Wait, is weed legal now?

0:00With real-world experience across a range of industries, Deloitte helps recognize how a breakthrough in aerospace might ripple into healthcare. How an innovation in agriculture could trickle into retail or biotech or even manufacturing. Is it clairvoyance? Hardly. It's what happens when experienced multidisciplinary teams and innovative tech come together to offer clients bold new approaches to address their unique challenges, helping them confidently navigate what's next. Deloitte. Together makes progress. For more than 50 years, the U.S. government has classified marijuana as what's known as a Schedule I drug, meaning that it's dangerous, it's bad for you, and that it belongs in the same category as LSD and heroin.

0:51But that could change soon, thanks to a directive from President Trump. Today I'm pleased to announce that I will be signing an executive order to reschedule marijuana from a Schedule 1 to a Schedule 3 control substance with legitimate medical uses. We have people begging for me to do this. And Trump isn't wrong. For years, people have argued that marijuana should be taken seriously as a drug with therapeutic effects. And this isn't just a line from your neighborhood stoner. The idea of making marijuana more widely accessible has broad appeal. I can't tell you, I think I probably have received more phone calls on this, on doing what we're doing.

1:38I don't think I received any calls on the other side of it. What you're hearing here is striking. You've got a sitting Republican president speaking so highly of a drug that's illegal under federal law, Despite the fact that, historically, Republicans have usually been the ones who are tough on drugs. But in this moment, the politics around marijuana are changing in a big way. From the newsroom of The Washington Post, this is Post Reports. I'm Martine Powers. It's Monday, December 22nd. Today, I'm talking with health reporter David Ovalle about what reclassifying marijuana could mean for access to this drug.

2:23And what happened to the Republicans' war on weed.

2:32All right, so David, I can't be the only person who doesn't actually know what reclassification of a drug means. Like, I don't know what Schedule 1 is or Schedule 3 is. Can you explain, like, what exactly is happening here and what does it mean that a drug is going from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3? So the Controlled Substances Act that was passed by Congress decades ago under President Nixon outlined different categories, different tiers of drugs. America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive.

3:17And it's the riskiness of the potential for abuse and also whether there's any medicinal value for a particular drug, right? So Schedule 1 is like the riskiest of drugs, right? There's a high potential for abuse and there's no medicinal value. So you have things like LSD, heroin, and then, of course, marijuana, which has been a source of contention for many, many years, even as so many states have legalized marijuana either for medical purposes or for recreational purposes. If this rescheduling goes through, marijuana will now join Schedule 3, which includes prescription drugs like ketamine, like testosterone, like Tylenol with codeine, which is used for cough syrup, basically, like extra strength cough syrup.

4:12So this is a big deal. This is a big change in federal policy. Now, what it means practically, that is going to be, you know, still up in the air and it might not be as much as your layperson thinks. But it certainly is a big message in federal marijuana policy.

4:33I want to talk more about those implications in a second. But just to be clear, this is not the same thing as saying that marijuana has been legalized federally, right? Right. Marijuana is not being legalized. It's not even being decriminalized. It's just fewer restrictions, right? There could be some sentencing changes. changes. You know, it's just going to be treated a little bit differently. There should be fewer restrictions on the medical research side. And then, of course, I think for the big deal is going to be with the ability for cannabis companies to be able to write off business expenses.

5:13Why did Trump call for this change? Like, why is Trump and the federal government now basically saying we think that there might be medicinal value in marijuana and that it might be less risky, even if we're going to keep it illegal. Well, so this actually goes back to the Biden administration. And this was actually a proposal that the Justice Department under Biden submitted. Look, folks, no one should be in jail merely for using or possessing marijuana, period. Far too many lives have been upended because of failed approach to marijuana. And I'm committed to righting those wrongs. You have my word on it.

5:51The Justice Department had taken the lead on doing this, which it's supposed to do, but it had been kind of stalled in kind of administrative hearings and administrative review. And so it's kind of been in limbo. So what Trump is doing is really just following what the Biden administration had already promised to do. And there's still a lot of tension about the public health benefits of it. But I think for the most part, people tend to think that marijuana is not something that you should be going to prison for for years and years and years. And while this does not decriminalize, it does send a powerful message about the priority that marijuana has for law enforcement.

