<\/p>\n
by Charles Fain Lehman – Wall Street Journal – July 2, 2025<\/span><\/p>\n President Trump should halt Biden\u2019s attempt to make pot a \u2018Schedule III\u2019 substance.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Whether to loosen the government\u2019s ultra-tight controls on marijuana is among the matters President Trump inherited from Joe Biden.<\/span><\/p>\n Under law, marijuana is a Schedule I substance, meaning it has no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Mr. Biden initiated a process to move pot to Schedule III, thereby labelling it a medicine with only moderate abuse potential. Mr. Trump must decide whether to move ahead with the change.<\/span><\/p>\n He shouldn\u2019t. Rescheduling would bolster a socially disastrous legal weed industry that has spread crime and disorder in the streets. Containing that chaos instead of spreading it would be in line with the president\u2019s mandate.<\/span><\/p>\n Rescheduling wouldn\u2019t mean legalization. Marijuana would still be a federally controlled substance, subject to the same restrictions as drugs like ketamine and anabolic steroids. Rescheduling also wouldn\u2019t mean increasing the medical availability of marijuana. Medical cannabis is legal in 40 states, and the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment, which became law in 2014, prohibits spending money to enforce federal laws against these operations. Marijuana is already more available to \u201cmedical\u201d users than other Schedule III substances.<\/span><\/p>\n The primary effect of rescheduling, as the Congressional Research Service\u00a0has shown, would be a tax break to fuel the growth of state-legal marijuana businesses. That\u2019s because a provision of the tax code, Section 280E, which provides that businesses can\u2019t deduct the costs of trafficking in Schedule I or II controlled substances. But that\u2019s not the case for Schedule III.<\/span><\/p>\n That affects state-legal marijuana businesses. Because of 280E, these firms can pay effective tax rates as high as 70%. Shifting pot to schedule III would alleviate the tax burden, and give the firms more room to operate. That would be good if these were normal companies, and if their business wasn\u2019t socially and individually harmful. But the state-legal marijuana business has been a catastrophe.<\/span><\/p>\n Legalization has\u00a0increased rates\u00a0of marijuana addiction\u2014typically called \u201cmarijuana use disorder\u201d\u2014including rates of heavy use\u00a0among teens. State-legal businesses have a profit-motivated reason to nurture addiction. Due to legalization, today\u2019s pot is far more potent than it was decades ago. Research links marijuana use, especially in young adulthood, to\u00a0IQ loss,\u00a0schizophrenia,\u00a0heart attacks,\u00a0strokes\u00a0and\u00a0lung disease.<\/span><\/p>\n As important, legalization is already socially toxic.\u00a0Research\u00a0by the Kansas City Federal Reserve found it has increased homelessness, addiction and arrests by double-digit percentages. Other research, on\u00a0Seattle\u00a0and\u00a0Vancouver, British Columbia, finds that dispensary proximity causally reduces property values. There\u2019s also the odor, which nearly half of New York City residents reported smelling \u201coften\u201d in\u00a0a recent poll.<\/span><\/p>\n Legalization hasn\u2019t even killed the black market. By expanding the consumer base while regulating the supply, it has made the illicit alternative more appealing than ever. Cannabis forecaster Whitney Economics\u00a0has projected\u00a0that in 2026 the black market will still account for 60% of sales.<\/span><\/p>\n Much of that money flows to Chinese criminal groups, which \u201chave come to dominate the cultivation and distribution of marijuana throughout the United States,\u201d according to the Drug Enforcement Administration\u2019s recent\u00a0National Drug Threat Assessment. Maybe that is why a majority of Americans now say that pot is bad for its users and society,\u00a0according to Gallup.<\/span><\/p>\n The rescheduling decision rests with the Justice and Health and Human Services departments, which both take marching orders from the president. Mr. Trump should end Mr. Biden\u2019s dangerous social experiment.<\/span><\/p>\n Source: https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/opinion\/legal-marijuanas-disastrous-legacy-policy-law-7c727c22<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Charles Fain Lehman – Wall Street Journal – July 2, 2025 President Trump should halt Biden\u2019s attempt to make pot a \u2018Schedule III\u2019 substance. Whether to loosen the government\u2019s ultra-tight controls on marijuana is among the matters President Trump inherited from Joe Biden. Under law, marijuana is a Schedule I substance, meaning it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,68,104,119,40,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cannabis-marijuana","category-drug-use-various-effects","category-political-sector","category-prevalence","category-prevention-research","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19695","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=19695"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20108,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19695\/revisions\/20108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}