Schedule III is progress. It’s also the wrong destination. After a decade of watching this industry fight for scraps inside a framework that was never designed for it, it’s time to say the quiet part loud: cannabis doesn’t need to be rescheduled. It needs to be removed from the CSA entirely.
The following is an opinion piece and represents the editorial perspective of All Things Cannabis. This is the final installment in our five-part series on federal cannabis rescheduling. If you’re just joining us, you can catch up on Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
I’ve been writing about cannabis since 2015. In that decade the industry has had to absorb blow after blow. This includes banking discrimination, crushing tax rates, federal raids on compliant operators, patients losing housing over a legal medication, and veterans unable to get honest answers from their own doctors.
Since stepping into this world from a professional standpoint, I’ve watched many brilliant and hardworking people build legitimate businesses under conditions that would have collapsed entrepreneurs in any other industry before they ever got off the ground.
And I’ve also watched the federal government respond to all of it with the same playbook, again and again. Slow it down. Contain it. Control it.
Reschedule it? Maybe. But never, ever let it out of the scheduling framework entirely.
The April 23rd rescheduling of medical cannabis to Schedule III is the most meaningful federal cannabis action in fifty years. I want to be clear about that, because what I’m about to argue shouldn’t be mistaken for dismissing the significance of . It matters.
The 280E relief matters. The physician access matters. And the signal to the broader world that cannabis undeniably has accepted medical use? That matters a whole lot.
But Schedule III is not where this ends. It’s not even close to where it ends.
And if the industry — and the advocates, and the patients, and the journalists covering this space — allow Schedule III to become the finish line, we will have accepted a framework that was never designed for cannabis in the first place.
We will have fought for decades to get a slightly better seat at a table we never should have been seated at.
It’s time to say it clearly: cannabis doesn’t belong in the Controlled Substances Act. It never did. And it never will.
Yes, Schedule III Is Progress. It’s Also the Wrong Conversation.
The Controlled Substances Act was signed into law in 1970 as part of the Nixon administration’s Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. Nixon’s own advisors recommended against placing cannabis in Schedule I. A commission he himself appointed, the Shafer Commission, concluded in 1972 that marijuana should be decriminalized.
Nixon ignored the recommendation. The scheduling was, by the account of his own former aide John Ehrlichman, a deliberate political tool designed to criminalize the anti-war left and Black Americans.
This is the framework we have spent fifty years trying to reform from the inside.
The CSA is a drug enforcement framework. It was built to classify, control, and restrict substances based on their potential for abuse in contrast to their accepted medical use. It’s a system designed for narcotics, stimulants, depressants, and hallucinogens to be regulated through a law enforcement lens.
The DEA administers it. The scheduling process runs through the DEA and the FDA. Enforcement is handled by federal prosecutors and agents.
Cannabis is a plant with a documented history of human use spanning thousands of years.
It has accepted medical applications in the majority of U.S. states. Cannabis can be legally purchased by adults in recreational markets across more than half the United States. It’s also is an agricultural product, a consumer product, a medical product, and an economic driver that generates billions in tax revenue and hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Asking whether cannabis belongs in Schedule I, II, or III is like asking whether wine belongs in the evidence locker or the supply closet.
The problem isn’t which shelf you put it on. The problem is that you put it in the evidence locker or supply closet at all.
The DEA has no business being the primary federal regulatory body for an industry this complex. Yes, admittedly, Schedule III is better than Schedule I.
I mean that genuinely, it’s significantly better for a lot of reasons.
It’s still not a logical regulatory home for cannabis. It’s just a slightly less hostile one.
Alcohol and Tobacco Were Plants First Too
Let’s talk about the direct comparison that the federal government has spent fifty years now refusing to make.
Alcohol is derived from fermented grains, fruits, and other plants. It’s processed, packaged, and sold to adults 21 and older. There are well-documented health risks including addiction, liver disease, cardiovascular damage, and a direct causal relationship with thousands of traffic fatalities per year.
It is not scheduled under the CSA at all. Instead, it’s regulated by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau — the TTB — a division of the Department of the Treasury, with state-level regulatory frameworks layered on top.
Tobacco is a plant, just like cannabis is a plant. It is processed, packaged, and sold to adults 21+. And it kills approximately 480,000 Americans per year according to the CDC — more than any other preventable cause of death in the country.
But it’s not scheduled under the CSA either. It’s regulated by the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products at the federal level, with state-level age verification and sales regulations in place across the country.
