The DEA Rescheduling Hearing Excluded the People It Was About — Don’t Call the Outcome Legitimate Yet

Today is the deadline DEA Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek Julius set for post-hearing briefs and transcript corrections, closing the record on an 11-day rescheduling hearing that wrapped July 15 without a single camera in the room.

A process this closed doesn’t earn the outcome it produces, whichever way it breaks.

Only designated participants got a seat, and reform advocates who wanted to argue for moving cannabis off Schedule I were not among them. The hearing was not livestreamed, despite earlier assurances that it would be. The people whose access to treatment, employment, housing, and criminal records turn on this decision watched from outside a room they weren’t allowed into, while a docket built mostly from rescheduling opponents shaped the record Judge Julius will now summarize. Multiple lawsuits challenging the process are still pending, which tells you the objection isn’t fringe — it’s structural.

Here’s the part that should bother supporters of rescheduling as much as opponents: none of this actually decides anything. Judge Julius doesn’t reschedule marijuana. He writes a recommendation. It goes to DEA Administrator Terrance Cole, a single political appointee, who can accept it, shred it, or sit on it. Two years, eleven hearing days, a closed room, and a contested transcript all funnel into one person’s discretion. That’s not administrative process working as designed — it’s a stalling ritual with the mechanics of due process and none of its openness.

The stakes of getting this wrong keep growing on both sides. New research flagged in Marijuana Moment’s Sunday roundup found that state-level legalization increased agricultural employment by roughly 9% in adopting states, with minimal wage disruption — a labor-market finding that cuts directly against the crime-and-harm framing rescheduling opponents leaned on inside that closed hearing room. If the people making the case against rescheduling never had to answer data like that in open argument, the record Julius is summarizing was thin by design, not by accident.

None of this means Schedule III is the right call, or that Schedule I should stay put. It means the process generating that answer forfeited the credibility to make it feel settled. A recommendation built on a hearing the public couldn’t watch, decided by participants opponents dominated, handed to one appointee for a final call — that’s not a verdict. It’s a procedural fig leaf, and everyone downstream of it, patients and providers included, should treat it that way until Terrance Cole’s signature actually lands on something.