Trump administration considers loosening up on marijuana

Tom Reynolds, the president of His Way, a residential addiction recovery program based in Huntsville, Ala., has met plenty of men with dangerous drug habits. But of the hundreds who go through his program, none started out as a meth or heroin addict, he says. Instead, they developed their addictions after experimenting with alcohol and marijuana during their teen years.

“It’s a gateway into the harder drugs, while at the same time, people enter the illusion that marijuana is not a hard drug,” said Reynolds.

That’s why Reynolds is worried about an effort by lawmakers and the Trump administration to potentially reclassify marijuana’s legal status, removing some of the restrictions surrounding the drug’s use. Reynolds is concerned such a move would send the wrong message. “When you reschedule it, you kind of create the impression that it’s not as harmful,” he said. “And I think it’s a false impression.”

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) currently separates drugs into five categories with varying levels of restrictions. Schedule I is reserved for the most dangerous substances like heroin, ecstasy, and LSD. The category also includes marijuana.

Last week, the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee advanced a bill that would prevent the Department of Justice from using federal funds to reschedule cannabis. Some groups say the federal government should downgrade marijuana to a less stringent category, since most states already permit marijuana use to some extent. But others warn that marijuana qualifies as a dangerous drug, arguing that less restrictive policies could be devastating.

In 1996, California became the first state to permit marijuana for medical purposes. Colorado in 2014 became the first to permit the sale of recreational marijuana.

Today, 40 states allow the use of marijuana for medical reasons, 24 for recreational purposes. Laws about cannabis possession vary widely: Adult residents of Washington, D.C., can’t buy weed, but they can possess up to 2 ounces of it or grow it themselves. In Iowa, CBD oil is the only form of cannabis permitted for medicinal use.

Under President Joe Biden, the DEA proposed moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, placing marijuana alongside substances like ketamine and testosterone. The Biden administration never finalized the rule, but the Trump administration is now considering it.

“We’re looking at it. Some people like it, some people hate it. Some people hate the whole concept of marijuana because it does bad for the children,” President Donald Trump said at an August news conference.

Still, some experts say marijuana doesn’t belong alongside hard drugs. By definition, Schedule I drugs have no accepted medical use.

Kent Vrana, a professor of pharmacology at Pennsylvania State University and director of its Center for Cannabis and Natural Product Pharmaceutics, said marijuana doesn’t fit that description. “I would say that as a scientist, it doesn’t belong there because it does have known medical benefits,” he said, pointing out that the Food and Drug Administration has approved four cannabis-derived or cannabis-related compounds.

These prescription-only drugs are used to treat symptoms like nausea and seizures. In states allowing medical marijuna, doctors can typically recommend cannabis in its plant form, but they can’t prescribe it.

Vrana believes marijuana may have the potential to treat things like chronic pain, inflammatory bowel disease, anxiety, and PTSD. But there just aren’t enough clinical trials to prove it. He said marijuana’s Schedule I status complicates his research. Vrana has a Schedule I license from the federal government, which he said he received after completing a nine-month application process, but can only study marijuana that comes from federally approved sources.

That red tape makes it tricky to study marijuana’s benefits and harms. “What really bothers me is people are using things out on the street that I don’t have access to for my research,” said Vrana. “I can’t fully gauge the dangers of some of this very high concentration material that’s out there because I can’t get access to it.”

Some experts think marijuana’s harms are well-documented enough to rule out rescheduling.

Heritage Foundation senior fellow Paul Larkin said that today’s marijuana isn’t the same as what users smoked in the 1960s. At that time, most weed had a psychoactive concentration of 3-6%. “Nowadays, the concentration in the botanical form, the raw form of cannabis, is 30-40%. And processed versions of cannabis can be in the 90-plus percent,” Larkin said.

That means that modern marijuana can be extremely potent. Roughly 3 in 10 people who use marijuana indicate symptoms of addiction. Schedule I drugs are defined as substances that can easily be abused.

In Larkin’s opinion, the federal government won’t ever be able to recommend dried cannabis for medicinal use. “One of the criteria for a drug to be approved as safe, effective, and uniformly made is that a physician will be able to know by prescribing exactly how much of that drug a person gets,” said Larkin.

With smokable marijuana, doctors can’t accurately prescribe how much a patient should inhale. The plant’s varying potency would also complicate the ability of doctors to prescribe it accurately.

That’s important because cannabis in all of its forms is up for rescheduling. So, while cannabis compounds have some medicinal benefits, smokeable weed hasn’t proven to be safe. Particularly among young people, marijuana may impair brain development and has even been linked to greater risk of schizophrenia.

Pennsylvania State’s Kent Vrana said that smoking marijuana might mask chronic pain rather than improve an illness, but he still argued marijuana in its dried plant form has value and may help some patients improve their quality of life.

Vrana acknowledged that marijuana is not without its harms, and he urges against legalizing it for recreational use. But, he added, “cannabis is safer than my drug of choice, which is a good, single-barrel bourbon.”

Paul Larkin argued that comparing marijuana to alcohol is beside the point: “The fact that we can’t effectively stop people in Western society from drinking doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t stop people from using other substances that are dangerous,” he said.

While most Americans won’t experience any immediate ramifications of rescheduling cannabis, businesses selling the drug would feel the changes quickly.

To avoid criminal penalties, marijuana sellers must remain within states where the drug is legal, but they can’t operate on federal land or access banking services in most cases, since banks are federally regulated. Marijuana businesses also can’t receive federal income tax deductions for most of their expenses because of the drug’s Schedule I status. But if the DEA reschedules marijuana, those companies could get more than $2 billion in tax relief yearly.

Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy fellow Katharine Harris worries that the marijuana industry may reap the main benefits of rescheduling. Tax deductions could give marijuana businesses more money to spend on advertising, which could influence everyday users.

“There’s a lot of evidence from the alcohol and the tobacco industries that marketing is very effective,” said Harris. “If you market things, especially to youth, to make things look cool and fun … that increases use.”

Rescheduling is not inevitable, especially given the recent House move to block the Justice Department from doing so.

But if the federal government does reschedule marijuna, people may be misled into thinking it’s safe, and more states might legalize it. This could add to the already staggering numbers of addiction-related deaths involving harder drugs.

And that concerns recovery program leaders like Tom Reynolds. “I don’t think making more dangerous drugs legalized in our culture is going to help us battle the battle that we fight every day of addiction,” he said.