The DEA Reconvenes a Hearing on a Decision Already Made

The DEA’s cannabis rescheduling hearing goes back into session today at the agency’s Arlington, Virginia headquarters, resuming after a July 4th recess in a proceeding that started June 29 and runs through July 15. Physicians will testify on medical benefit. An FDA official will walk through the review process. Nebraska, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, and groups like Smart Approaches to Marijuana will argue the other side.

Here’s the thing nobody’s saying out loud: the outcome this hearing is supposedly deciding already happened.

On April 23, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order immediately moving FDA-approved marijuana products and state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III. Schedule I is the government’s classification for drugs with “no accepted medical use” and the highest abuse potential — the box that has strangled cannabis research funding and forced state-legal dispensaries to pay punishing federal taxes under IRS code 280E because they’re trafficking a Schedule I substance. Schedule III means accepted medical use with moderate dependence potential, the same tier as ketamine and anabolic steroids — easier research access, normal business tax treatment, but still federally regulated, still requiring a prescription pathway, not legalization.

So the reclassification is done. This hearing — with its dueling witnesses, its testimony that cannabis “could not have passed” the FDA’s old medical-value test, its testimony comparing cannabis withdrawal favorably to opioid withdrawal — is litigating a verdict the Acting AG already delivered. That’s not how evidentiary process is supposed to work, and it should worry anyone who cares about the DEA’s rulemaking having actual integrity, regardless of which side of rescheduling they’re on.

What’s genuinely worth reading from the testimony transcripts: a chronic lower-back-pain study showing patients on inhaled cannabis dropped opioid use from 100% to 4.6% over five years. That’s the kind of substitution data that should drive scheduling decisions — not politics, not federalism fights with Nebraska.

Meanwhile, watch Arizona for what rescheduling won’t fix. The state’s adult-use market is oversupplied, and marijuana tax revenue has cratered — $289 million in 2024, $283 million in 2025, just $182 million so far this fiscal year. A repeal campaign against the state’s legalization law got far enough that organizer Sean Noble had to publicly abandon it in May. Schedule III does nothing about market saturation, nothing about tax collapse, nothing about the underage-marketing concerns that killed that repeal push. It changes what box a drug sits in at the federal level. For the treatment field, that’s a research and banking story, not a demand story.

The hearing will run its two more weeks. The decision it’s deciding won’t move.