The Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services is recommending that the Drug Enforcement Agency significantly loosen federal restrictions on marijuana but stopped short of advising that it should be entirely removed from the Controlled Substances Act.
The health agency wants the drug moved from Schedule I to Schedule III under the CSA, potentially the biggest change in federal drug policy in decades.
HHS Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel Levine wrote in a Tuesday letter to the DEA, first reported by Bloomberg News, that the recommendation was based on a review conducted by the Food and Drug Administration.
I’ll believe it when I see it. The DEA ultimately gets to make the call. A change like this would probably mean they’d lose some funding, so I bet they’ll be against it. They’d also have to come up with new and creative ways to harass and incarcerate black people, though I imagine that might be a tempting prospect for them…
It wouldn’t stop any arrests, it basically only opens up the stock market for the companies.