6:28Yeah, I have to say there aren't many issues that are being tackled by the federal government right now that you could say, well, Trump is just finishing what the Biden administration started or carrying out what Biden had already had already planned. Can you talk a little bit more about why this is something Trump cares about and what his stance has been on marijuana previously? Well, you know, Trump is not someone that cares much for substances. He's famously not a drinker. But I think he realizes it's a politically popular thing to do, despite pushback and objections from leaders within the Republican Party.

7:05That being said, as with many things with the Trump administration, there's sort of some built-in contradictions because at the same time, he's been launching this very aggressive war on drugs and targeting drugs like cocaine and fentanyl, but also pardoning people who have been involved in drug trafficking. So, you know, it's a little bit of some contradictions in there, but I think broadly speaking, I think it's something that he realizes is popular. Yeah, I think this tension is really interesting. As you say, a lot of Americans at this point say, you know, look, I can see that there are medicinal benefits of marijuana or that people shouldn't go to prison or especially not for a long time for buying or selling marijuana.

7:48At the same time, I mean, the Republican Party is the party of Ronald Reagan. The war on drugs historically has been really tough on drugs. And as you said, Trump himself is making this case that he is tough on other drugs. So can you talk a little bit more about how, you know, the Republicans who are who are pushing back on Trump with this reclassification of marijuana, what are they saying and why do they why are they not on board with Trump's desire to let marijuana be considered a less serious drug? Well, some of the more conservative Republicans have really expressed concerns about the health impacts, right?

8:28For example, Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas posted a video to Instagram strongly disagreeing with the change. It's completely inconsistent why we're trying to gun down those who are bringing in marijuana, heroin, and other dangerous drugs to our country. And yet we declassify that from a Schedule 1 to a Schedule 3. Sessions and other House leaders wrote a letter before the executive order was announced asking Trump to reconsider. They just alleged that the Biden administration had done this as a political ploy to get votes and that Trump was just sort of following suit. And that it really was sending a dangerous message to the youth and that it was just going to enrich big marijuana companies.

9:09And that it would even benefit the Chinese criminal organizations that have really gotten into the cannabis industry. So there's a lot of pushback within the GOP. And there was people within the Trump administration that had been going back and forth opposing it internally. But as with many things with cannabis, it doesn't cut neatly across party lines. And so there are plenty of public health experts and researchers and medical experts that don't necessarily skew to the right, that also have their concerns about just how quickly the marijuana market has expanded. And the reason for that is the products, the marijuana, whether it's edibles, just your average joint or vapes or any other kind of marijuana products just are not the same as it was decades ago, right?

9:59The potency can be much, much more powerful. You have products that have sort of proliferated in such a loosely regulated space and the state level and sort of in some of the gray markets in other states where it's not legal that, you know, there is some valid concerns, not just from Republicans, but from other experts about just how this might be damaging, you know, the youth, people who have access to it. It used to be you had a joint in the 60s or 70s. It probably wasn't a big deal. But if you have regular access to potent edibles and sort of unregulated types of products, there's greater health harms.

10:40And that could be anything ranging from psychosis in young people whose brains are not developed to addiction. Even as marijuana has expanded in many, many states, I think there's still there is a growing consensus that, you know, maybe there we need to moderate or at least take a harder look at how it's proliferating.

11:03After the break, I keep talking with David about whether reclassifying marijuana will make it easier and cheaper to buy. We'll be right back.

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12:03So, David, as you noted, part of this change in classification for marijuana will mean that there's a difference in medical research. and how scientists can study the effects of marijuana. Tell me a little bit more about how that will work. Like, what does this change allow for scientists and doctors to do? It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out, because historically it's been very, very difficult to research marijuana, because under Schedule 1 it's very tightly restricted. So to study marijuana, you have to have lots of different permissions from the Drug Enforcement Administration and get marijuana from specific growers that are DEA approved.

12:42And the research that's ongoing into marijuana really runs the gamut. I mean, you have research into some of the obvious ones like PTSD with veterans, chronic pain, dealing with cancer and cancer treatment, dealing with the side effects from chemotherapy, and then even things like autism. So it really does run the gamut. So in theory, this schedule change should make that kind of research a bit easier. You won't have to get as many permits and the paperwork and everything should be sped up. But that being said, there's still going to be significant challenges in researching marijuana. And part of that has to do with the fact that there's so much product already out there.

