California recently rolled out its “Get #weedwise” campaign in an effort to stamp out black-market cannabis products in the state. The campaign is an important measure to support the California industry, but the state should be looking elsewhere for sustainable and long-term solutions to this issue: the federal government. The black market can grow for only one reason — the current federal prohibition on interstate cannabis trade. It is an inescapable consequence of supply and demand.

California maintains some of the highest standards in the world for cannabis product purity to ensure patient and adult users are getting safe and known products; people should not have to worry about ingesting hard metals and dangerous pesticides. These regulations are a cost of doing business, along with paying significant taxes to support the state’s regulatory regime — a cost the black market does not bear.

Unlike all other state-licensed business (including the wine industry), California’s cannabis industry cannot ship products across state lines or approach new markets solely because of the federal prohibition. That reduces the California industry’s potential U.S. market from roughly 220 million adults to roughly 25 million adults in California only.

Importantly, it means that businesses cannot reduce prices by scaling up the production of cannabis and reaching a larger volume of the consuming population. This gap in federal law forces legal businesses to compete with black-market operators, which have the unfair advantages of both lower overhead costs per unit and a significantly larger market through their disregard of federal interstate commerce laws. Illegal producers’ costs and prices are largely fixed by their illicit nature; they cannot build large, sustainable farms to reduce per-unit costs because of the inherently unstable nature of their business. Legal businesses in the United States, aided by the protections of the commerce clause, can easily compete with and replace the black market if given the chance. Federal law can easily be changed to reach this goal.

Changing federal interstate commerce laws on cannabis would also give state-legal businesses an advantage over black-market producers in terms of banking access. Current federal law treats legal and illegal businesses as one and the same. But for businesses to raise the capital they need to eliminate the black market, the laws need to allow the financial sector to “touch the plant.” As Dan Stipano recently told American Banker, “Anything short of legalization on the federal level will probably not be enough. ... Financial institutions are caught in the middle.”

Thus, while California gets #weedwise, outdated federal laws that continue to designate cannabis in the Controlled Substances Act effectively encourage growth of the black market by ensuring state-legal businesses cannot compete with it. Congress can solve this problem by exercising its commerce clause powers to allow the interstate trade in cannabis products between legal states rather than preventing it.

It is time for California’s federal delegation to take the lead in correcting this legal conundrum and unify behind interstate cannabis trade. No one disagrees that this business will provide an incredible economic boon to those allowed to engage in it and that the current situation is utterly untenable. For a change, Congress can do something positive that meets all of these goals rather than being a barrier to California’s businesses and their employees.

Randal John Meyer is executive director of the Global Alliance for Cannabis Commerce. He previously served as legislative counsel to U.S. Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky, specializing in judiciary issues such as cannabis legalization and criminal justice reform.