Cannabis, I’ll remind everyone in case they forgot, is a plant.
It is processed, packaged, and sold to adults 21 and older or medical marijuana patients who have a current recommendation from a state-licensed or approved physician. Its documented health risks — while real and worth honest discussion — are substantially lower than either alcohol or tobacco by virtually every measure.
And it is still sitting in the same federal scheduling framework as heroin.
The argument that cannabis is “too dangerous” or “too abuse-prone” for the regulatory frameworks we use for alcohol and tobacco has always been difficult to make with a straight face (it hasn’t stopped the federal government from trying).
After fifty years of research, decades of successful state-legal markets, and public health data, it is no longer possible to make that argument honestly.
If we regulate Budweiser, Jack Daniels, and Marlboros through dedicated federal agencies with state-level oversight, there is exactly one logical answer to the question of how we should regulate cannabis.
The exact same way.
The TTB model is worth understanding for those who don’t know how it works. It oversees the production, labeling, advertising, and taxation of alcohol and tobacco at the federal level. Not as a drug enforcement matter, but as a consumer products and revenue matter.
They coordinate with state regulatory bodies and set baseline standards. They do not treat every bottle of whiskey or pack of cigarettes as a potential crime scene.
That’s the model cannabis deserves. Not because cannabis advocates want it to be treated like alcohol — the two have meaningfully different profiles and their regulation should reflect that.
But because the underlying principle is right: this is a consumer product manufactured from a plant and sold to adults. Following that logic, it should be overseen by a regulatory body whose entire purpose is consumer product safety and tax compliance, not drug enforcement.
The States Who Legalized Have Already Figured This Out
Here’s my favorite part about this argument for removing cannabis from the CSA entirely: we don’t have to theorize about what a dedicated cannabis regulatory framework looks like. We can just look at what the states built and use what’s worked the best overall to build a real federal framework for safely regulating cannabis.
Florida has the Office of Medical Marijuana Use for example. It’s a dedicated state agency that oversees patient registration, physician certification, dispensary licensing, product testing, and compliance. It does not live inside a law enforcement agency. It is a regulatory body designed specifically for cannabis.
Similarly, Colorado has the Marijuana Enforcement Division, housed within the Department of Revenue. It regulates the entire cannabis supply chain — cultivation, manufacturing, retail — with a framework that treats cannabis as a taxable, regulated consumer product. And it has been doing this successfully since 2014.
California has the Department of Cannabis Control — a standalone state agency created in 2021 by consolidating three existing cannabis programs. They handle licensing, testing, and enforcement of consumer safety standards, along with equity programming. And it is not a subset of law enforcement, it’s a dedicated regulatory body.
In Massachusetts they have the Cannabis Control Commission, an independent state agency with a specific mandate that includes not just licensing and compliance but also social equity programming for communities most impacted by the war on drugs. It treats cannabis regulation as a public health, consumer safety, and economic equity matter simultaneously.
These agencies already exist. They’re functional and effective.
They’ve already developed real expertise in the specific regulatory challenges that cannabis presents — product testing standards, potency labeling, packaging child safety requirements (a topic for another day), advertising restrictions, seed-to-sale tracking.
The infrastructure has already been built. The work is already done. It wouldn’t be difficult to adopt the same structure on a federal level.
See, when voters passed legalization initiatives, states didn’t wait for the federal government to figure all this out. They built the model on their own to implement the will of voters. Now it’s the federal government’s job now is to catch up — not to insist that the DEA remains the authority on an industry it was never designed to oversee in the first place.
The rescheduling action is already triggering state-level momentum. North Carolina’s Senate leadership has cited the federal rescheduling as a reason to finally move on medical cannabis legislation — a bill that has repeatedly passed the Senate only to die in the House.
The federal signal matters to the states that have been waiting for political cover. Imagine what potential a complete removal from the CSA — and a clear federal regulatory framework — would unlock.
What a Real Federal Framework Could Look Like
This isn’t a utopian argument. It’s a practical one. Here’s what removing cannabis from the CSA and placing it under a dedicated federal regulatory framework could actually look like:
A federal Cannabis Regulatory Authority
Modeled on the TTB — housed within the Department of Treasury or the Department of Commerce, not the DEA or the Department of Justice. Its mandate: interstate commerce standards, baseline product safety and testing requirements, federal licensing for manufacturers and distributors operating across state lines, and tax compliance.
