President Donald Trump signed an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House on Thursday that will reschedule cannabis from a Schedule 1 drug to a Schedule III drug. The move will not legalize marijuana at the federal level, but it may allow for more money to be allocated to research into medical uses for the drug.
Schedule 1 drugs have accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and include drugs like heroin, LSD, and ecstasy. Schedule III drugs are considered to have a “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence,” based on the DEA’s assessment, and include Tylenol with codeine, ketamine, and anabolic steroids. Testosterone is also a Schedule III drug, and an FDA panel recently recommended dropping its classification altogether for testosterone replacement therapy.
Rescheduling cannabis will also reduce the tax burden for businesses that cultivate and sell the drug because some federal tax deductions are prohibited for any entity that sells Schedule 1 drugs, according to CBS News. Twenty-four states have legalized cannabis for recreational use, and 39 currently allow medical marijuana sales.
Trump was asked by a reporter on Thursday about why he was reclassifying cannabis, and the president cited polling that said 82% of Americans support the change. “This reclassification order will make it far easier to conduct marijuana-related medical research, allowing us to study benefits and potential dangers and future treatments,” Trump said while reading from a paper on his desk.
Trump was joined by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Mehmet Oz, the head of Medicaid and Medicare, for the Oval Office ceremony. Doctors in white lab coats also surrounded Trump to heap praise on him, as often happens during these livestreamed productions.
Trump is extremely sensitive to public polling and the perception of his administration’s performance. The president’s approval has fallen to 38%, a new low, according to NPR, and that was clearly on his mind Wednesday night when he delivered a televised address that mostly consisted of claims that he has done great this year.
President Joe Biden investigated rescheduling cannabis in 2022 and announced he would do just that in 2024, but he tried to get it done through the U.S. Department of Justice and the DEA’s normal rulemaking procedures, which hit significant roadblocks. Little did Biden know that presidents can just sign executive orders to get whatever they want. (Not to mention tear down a third of the White House if they get the itch to build something new.) Technically, the DEA still needs to finalize Trump’s executive order, the text of which hasn’t yet been made public.
Marijuana was classified as a Schedule I drug in 1970 under President Richard Nixon, when the scheduling system was first created in the United States. Nixon launched the so-called War on Drugs in 1971, which was largely a smokescreen to target racial minorities, marginalized groups, and left-wing political opponents. Nixon privately called marijuana “not particularly dangerous” in a recording only discovered in 2024, and one of the president’s top men admitted in an interview decades later that the goal was to actually fight against Americans with a flimsy pretext.
Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, gave an interview in the mid-1990s that laid it all out, though it wouldn’t be quoted in Harper’s magazine until 2016.
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” said Ehrlichman, who died in 1999.
“We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Read the full article here
