If anybody is surprised by the following they need their head examined..
Marijuana Moment
Without proactive advocacy for marijuana rescheduling from President Donald Trump personally, the process could stall indefinitely, former officials with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) say.
What’s more, rescheduling proceedings that are currently paused could be suspended altogether if the new administration reinterprets legal arguments about federal drug policy that were made by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) under the Biden administration.
During a virtual event organized by Ohio State University’s (OSU) Drug Enforcement and Policy Center on Tuesday, the officials pulled back the veil on the drug rescheduling process and weighed in on the fate of the proposal to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).
While HHS and the Justice Department backed marijuana rescheduling following the review initiated by former President Joe Biden, that process stalled near the end of his term due to issues in DEA administrative hearings. It’s unclear when those hearings might resume or how DEA might approach it differently under Trump.
Matt Lawrence, a former senior advisor with DEA, said he sees three potential outcomes for rescheduling in the Trump administration.
The first is that DEA does “essentially nothing at all,” kicking the can down the road and continuing to delay the process without explicitly ending it. That might involve administrative updates along the line, but in essence this would be the path of least resistance.
DEA might alternatively do “something really quick” to finalize the rescheduling rule. But Lawrence said he expects that would be incumbent upon Trump making the issue a “presidential priority.”
Supporters of rescheduling got an unwelcome update on that front last week, however, as the White House Office of Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) released a report that outlined the administration’s top drug policy priorities for Trump’s first year of his second term—and it notably did not mention rescheduling or other cannabis reforms.
Lawrence said he could also see a scenario playing out where DEA moves forward with rescheduling, but the agency determines that it needs to separately propose rules to regulate cannabis as a Schedule III drug to meet international treaty obligations.
Ultimately, however, he said “the biggest thing to predict among those three paths is politics” and whether the administration perceives rescheduling as a political motivator or detractor.
“I leave that to political experts to kind of make that prediction,” Lawrence said. “But if it’s not a political priority—or if it’s a mixed political thing, like it’s a win and a loss—then you’ve got to assume it’s going to be the can-kicking approach.”
Patricia Zettler, a former deputy general counsel at HHS separately said at the OSU event that one factor she’s taking into account is the fact that Trump’s pick to run DEA, Terrance Cole, “has a long record of career service at DEA, which I don’t think bodes particularly well for support of rescheduling.”
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