Marijuana Moment has brought its request for public and media livestream access to the historic federal cannabis rescheduling hearings starting next week directly to the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) after the judge overseeing the proceedings—which only involve opponents of the reform—said he wouldn’t consider filings from outside parties.
A letter from Marijuana Moment counsel Joseph A. Bondy notes that “DEA has already determined that livestream access is appropriate here”—pointing out that the agency permitted streaming of an earlier, subsequently cancelled hearing process on the proposal to move cannabis from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) to Schedule III that took place during the Biden administration.
“The same public-interest rationale applies now,” he wrote to DEA administrator Terrance Cole on Thursday.
Earlier this week, Marijuana Moment’s attorney had sent a letter to DEA Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek Julius, saying that “a public hearing is not meaningfully public if access depends on the happenstance of limited physical attendance.”
The judge last week issued a preliminary order laying out rules and timelines for the marijuana rescheduling proceedings—simultaneously recognizing that “national public interest in this issue predicates towards a policy of transparency” while also determining that “the hearing
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