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.
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.”
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.”