Justice department is pushing to pursue simple possession cases, and ICE uses cannabis offenses to speed deportation
Experts say Donald Trump’s recent executive order on cannabis rescheduling is unlikely to make a meaningful difference for those most vulnerable to cannabis-related criminal charges, which the president has ramped up in various ways during his second term.
Under the Biden administration, the Department of Health and Human Services recommended that cannabis be removed from schedule I, a category reserved for substances with “no accepted medical use”, to schedule III, a category that includes substances eligible for FDA approval as medications. Last month, Trump urged the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, to speed up the process in his executive order, citing 2023 FDA findings supporting cannabis’s potential “to treat anorexia related to a medical condition, nausea and vomiting, and pain”.
Still, the executive order has not yet materialized into a change in policy. While the attorney general has discretion to expedite the rescheduling process, Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University and executive director of the Drug Enforcement Policy Center, said: “There’s already pushback on Capitol Hill from a variety of folks about doing it in this kind of expedited way, notwithstanding that that seems to be what the president ordered.”
That pushback is coming from congressional Republicans who do not want cannabis to be rescheduled, and advocates who want cannabis reform to go further and remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) altogether and place it in the same category as alcohol and tobacco, Berman explained.
Cat Packer, director of drug markets and legal regulation at the Drug Policy Alliance, said that rescheduling will not reduce criminal penalties for cannabis because “under the CSA, marijuana is special, and marijuana has specific penalties that are not dependent on whatever schedule marijuana is on”, so even if it got moved to schedule V, which includes products such as cough syrup with codeine, formulations of cannabis that have not been FDA-approved would still be just as criminalized.
On paper, rescheduling “wouldn’t make any formal difference”, Berman said, echoing Packer.
“Though I think it’s important not to lose sight of the importance of informality. We have seen across the country significant reductions in the number of people arrested for cannabis offenses, even in states where the law hasn’t changed at all. And so the reality is, nationwide, reforms, changes in culture and attitudes always trickle down to enforcement in a variety of ways,” Berman said.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/12/trump-cannabis-executive-order-reschedule
