“You cannot correct disinformation without studying its first successful deployment. Cannabis prohibition is that blueprint.” — Madicyn Marinaro
Disinformation is rarely sustained by belief alone. It persists because it is economically rewarded. CCAT approaches disinformation as a market condition rather than a cultural or political anomaly.
Cannabis offers the clearest historical control case available: a century-long, legally enforced disinformation system. By studying this prototype, CCAT identifies how disinformation becomes structurally profitable. And how those incentives can be reversed.
CCAT defines transparency standards and reduces exposure to distortion-dependent markets by aligning capital with verifiable audiences, stable narratives, and ethical information environments.
Disinformation Prototype
Cannabis as a controlled case of incentive-driven distortion.
Baseline Conditions
Lawful cannabis market · legitimate demand · verifiable audiences
Observed Overlay
Persistent risk narratives · asymmetric enforcement · capital exclusion mechanisms
Information Environment
Algorithmic suppression · selective risk framing
Market Effect
Distortion rewarded · volatility normalized · legitimacy penalized
CCAT Function
Identify incentive origin · document distortion premium · model corrective alignment
“When incentives outlive evidence, distortion becomes structural.”
— CCAT research note
The Disinformation Blueprint
CCAT’s research examines cannabis prohibition as the longest-running and most economically successful disinformation system in modern history.
Rather than treating cannabis as a special case, we study it as a blueprint — a fully developed example of how fear-based narratives shape law, markets, media, and capital flows over time.
By making these incentive dynamics visible, CCAT allows institutions to recognize where disinformation introduces hidden risk — and how alignment with transparency reduces exposure to it.
Cannabis prohibition demonstrates how a false narrative can outlive evidence, reform, and legalization. Truth is so structurally deincentivized that it becomes functionally indistinguishable from falsehood within the existing profit system.
CCAT’s market analysis shows that distortion generates short-term advantage while embedding long-term instability and capital risk.
CCAT tests its findings in live markets. Through U.S. Weed Channel, we observe what happens when transparency competes with distortion.
When distortion is translated into risk, its advantage collapses. CCAT converts disinformation from a profitable strategy into a measurable liability — enabling aligned institutions to reduce exposure by shifting capital toward transparent, stable information environments.
State change: distortion → risk · transparency → stability
CCAT studies disinformation as a constructed economic system and intervenes at the incentive level where it actually operates.
Our method begins with a simple premise:
disinformation does not persist because people believe it — it persists because
systems are structurally rewarded for sustaining it.
Using cannabis prohibition as the prototype, CCAT applies a four-stage method that moves from diagnosis to correction.
Identify the Prototype
Origin
Cannabis prohibition as the first large-scale system to prove that disinformation could be sustained, enforced, and monetized across generations.
Incentive Structure
Mechanism
Fear → enforcement → scarcity → volatility → profit. CCAT maps how these forces reinforce one another through law, media, and capital allocation.
Live Market Correction
Intervention
Through U.S. Weed Channel, CCAT implements its framework in live advertising and media markets, redirecting capital toward transparent, stable systems.
Transferable Logic
Replication
The outcome is not a cannabis solution — but a reusable diagnostic framework for any sector where disinformation is economically rewarded.
CCAT does not counter disinformation by correcting narratives — but by altering the economic conditions under which distortion remains viable.
Disinformation is not defeated by individual actors acting alone. It is corrected when institutions coordinate around transparency, incentive alignment, and shared refusal to profit from distortion. CCAT exists to set the conditions for that coordination.