A coalition of anti-marijuana, law enforcement and religious groups are imploring President Donald Trump to oppose a cannabis rescheduling proposal that he says his administration will decide on within weeks.
Led by Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), the coalition sent a letter to the president on Monday, saying the organizations “strongly urge that you reject reclassifying marijuana as a Schedule III drug” under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), a move that Trump had endorsed during last year’s campaign.
One signatory of the letter, the Drug Enforcement Association of Federal Narcotics Agents, represents personnel at the Drug Enforcement Administration, the agency that the cannabis reform proposal currently sits before.
“President Trump has an opportunity to make a stand for the safety of children across America by opposing the flawed proposal to reschedule marijuana,” SAM President Kevin Sabet said in a press release. “Marijuana has not been approved for any medical use by the FDA, nor has any raw plant. And it likely never will. It is an addictive drug with a high risk of abuse. That’s why it sat in Schedule I for decades and why it must stay there.”
Cannabis is currently classified as a Schedule I drug, but the Biden administration initiated a scientific review that led it to it to propose moving it to Schedule III. That wouldn’t federally legalize the plant, but it would allow state-licensed marijuana businesses to take federal tax deductions and remove certain barriers to research.
In the letter, the organizations acknowledged that the argument that marijuana shouldn’t be placed in the same schedule as heroin are “politically salient and easy to understand.” However, they said reform advocates “fundamentally misunderstand how drug scheduling works.”
“Contrary to popular belief, drug scheduling is not a harm index,” they said. “Rather, it balances the accepted medical use of a substance with its potential for abuse.”
Other notable signatories on the letter include the Family Research Council, National Narcotic Officers’ Associations’ Coalition, NAADAC the Association for Addiction Professionals, CADCA and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.
The letter disputes the conclusions of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) review under Biden, contending that marijuana has no accepted medical value and a high abuse potential that warrants its Schedule I status.
It then claims that rescheduling “would hand dispensaries and drug dealers a massive tax break estimated at $2 billion annually.”
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) code known as 280E at issue represents a “commonsense safeguard against giving tax breaks to illicit drug trafficking would be undermined by marijuana rescheduling,” the groups said. “Under Schedule III, street dealers and dispensaries alike would be able to receive deductions for promoting or marketing the sale of addictive drugs.”
“This loophole wouldn’t just benefit domestic traffickers. International drug cartels, already operating thousands of marijuana farms across the country—many licensed at the state level—would also qualify for tax breaks. These operations, linked to human trafficking and other serious crimes, are already making billions from the marijuana trade. Rescheduling would funnel federal tax benefits to them rather than to law-abiding American businesses.”
The groups went on to say that placing marijuana in Schedule III would inhibit federal workplace drug testing mandates, meaning “roads and skies would be significantly less safe.”
For what it’s worth, the president’s nominee to lead a key federal traffic safety agency says he’s prepared to “double down” on increasing awareness about the risk of marijuana-impaired driving in partnership with the White House.
The letter also argues that the reform would “hurt our kids” because rescheduling would send a message to youth that marijuana is less harmful.
“Rescheduling marijuana would not only ignore the science around the drug, but it would give tax breaks to corporate marijuana and drug traffickers, make our roads more dangerous, and send the wrong message to youth,” the letter concludes. “We strongly urge you to reject rescheduling, and keep marijuana in Schedule I.”
Trump endorsed rescheduling on the campaign trail ahead of his second term—as well as industry banking access and a Florida adult-use legalization ballot initiative. And he said recently that a decision on the issue would be announced within weeks, but he didn’t signal which direction he plans to take.
Trump said at that time that we’re “only looking at that” and it’s too “early” to say how the issue will be decided, adding that “it’s a very complicated subject.”
“Some people like it. Some people hate it—people hate the whole concept of marijuana, because it does bad for the children [and] it does bad for people that are older than children,” the president said. “But we’re looking at reclassification, and we’ll make a determination over the next few weeks—and that determination, hopefully, will be the right one.”
Photo courtesy of Philip Steffan.
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