The pro-pot movement got its biggest federal policy win Thursday when President Trump removed marijuana from the list of most-restricted drugs and rescheduled it to allow for expanded medical research and applications.
Marijuana will be moved from a Schedule I drug, like heroin, to a Schedule III drug, like Tylenol with codeine, under the Controlled Substances Act. It’s a win for cannabis advocates who were hoping for such results under President Biden.
Mr. Trump said his move was something “having to do with common sense.”
“We have people begging for me to do this, people that are in great pain,” Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office. “For decades, this action has been requested by American patients suffering from extreme pain, incurable diseases, aggressive cancer, seizure disorders, neurological problems and more, including numerous veterans with service-related injuries and older Americans who live with chronic medical problems and severely degrade their quality of life.
“I think I probably have received more phone calls on this, on doing what we’re doing,” he said.
Sidestepping the objections of some Republican lawmakers and conservative groups, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t think I received any calls on the other side of it.”
The president emphasized that his action does not legalize marijuana federally for recreational use, but the executive order will focus on increasing medical research for medical marijuana and cannabidiol, or CBD.
“The president is very focused on the potential medical benefits, and he has directed a commonsense approach that will start working to improve the medical marijuana and CBD research to better inform patients and doctors,” a senior administration official said.
The presidential order directs the attorney general to expedite the rescheduling and directs the White House deputy chief of staff for legislative, political and public affairs to work with Congress to allow Americans access to products containing CBD, except those that could pose health risks.
It also calls for the health and human services secretary to focus on researching and improving access to hemp-derived CBD products.
“We will have answers very soon,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said. “This will finally allow us to study this issue and to answer these questions for the American people.”
The Biden administration proposed a similar move but did not implement it before leaving office. Mr. Biden did, however, pardon thousands of people who were convicted of use and possession of marijuana.
Morgan Fox, political director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said that even though the process was started under Mr. Biden, “we’re not exactly sure exactly when and how that’s going to progress, whether that’s going to be in the immediate future or a little bit further down the road.”
“And, we also expect, as we expected under the Biden administration, that there will probably be legal challenges to it, so this change in scheduling could actually take quite some time,” he said.
However, he said, “a move to Schedule III is validation of what millions of patients and consumers and thousands of researchers and medical professionals have known for a long time — that cannabis does have medical value and that it does not have a high potential for abuse, especially when compared to drugs like alcohol and tobacco that aren’t even on the schedule.”
Mr. Trump first floated the idea of rescheduling marijuana in August. He said the issue was complicated because “some people like it, some people hate it.”
A group of 22 Republican senators wrote a letter to the president Wednesday, asking him to uphold the drug’s Schedule I classification. They said reclassifying marijuana will “undermine your strong efforts to Make America Great Again and to usher in America’s next economic Golden Age.”
“We cannot re-industrialize America if we encourage marijuana use. America’s workplace and America’s roads are endangered by marijuana use,” they wrote.
CatholicVote said cannabis is “not medicine. It’s a public health risk.” The conservative advocacy group called for people to email Mr. Trump through its website.
A Gallup poll from last month found that 64% of U.S. adults think marijuana use should be legal. Twenty-four states have legalized marijuana for recreational use, and 40 states have authorized some kind of medical marijuana program.
The Marijuana Policy Project said Mr. Trump’s order doesn’t go far enough.
“While MPP welcomes the president’s proposal to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III, neither the plant itself nor its naturally occurring component cannabinoids belong on the schedule at all,” Executive Director Adam J. Smith said in a statement.
Mr. Smith said he hopes the order promotes medical research and healthy patients, but “it is only a step. It is long past time to de-schedule cannabis entirely and end nearly a century of failed prohibition.”
The Controlled Substances Act says a Schedule I substance has no accepted medical uses and a high likelihood of abuse, but a Schedule III substance has accepted medical uses and a lower potential for abuse.
The order would not change the federal criminal penalties or legality of recreational marijuana use. The senior administration official declined to say whether the president plans to legalize recreational use.
“What we’d really like to see the president do is expand upon the pardons that took place during the Biden administration, as well as federally decriminalize cannabis, and leave criminalization of cannabis up to the few states that still want to pursue that failed strategy,” Mr. Fox said.
He said opposition to the rescheduling stems from a lack of understanding of Schedule III and is an “outdated stigmatization of cannabis and lack of understanding of what the research really says about it.”
Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Mr. Trump said on Truth Social that it was “time to end needless arrests and incarcerations of adults for small amounts of marijuana for personal use” and that he was voting yes on a Florida ballot initiative that would have legalized pot in the state. The proposal failed.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, said the president’s order was “a step in the right direction, but more work must be done to decriminalize cannabis, ease overly restrictive banking regulations that stall industry progress in states where it is legal, and rectify the harms done by the War on Drugs.”
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