DEA Invites Only Opponents to Marijuana Rescheduling Hearing

When the federal government defends its own plan to loosen marijuana’s status at a hearing later this month, every outside voice in the room will belong to someone fighting that plan. The Drug Enforcement Administration has named the participants for its June 29, 2026 hearing on moving all marijuana to a less-restrictive federal schedule — and not one patient group, consumer advocate, or licensed cannabis operator made the list.

The agency’s selected participants are the National Drug & Alcohol Screening Association, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, the states of Nebraska, Idaho, Indiana, and Louisiana, the drugged-driving group DUID Victim Voices, and two individual practitioners — a physician and a pharmacist. Each has a record of opposing marijuana reform, and several have gone to federal court to try to stop rescheduling outright.

Who got left out

Reform groups that asked to take part were turned away. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, the Drug Policy Alliance, and a national cannabis trade association all filed notices of intent to participate and were denied. NORML, which has been a party to the federal rescheduling petition since it began, called the exclusion troubling, arguing that the country’s leading consumer-advocacy organization is plainly affected by a proceeding that will shape federal cannabis policy for millions of state-legal consumers.

The DEA’s stated reason turns on a narrow reading of who counts. Under the agency’s rules, only an interested person — someone “adversely affected or aggrieved” by the proposed rule — may take part. In its rejection letters, the DEA concluded that reform supporters do not meet that test: because they back moving marijuana out of Schedule I, or at least do not oppose it, they suffer no injury from the very change they want.

That logic produces a lopsided hearing. Supporters are shut out precisely because they support the rule, leaving only the parties who want it stopped. The government will have to defend a reform it wrote while the only outside participants in the room are there to argue against it.

What the hearing actually decides

The June 29 hearing covers the bigger, unfinished half of cannabis rescheduling. In April 2026, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche issued an order that immediately moved state-licensed medical marijuana and FDA-approved cannabis products to Schedule III. That order left everything else — including the adult-use market that makes up most of the legal industry — in Schedule I.

This proceeding takes up whether to move marijuana more broadly, recreational included, down to Schedule III. It builds on a 2023 recommendation from federal health officials and a 2024 proposed rule, and a DEA administrative law judge will preside. The hearing opens June 29, 2026 and must conclude by July 15, 2026. The government — not the opponents — carries the burden of proving the change is justified.

The stakes for operators are real. A broad move to Schedule III would extend to the wider industry the same benefits medical businesses just gained: relief from the federal tax penalty that bars cannabis companies from deducting ordinary business expenses, and an easier path to research. The adult-use sector, still locked in Schedule I, has the most riding on the outcome, yet no seat at the table.

That makes the participant roster more than a procedural footnote. A formal hearing builds the official evidentiary record, and that record is what reviewing courts and future administrations lean on. With only opponents testifying and cross-examining, the case being assembled on the record will run in one direction, even as the agency itself argues for the reform.

The states selected sharpen the imbalance. Nebraska and Indiana are among the attorneys general who sued to block the April order, and the drug-testing association on the list is part of a separate court challenge seeking to pause it. None of the 40 states that license medical marijuana, nor the two dozen with adult-use markets, will have a representative making the operator or patient case.

What to watch next

Both supporters and opponents had filed to participate earlier this spring, so the one-sided final roster lands as a setback for the reform camp. It echoes the last attempt: the Biden-era rescheduling hearing collapsed in early 2025 amid litigation over witness selection and improper communications, and NORML was left off that participant list too.

The administrative law judge will set the order in which parties present testimony and question one another, while the consolidated lawsuits already pending before the federal appeals court in Washington move ahead in parallel. Whatever record the hearing produces, the legal industry it stands to affect most will not have helped build it.