State regulatory bodies remain primary for in-state markets
The existing state agencies — Colorado’s MED, California’s DCC, Florida’s OMMU, Massachusetts’ CCC, and their counterparts in every legal state — continue to operate as the primary regulatory bodies for in-state cultivation, manufacturing, and retail. The federal framework sets the floor; states set their own standards above it, exactly as they do with alcohol.
A clear interstate commerce framework
One of the most significant barriers to cannabis industry normalization is the prohibition on moving product across state lines, even between two legal states. A dedicated federal regulatory body could establish the licensing and compliance infrastructure to make interstate commerce legally possible — creating genuine national market access for the first time.
Banking and financial services normalization
With cannabis no longer a Schedule I or III controlled substance under the CSA, the primary federal barrier to banks servicing cannabis businesses evaporates faster than water in the desert. The SAFE Banking Act Passed the House multiple times only to die in the Senate — becomes largely unnecessary because the underlying problem is resolved without it.
Research without restrictions
Federal cannabis research has been strangled for decades by the requirement that researchers use cannabis grown at a single DEA-licensed facility — product that has been widely documented as unrepresentative of what patients and consumers actually use. Outside the CSA framework, research access opens dramatically.
Is this a heavy legislative lift? Absolutely. Is it more complicated than moving cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III? Yes, no doubt.
Does any of that make it the wrong argument? Not even a little bit.
The Ask Isn’t Radical — It’s Logical
I want to address the objection I always hear when this argument comes up: that removing cannabis from the CSA entirely is too aggressive. Or too politically unrealistic. A personal favorite: it’s too far outside the governments comfort zone to be a productive position to hold so strongly.
I’ve been hearing some version of that argument since 2015. That was back when full legalization was politically unrealistic for most states. When banking reform was politically unrealistic and truly unobtainable. When rescheduling was a pipe dream, the carrot on the stick they’ve so kindly let us finally have just a bite of.
The Overton window on cannabis has moved faster than virtually any other social policy issue in modern American history — because advocates, patients, researchers, and industry professionals refused to treat the politically convenient position as the correct one.
But Schedule III is the politically convenient position.
It’s the one that lets lawmakers say they did something without fundamentally restructuring the federal relationship with cannabis like it should be. It keeps the DEA in the picture unnecessarily. It keeps the CSA framework intact.
And it lets Congress avoid the harder conversation about what descheduling actually requires. Or what it would actually mean for the hundreds of thousands of Americans still sitting in prison or carrying records for cannabis offenses that are now legal in their states.
The correct position — the one that follows logically from the evidence, from the state-level precedent, from the basic comparison with alcohol and tobacco regulation, from fifty years of watching the CSA framework fail to produce anything but harm for cannabis patients and consumers — is that cannabis should be removed from the Controlled Substances Act entirely.
Placing cannabis under a dedicated regulatory framework designed for what it actually is (a consumer product with medical applications, manufactured from a plant, sold to adults) would be the most common sense reform the government could possibly make.
That’s not a radical position. It’s the only one that actually makes sense from every direction.
We have spent fifty years asking the DEA for permission to exist. The right question was never which schedule cannabis belongs in. The right question is: why was it even a part of the list at all?
Schedule III is undeniably a step forward.
Take it. Use it. Advocate loudly for the 280E relief, the physician access, and the VA policy shifts that it all makes possible. And fight like hell to make sure the June 29 hearing happens and the congressional riders fail. All of that matters and none of it should stop here.
But then keep going.
Because the goal was never Schedule III.
The goal is an industry that operates like every other legal industry in this country. With clear rules, fair taxation, open banking, research access, and a regulatory body whose job is consumer safety, not drug enforcement.
We’re closer than we’ve ever been. But we’re still not there yet.
Don’t let anyone tell you Schedule III is good enough. That’s not what we’ve been fighting for and we can’t forget that just because it’s convenient.
About This Series
This is the final piece in All Things Cannabis’ five-part series on federal cannabis rescheduling. The full series:
- Part 1: Medical Cannabis Is Now Schedule III — But What Actually Changed?
- Part 2: Rescheduled, Not Freed: What Cannabis’ New Federal Status Means for You as a Patient
- Part 3: What Schedule III Really Means for Cannabis Businesses — And Who Actually Benefits
- Part 4: Congress Is Already Trying to Kill Cannabis Rescheduling — Here’s Who and How
- Part 5: Cannabis Doesn’t Belong in the CSA. It Never Did. (You’re here)
Stay current on federal cannabis policy, state-level developments, and industry news with us here at All Things Cannabis.
