The DEA Is Rescheduling Marijuana Through a Process Its Own Watchdog Says Doesn't Exist on Paper

Clint Kellum runs California’s Department of Cannabis Control, which means it’s his job to tell a multibillion-dollar regulated industry what the rules are. Right now he can’t, because the agency that actually sets the federal rules won’t tell him either. The DEA has shown “any sort of interest” in guiding states through marijuana’s ongoing move from Schedule I to Schedule III, Kellum said this week — meaning, pointedly, that it has shown none — even as the DEA simultaneously demands more paperwork from California’s own medical cannabis program.

You cannot run a reclassification of a Schedule I drug — the government’s most restrictive category, legally equivalent to heroin — as an improvisation, and expect the states and patients underneath it not to get hurt.

Now there’s a federal paper trail confirming the improvisation is real. A Government Accountability Office report published September 23 found that the DEA has no written policies identifying who is responsible for what, or what procedures staff are supposed to follow, when the agency evaluates and reschedules a controlled substance. The FDA, which makes the medical-and-scientific recommendation the DEA is supposed to weigh, doesn’t have documented evaluation procedures either. GAO’s warning wasn’t abstract: without those policies written down anywhere, the agencies risk losing institutional consistency the moment a longtime staffer with the knowledge in their head retires or quits.

That finding lands in the middle of an active rescheduling fight, not a hypothetical one. On September 14, marijuana’s reclassification took effect for FDA-approved cannabis medications and state-licensed medical marijuana products, after the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an attempt by a drug-testing trade group and a pharmaceutical company to block it. Three consolidated lawsuits are still pending, and recreational marijuana remains fully Schedule I. So the country now has a split-status drug — legal-ish for some uses, federally criminal for others — being administered by an agency that, per its own outside watchdog, has never written down how it makes that call.

For the people this actually touches, that’s not a bureaucratic footnote. State regulators like Kellum are trying to tell cannabis businesses how to handle banking, taxes, and interstate shipping rules that shift depending on a schedule status the federal government won’t clarify. Patients using cannabis-derived medications are relying on insurance and pharmacy systems that key off scheduling status too. None of them get to wait for DEA to eventually write the policy GAO says it’s missing — they have payrolls and prescriptions due this month.

Congress isn’t waiting either, just not in a way that helps: Reps. Valerie Foushee and Del. James Moylan introduced separate legislation this month to designate cannabis a “high-risk” product requiring extra ad-verification — a parallel track that has nothing to do with fixing the scheduling process and everything to do with adding another layer on top of it. Nobody in Washington is actually closing the gap GAO just described in writing. They’re building around it.

More on this beat at /newsroom/category/policy-funding and /newsroom/substances/cannabinoids.