to favor whoever can afford the lawyers and lobbyists to navigate it. We produce research, model legislation, and policy resources that anyone can use, especially consumers, workers, small businesses, and the communities most harmed by the war on drugs, and we provide live trainings.

You'll find our work in op-eds for places like the Boston Globe and High Times, in academic papers on social equity and monopoly prevention, and in our federal Model Plan for legalization. We also publish The Parabola Papers, our Substack. Our goal is the same across the board: make expertise accessible so the people who built the legalization movement aren't shut out of writing what comes next.

Underneath the cannabis work is a bigger idea. When a new industry is born, its rules get written fast, usually by a handful of people who can afford to be in the room, and once those rules harden, they almost never get undone. That's how a market meant for everyone quietly becomes a market for a few. We learned to fight that in cannabis, in real time, in states that had already made the mistakes. Now the same playbook is running in technology and AI, and it'll run in whatever comes after. Emerging industries shouldn't mean emerging monopolies, and we go where that fight is before the rules are set.

We don't take money from Big Tobacco, Big Tech, or the marijuana conglomerates. That's the only way to stay in these fights, honestly, and it's why we depend on support from people like you.

Donations help us put expertise into the hands of the people who need it most. They fund public health research on how legalization is actually affecting people, toolkits that small businesses and advocates can use in their own fights, and briefs that reach legislators as bills are being written.

If you want cannabis and other emerging industries to serve communities instead of boardrooms, you can help us keep doing this work.

Support Parabola Center