Is Obama About to Reschedule Weed? Does It Even Matter?

A marijuana plant in Colorado. Photo via Flickr user Brett Levin

Talk to anyone interested in changing America's insane drug laws, and sooner or later the term scheduling is bound to come up, a reference to the federal government's system of denoting how safe or dangerous any given narcotic is. For cultural—which is to say institutionally racist—reasons, the US has labeled weed "schedule I," a designation that means the authorities think it has "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse." (Heroin is in the same category, though cocaine, bizarrely, is not.) In a cascade of circular logic, this status helps discourage research into those very medical benefits while providing a tacit national endorsement of our collective tendency to screw over black and hispanic kids who use the drug no more often than their white peers.

So more than a few eyebrows were raised when, on Friday, Attorney General Eric Holder for the first time publicly suggested he and the Obama administration are open to rescheduling pot.

"We'd be more than glad to work with Congress if there is a desire to look at and reexamine how the drug is scheduled," he said at a House Appropriations Committee hearing. "There is a great degree of expertise that exists in Congress. It is something that ultimately Congress would have to change, and I think that our administration would be glad to work with Congress if such a proposal were made."

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before rapidly shifting public opinion on the issue—a majority of Americans have supported outright marijuana legalization and a broader rethinking of the war on drugs for a few years now—crept up the federal law enforcement and political superstructure. Just as importantly, Colorado and Washington state are in the midst of rolling out tax-and-regulate schemes, which should eventually serve to dispel some of the fear-mongering about how society will collapse if we let people get high (then again, with the mainstream media losing its shit over the story of a Wyoming teenager who jumped to his death after eating pot cookies in Colorado, maybe we're still a bit paranoid about that stuff).

And yet, the way Holder worded his statements is telling—he put the onus squarely on the shady lawmakers populating Capitol Hill, mentioning Congress four times in three sentences to really drive the point home that this policy shift isn't on him.

"That's not a good sign, because the Congress isn't going to do it," said Steve Cohen, a Democratic congressman from Tennessee who was careful to distance himself from the spectacularly unpopular institution when I interviewed him. "[The administration] should reschedule it on their own. It shouldn't be schedule I, it should be schedule 87-Z."

Indeed, it's hard to imagine a more cynical, backhanded gesture of support than Holder telling drug reformers to make their case for rescheduling to Congress—especially since the Controlled Substances Act almost certainly allows the administration to reclassify pot without congressional approval. And lately, Congress has found it difficult to pass basic spending bills, much less contentious legislation involving racially-charged social issues.

It's true that some libertarians in the GOP are making a case for the party to ease up on the cultural warfare, with rising stars like Rand Paul calling pot prohibition out for what it is and even New Jersey Governor Chris Christie hinting he's not an orthodox drug warrior. But the fact remains that just one Republican in Congress signed on to a letter drafted by a bunch of liberals in safe districts a few weeks ago urging Obama and friends to reschedule pot. None of the lawmakers I spoke to think a rescheduling bill has any shot whatsoever at clearing the GOP-controlled House, much less the Democratic Senate.

"We're not going to see marijuana rescheduled before the next presidential election," predicted Dan Riffle, the director of federal policy at the Marijuana Policy Project. "But I'm willing to bet every candidate in 2016 will take the view that this is something that should be decided at the state level."

Prospects for drug reform are somewhat better in the states, with Oregon poised to put its own legalization regime back before voters for approval this November. (The state narrowly failed to join Colorado and Washington last time around thanks to some overreach by those drafting the ballot language.) Changing law state by state is probably a better tactic for marijuana activists than advocating for rescheduling, since there is some dispute about just how big of an impact it would have on US drug policy in the first place.

"Rescheduling is a complete red herring," said Mark Kleiman, a UCLA professor and the adviser for the tax-and-regulate program emerging in Washington state. "Marijuana can never be a medicine as the law currently understands it. A medicine is something of known composition that a physician could administer to a patient with some predictable consequence. Herbal marijuana is simply too diverse for that to be true."

He may have something of a point given that the dispensaries popping up around the country offer plenty of variety when it comes to pot strains, each with their own unique properties. Medical research is most directly impeded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse's monopoly on legal marijuana production (which takes place exclusively at the University of Mississippi, of all places), as well as the Clinton administration's weird 1999 guideline (still in effect) that the Public Health Service must sign off on all studies; rescheduling would do nothing to change either of those rules. Besides, most legalization advocates see the twin memos put out by the Justice Department since Obama's re-election (one indicating Colorado and Washington can proceed largely unmolested, the other facilitating banking for pot businesses) as the better measuring stick for where the federal government's mind is at right now.

"It's a modest step in the right direction so long as it does not distract from the broader objective of ending marijuana prohibition," Ethan Nadelmann, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said of Holder's stance on rescheduling.

The federal government is inching toward reform even as many governors—including not just your garden-variety Southern Republicans, but also most Democrats—remain leery of legalizing bud, anxious to see how things play out in Washington and Colorado. Though their constituents may be clamoring to smoke blunts without worrying about the cops, elected officials claim to have legitimate concerns like whether usage rates among children will rise and the tricky matter of just how robust revenues from taxation prove (early indications are that they might be even heftier than promised, with most of the proceeds set to fund education programs). Why get out in front of the coming wave of marijuana reforms when you can stall a little longer and learn from the experiments going on in Washington and Colorado?

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