“Trump himself has never called for relaxing federal controls on adult-use marijuana.”
By Robert A. Mikos, Vanderbilt University Law School
Last month, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) wrapped up hearings on a long-delayed Biden Administration proposal to reschedule all marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). The agency’s proposed rule would move the drug from Schedule I, the most tightly controlled, to Schedule III, alongside drugs like ketamine.
The proposal now under review by an administrative law judge is much broader than the rescheduling action then-Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche took earlier this spring. In April, Blanche issued an order immediately moving all state-licensed medical marijuana to Schedule III. (He claimed the CSA’s treaty exception clause empowered him to bypass the statute’s cumbersome rulemaking standards and procedures which the DEA is now following.)
But unlike the rescheduling rule DEA is currently considering, Blanche’s rescheduling order applied only to medical marijuana. It left all non-medical marijuana, including state-licensed recreational (i.e., adult-use) marijuana, on Schedule I.
Adult-use marijuana is ascendant in the 24 states that have legalized both medical and recreational marijuana. In Colorado, for example, adult-use marijuana accounted for nearly 90 percent of the state’s $1.3 billion marijuana market in 2025,
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