Trulieve becomes the first U.S. cannabis company to trade on the NYSE on June 10. To get through the door, it carved the recreational weed out of the company entirely.
Wall Street is letting in a U.S. weed company for the first time. Just not the recreational side of it.
Florida-based Trulieve said on June 5 that it will become the first U.S. plant-touching cannabis operator to list on a major American exchange. Canadian producers have traded on the Nasdaq and NYSE for years, as long as they keep their weed out of the U.S. No American operator that actually sells the plant here had cracked a senior U.S. exchange until now. Trulieve’s shares begin trading on the NYSE on June 10 under the ticker TRLV. The over-the-counter shares most investors have been stuck with, TCNNF, jumped about 20% on the news and are up roughly 42% this year.
Here is the part that the milestone headlines skate past. To qualify, Trulieve did not bring its whole business to the NYSE. It carved its recreational operations out into a separate entity called Harvest Enterprises and brought in an outside investor, Whitley Holding, with about $14.8 million for a 10% voting stake, enough to make the split real under accounting rules. What lists on the NYSE is the medical-only company. The adult-use weed that half the country can buy in a dispensary stays outside, in a box that converts back to Trulieve only if and when federal rules let recreational operators in.
Trulieve could pull this off because of what it owns. The company runs 206 medical dispensaries and controls as much as 40% of Florida’s medical market by some estimates, so the medical business stands on its own as an investment even with the recreational revenue stripped out.
The split is not just about exchange rules. It is also a tax play. A 1970s IRS provision known as 280E bars companies that sell Schedule I or II drugs from taking normal business deductions, which can push a cannabis operator’s effective tax rate as high as 70% against the standard 21%. The medical entity, now riding the reclassification, escapes that. The recreational side, still Schedule I, does not.
The Door Opened In April
None of this was possible a year ago. The Justice Department issued a final order in April to reclassify state-licensed medical cannabis to Schedule III, acting on an executive order Trump signed in December. That single move opened the exchange and the tax door at once, but only for the medical side. The DEA holds a hearing on June 29 to decide whether the reclassification should include recreational cannabis, too.
CEO Kim Rivers, who lobbied the administration hard for the change after Trulieve poured $150 million into a failed 2024 Florida legalization push, did not hide who she was thanking. “Common sense action by President Trump to reclassify medical marijuana to Schedule III paved the way for this historic milestone,” she said in a statement.
The rest of the industry is already sprinting. Curaleaf and Verano announced reverse stock splits this week to meet the NYSE’s minimum share price and follow Trulieve up. Robinhood added Trulieve, Green Thumb and Curaleaf to its platform. TerrAscend CEO Jason Wild called a shareholder meeting and said the uplisting question is “no longer a question of if. It’s a question of when.”
A Second Green Rush. Maybe?
If the June 29 hearing goes the industry’s way, this is the first inkling of a second green rush, with retail investors who have waited years for a real listing already pushing Trulieve to the top of WallStreetBets. Worth remembering how the first one ended, though. Canada’s Tilray, the poster child of the 2018 boom, has fallen more than 99% from its all-time high. A bell at the NYSE is a milestone, not a guarantee.
