Rescheduling Opponents Preview Their Case Before DEA Hearing

The federal push to loosen marijuana’s drug classification heads into a contested hearing on Monday, and the only parties in the room arguing the merits will be the ones trying to stop it. In briefs filed this week, the prohibition groups, states, and physicians the Drug Enforcement Administration cleared to participate laid out the case they intend to make to a federal administrative judge: that cannabis belongs exactly where it has sat for half a century, in the most restrictive federal drug category.

The stakes reach well beyond procedure. The hearing, which begins June 29, 2026, will weigh whether to move marijuana broadly to Schedule III — the lighter classification that already covers state-licensed medical cannabis and FDA-approved marijuana drugs, but not the adult-use market that makes up most of the legal industry. A shift would lift the federal tax penalty that blocks cannabis businesses from taking ordinary deductions and would loosen federal handling rules. The opponents want the judge to recommend against it.

What the opponents are arguing

To keep marijuana in the strictest category, opponents have to defend a three-part test: that the drug has a high potential for abuse, no accepted medical use, and no accepted safety for use under medical supervision. Smart Approaches to Marijuana, the leading national anti-legalization group, argues in its prehearing statement that marijuana meets all three, and that the 2023 federal health recommendation to reschedule it rested on a flawed analysis that compared cannabis too favorably with alcohol and opioids.

A joint brief from Idaho, Indiana, and Nebraska frames the question as a matter of public safety. Each state “prohibits or severely restricts the availability of marijuana within its borders,” the filing says, because the drug “causes our citizens psychiatric harm and is linked to increases in homelessness, traffic accidents, illegal drug trafficking, and other crime.” The states plan to call Yale psychiatrist Deepak Cyril D’Souza, the inaugural director of the university’s cannabis science center, to testify on abuse potential and on risks ranging from psychosis to impaired driving and adolescent harm. Their second witness, Humboldt County, California Sheriff William Honsal, is expected to testify that legalization expanded the illicit market rather than shrinking it, and that criminal growers exploited the state’s loose medical-recommendation system. Louisiana, an original party to the case, was absent from the latest brief.

SAM is leaning on its own marquee witness, Harvard Medical School professor and former White House drug-policy official Bertha Madras. It is also making an unusual demand: the group has subpoenaed a DEA pharmacologist, Luli Akinfiresoye, to testify against the agency’s own rule — a request the DEA has resisted. A separate participant, the National Drug & Alcohol Screening Association, plans to argue that rescheduling would weaken workplace and transportation drug-testing safeguards.

A hearing with only one side

The lineup points to an oddity at the center of the proceeding. The DEA is formally the proponent of the rule it will spend the hearing defending, yet the agency invited only opponents to participate. All seven parties cleared to take part oppose the reform, and some have sued to block it. Reform supporters who asked to join were turned away, including the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. DEA Administrator Terrance Cole told the group it had failed to show it was “adversely affected or aggrieved” by a shift to Schedule III, since NORML’s actual complaint is that the move doesn’t go far enough — it wants cannabis off the federal schedules entirely.

That leaves the DEA to defend its own reform against a roomful of critics. DEA Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek Julius, who is overseeing the case, has set the ground rules and ordered that the proceeding not be televised or livestreamed, so the public must watch in person in Arlington, Virginia.

What’s already settled, and what isn’t

Much of the relief the industry wanted is already in motion for one slice of the market. An order Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed in April 2026 immediately reclassified state-licensed medical cannabis and FDA-approved marijuana products to Schedule III. The DEA has since opened a registration pathway for medical operators and begun inspecting the dispensaries that signed up. Monday’s hearing is the separate, broader question of whether the rest of the market — including adult-use cannabis — follows.

The reform also faces a parallel fight in court. Several lawsuits brought by Republican state attorneys general and a cannabis-focused drug developer have been consolidated before a federal appeals court, each seeking to pause or undo the rescheduling. The administrative hearing is scheduled to conclude by July 15, 2026, after which Julius will send a recommendation back to the DEA Administrator for a final decision. Whether opponents can build a record strong enough to slow the broader move is the question the next two weeks will begin to answer.