{"id":19629,"date":"2025-07-12T16:11:39","date_gmt":"2025-07-12T15:11:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/?p=19629"},"modified":"2025-07-12T16:11:39","modified_gmt":"2025-07-12T15:11:39","slug":"easing-cannabis-restrictions-would-set-back-the-golden-age-and-boost-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/2025\/07\/easing-cannabis-restrictions-would-set-back-the-golden-age-and-boost-china\/","title":{"rendered":"Easing cannabis restrictions would set back the \u2018Golden Age\u2019 . . . and boost China"},"content":{"rendered":"

Opinion\u00a0<\/strong>by\u00a0Kevin Sabet – SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana) – July 10, 2025,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

President Donald Trump is facing a pivotal decision: whether to ease national restrictions on marijuana, a\u00a0policy shift he hinted at during his 2024 campaign. But a major federal bust this week in Massachusetts \u2014 where the FBI arrested seven Chinese nationals connected with a multimillion-dollar pot-growing conspiracy \u2014 shows why loosening the rules would be a soft-power disaster.<\/span><\/p>\n

First, some context.<\/span><\/p>\n

The federal government, under the Controlled Substances Act, uses a five-part schedule to classify various drugs and other potentially addictive items. Drugs with no accepted medical use and high potential for abuse get listed on Schedule I.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s where\u00a0marijuana is now placed\u00a0\u2014 right where it belongs.<\/span><\/p>\n

FDA-approved marijuana-based medications are rightly classified on lower schedules.<\/span><\/p>\n

Raw weed, however, has\u00a0no<\/em>\u00a0accepted medical use (whatever may be claimed in states that have legalized it), and addiction rates are around 30% and rising, with younger people hit hard.<\/span><\/p>\n

That didn\u2019t concern President Joe Biden\u2019s Health and Human Services Department, which recommended moving cannabis to Schedule III, the list of drugs with an accepted medical use and a lower risk of abuse.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now celebrities, star athletes\u00a0<\/strong>and some MAGA influencers are\u00a0pushing Trump to follow\u00a0the Biden-era recommendation.<\/span><\/p>\n

But this president \u2014 who correctly grasps the\u00a0multifaceted strategic threat\u00a0China poses to the United States \u2014 should reject their urgings.<\/span><\/p>\n

Look at this week\u2019s Justice Department charges.<\/span><\/p>\n

Federal law enforcement on Tuesday rolled up a network of marijuana grow houses in Massachusetts and Maine, allegedly run by Chinese nationals and staffed with illegal immigrants pressed into what amounts to indentured servitude.<\/span><\/p>\n

The operations generated millions of dollars in profits, which the growers sank into assets like jewelry, cars and real estate that expanded their criminal enterprise.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chinese criminals played a major role in the US fentanyl crisis by manufacturing the drug\u2019s precursor chemicals and selling them to Mexican cartels. Trump slammed\u00a0China with a 20% tariff over that very fact.<\/span><\/p>\n

Marijuana is looking like another big-time business unit for Beijing.<\/span><\/p>\n

But it gets worse: China\u2019s communist government appears to have significant links with these criminal weed enterprises.<\/span><\/p>\n

Two Chinese nationals charged with running an illegal grow operation in Maine in 2023 had deep links to the Sijiu Association, a Brooklyn-based non-profit reportedly connected to China\u2019s New York consulate and to the United Front Work Department \u2014 the branch of the CCP\u2019s Central Committee that handles influence operations abroad.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another report in 2024 tracked the connections of Zhu Di, one of China\u2019s top US diplomats, to an Oklahoma cultural association that Sooner State authorities investigated for its links to the illicit weed business.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s beyond clear that Beijing smells the skunky funk of a tactical play against the United States rising from the red-hot marijuana trade. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s what makes rescheduling weed such a risk.<\/span><\/p>\n

Moving marijuana to Schedule III would supercharge the pot market, letting canna-businesses take regular deductions \u2014 including on advertising \u2014 at tax time, and easing their access to banking and credit.<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words, it would be a major step towards commercially normalizing Big Weed, and a massive boost for Chinese organized criminals with apparent CCP connections.<\/span><\/p>\n

Worse \u2014 as New York has seen first-hand \u2014 far from eliminating the drug dealers, a juiced-up legal weed market leads to a bigger illegal\u00a0<\/em>market.<\/span><\/p>\n

Post-legalization in the Empire State, New York City alone contains an\u00a0estimated 3,600 illegal pot stores, dwarfing the mere dozens of legal ones. California and Michigan have seen a similar trend.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s yet another way rescheduling would hand an unforced victory to China, which is already elbow-deep in illegal weed operations stateside.<\/span><\/p>\n

The worst part is that there\u2019s no domestic benefit to this trade-off.<\/span><\/p>\n

If weed goes on Schedule III, it will do nothing except help addiction profiteers get rich \u2014 and damage public health irreparably, even as a flood of new data confirms that marijuana is as bad as it gets for users\u2019 mental and physical well-being.<\/span><\/p>\n

Heart disease, schizophrenia, dementia, even tooth rot: Weed truly is the drug that does it all.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, the American public seems to be waking up. Every state considering recreational marijuana at the ballot box in 2024 rejected it.<\/span><\/p>\n

But Trump should remember that Beijing will exploit any and every policy misstep we make to the utmost.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

That\u2019s as true of spy balloons\u00a0as it is of public-health policies with nothing but negative domestic implications.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Rescheduling marijuana would put Americans last, at home and abroad \u2014 and usher in the very opposite of the Golden Age the president has so memorably promised.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kevin Sabet is president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana and a former White House drug policy adviser.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Source:\u00a0 https:\/\/nypost.com\/2025\/07\/10\/opinion\/easing-weed-rules-will-harm-golden-age-and-boost-china\/<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Opinion\u00a0by\u00a0Kevin Sabet – SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana) – July 10, 2025,\u00a0 President Donald Trump is facing a pivotal decision: whether to ease national restrictions on marijuana, a\u00a0policy shift he hinted at during his 2024 campaign. But a major federal bust this week in Massachusetts \u2014 where the FBI arrested seven Chinese nationals connected with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73,30,129,68,43,40,36,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-addiction","category-cannabis-marijuana","category-culture","category-drug-use-various-effects","category-methamphetamine-ghb-hallucinogens-oxycodone","category-prevention-research","category-treatment-addiction","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19629\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}