13:29And so it's one thing to kind of research marijuana that's grown specifically to federal government standards. but then it's a lot harder to research the things that people are actually using, right? The products that are sort of maybe loosely regulated or not regulated at all or just kind of out there in different dispensaries in different states that are going to have varying quality and varying standards. So that's going to be one of the things where the market has really overtaken the science and that is not something that's going to be as easy to discern even when marijuana goes to Schedule 3.

14:03Well, then let's talk more about that kind of open market for marijuana, too. Like, will this have any effect on businesses, dispensaries, like people or places that sell marijuana or marijuana buy products? It probably will. And I think the biggest way it's going to benefit the cannabis industry is it's going to allow sort of your standard business tax write-offs, right? So under a provision of the tax code, any company that deals with Schedule 1 drugs cannot do those sort of normal business expenses that normal businesses do, right? So that makes the cost of business, that makes profits, that makes things very, very difficult for cannabis companies at the federal level, even if you're working in a state where it's legal, California, Colorado, New Mexico, wherever.

14:54So it's been an industry that has really kind of fallen on tough times in certain ways because it's just only these big marijuana companies that are really making profits. And even then, it's still the margins are not great because there's just so many tax issues and regulations. And so that's also kind of led to an illicit market or gray market in cannabis products that sort of served us this competition. So within the cannabis industry, there's like a lot of tension points, right? So this should help cannabis companies be able to sort of work as normal businesses do. So I think that's going to be sort of where we see it the most.

15:31And I think that has the potential to really transform how the industry operates. And what about on the consumer side? Like if it's making, if this change could make it easier for some of these companies to operate, to have slightly larger profit margins, does that mean that for people who buy marijuana, that it'll be cheaper or easier to get? It's still going to be a controlled substance at the federal level. So this is all going to come down to the state. So it may vary from state to state. The added wrinkle is marijuana will now be a Schedule 3, and every other substance in the Schedule 3 category is an FDA, a Food and Drug Administration-approved substance, right?

16:11Whether it's ketamine, whether it's steroids. So there's going to be a lot of pressure on the FDA to regulate marketing, to regulate the claims that are made on marijuana products. But I think most people in the cannabis industry would say, well, it's not really going to change that much, and FDA will probably keep a hands-off approach. It's sort of uncharted territory, and I think it's going to be interesting to see how the federal government reacts to or sort of incorporates marijuana into its bureaucracy. All right. So before we go, just to be clear, I mean, this schedule change, it's not official yet, right?

16:46Like, it's still up in the air. What's the timeline for this? Like, how quickly are we expecting this to go through? You know, it's still kind of up in the air because while the Justice Department has basically been told to expedite this, it still has to go through a lot of bureaucracy and hoops to make sure that it's final. Plus, there's also a window for lawsuits to challenge it. So there's going to be litigation over this for sure. And that could also hold things up. So I wouldn't expect the schedule change to be finalized within the next couple weeks, but probably the next several months to a year or more.

17:26And really, then we'll have a better sense of just how far-reaching this historic change will become.

17:40David, thank you so much for explaining on this. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Appreciate it.

17:48David Ovalle covers opioids and addiction for The Post. That's it for Post Reports. Thanks for listening. A new year is on the horizon. And guess what? Your 2026 savings start here. For four weeks of access, only$2 to read everything that The Washington Post has to offer. That is for the first six months. After that, it'll cost$12 every four weeks. Still a deal. Cancel any time. You'll get unlimited access to trusted journalism that helps you understand the year ahead and the world around you. Now's the perfect time to subscribe because great habits and great savings start together. Go to WashingtonPost.com slash subscribe.

18:31Again, that is WashingtonPost.com slash subscribe. And start your year informed with The Washington Post. Today's show was produced by Emma Talcoff. It was mixed by Sean Carter and edited by Ariel Plotnik. Thanks to Chris Rowland. I'm Martine Powers. We'll be back tomorrow with more stories from The Washington Post.

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