DEA Marijuana Rescheduling Hearing Ends With No Decision Timeline

The federal proceeding that could extend Schedule III status to the entire cannabis industry has ended — but operators hoping it clears a path to tax relief now face an open-ended wait. A Drug Enforcement Administration hearing on whether to move all marijuana to Schedule III concluded on July 15, 2026, and the agency judge overseeing it set an August deadline for final written arguments while declining to say when he will issue a recommendation or when the government will act on it.

DEA Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek Julius closed the hearing after more than two weeks of testimony that opened June 29, 2026, then issued an order the next day setting out the next phase. Because the compressed schedule left no room for spoken closing arguments, participating parties may instead file post-hearing briefs by August 17, 2026. Each brief is capped at 50 pages, can fold in closing arguments, and is optional — a party that files nothing faces no penalty. The same deadline covers proposed corrections to the hearing transcript, a fully corrected version of which the agency says it will publish online.

From recommendation to final rule

Once the briefs are in, Julius will write his recommendation on whether the government should reclassify marijuana — though he was clear the decision is not his to make. Under the agency’s rules, participants will have 20 days to challenge his findings before the full record passes to DEA Administrator Terrance Cole, who issues the final decision. That recommendation is advisory: an administrator can adopt it or reject it, as one did in the 1980s after a judge urged rescheduling.

What Julius would not do is commit to a timeline. He told the parties he could not say when his recommendation would come, or when Cole would act on it — an open clock that sits awkwardly against the administration’s push for speed. President Trump’s December 2025 executive order directed the Justice Department to finish rescheduling as quickly as the law allows, and the hearing itself was squeezed into a hard July 15 finish. The decision that follows carries no such deadline.

What the hearing weighed

It was the first time the full case for moving all of cannabis to Schedule III had been tested on the record, after an earlier attempt begun under the Biden administration collapsed amid disputes over witness selection. The revived hearing was built around the government’s own 2024 proposal to move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, grounded in federal health regulators’ finding that cannabis has an accepted medical use. DEA officials defending the change leaned on testimony that marijuana is safer than alcohol and opioids, including a Food and Drug Administration scientist and a New Hampshire physician who described cannabis as an alternative to opioids for pain patients.

The case against it came entirely from opponents. Cole invited only rescheduling critics to take part as designated parties — longtime opponents of legalization such as Smart Approaches to Marijuana and the National Drug & Alcohol Screening Association, a coalition of states including Nebraska and Idaho, and two physicians — after ruling that reform supporters were not harmed by the proposal and so did not qualify to participate. Their witnesses stressed the alleged harms of cannabis and attacked the analysis regulators used to find it has medical value. Even so, some of the opposition’s own experts acknowledged under cross-examination that marijuana meets the Schedule III standard — testimony now locked into the record the government will lean on.

What’s at stake for operators

For the industry, the stakes are mostly financial. Marijuana already sits in Schedule III for two narrow categories — FDA-approved cannabis medicines and state-licensed medical products — under a separate order the Justice Department issued in April 2026. This hearing covers everything else: the adult-use market still classified as Schedule I. Adult-use operators currently owe federal tax on their gross profit rather than net income, because the federal tax penalty attached to Schedule I and II drugs denies them the deductions available to ordinary businesses. Moving marijuana to Schedule III would lift that penalty — freeing cash many operators would put back into payroll and expansion — and the Treasury Department and the IRS have said new tax guidance would follow.

Reclassification is not legalization. Even in Schedule III, marijuana would remain federally controlled, subject to registration and other agency oversight, and related restrictions would stay in place — truck drivers and pilots still could not use it, and the military still bars service members. Nor is it the end of the fight. The consolidated lawsuits challenging the April order are already before a federal appeals court, and whatever Cole ultimately decides is likely to be contested there as well. For operators, the hearing’s close starts the clock on a decision — even if no one will say how long that clock runs.