Marijuana and other drugs are not as dangerous as laws written half a century ago say they are, according to a new scientific review.
Since the passage of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in 1970, U.S. drug laws have been dictated by rigid categories that supposedly reflect the dangers posed by different substances—but the new study suggests that “drug policy contradicts expert assessments of drug harms” both in America and across the world.
The results indicate that governments’ legal rankings for substances bear little resemblance to what experts actually know about which drugs cause the most harm—something that cannabis consumers and much of the general public have long recognized.
Marijuana, for example, has been listed as a Schedule I drug in the U.S. for decades. While President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the attorney general to expeditiously complete the process of moving cannabis to a Schedule III substance last month, that has not yet occurred.
In the new paper published in the December 2025 issue of Harm Reduction Journal, a multidisciplinary panel of U.S. researchers, clinicians and people with lived experience of substance use found that federal drug policy is “poorly aligned with scientific evidence” and often contradicts
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