Five years before High Times existed, a fifty-cent magazine out of a Buffalo dorm room made the exact argument the DEA just made in federal court. It also named, in 1969, the people who would spend the next half century saying we need more research first.

The government’s closing brief in the marijuana rescheduling hearing was filed on August 17, 2026. It argues that cannabis has an accepted medical use, that the evidence has been sitting there for years, and that the people insisting the science isn’t ready yet are applying a standard the law does not require.

Somebody made that argument first, on newsprint, for fifty cents, in the winter of 1969.

The magazine was called The Marijuana Review. Volume one, number two, dated January through March 1969, twenty-four pages, Updated by an outfit called LeMar International out of Box 71, Norton Hall, at the State University of New York at Buffalo. LeMar was short for Legalize Marijuana. The editors listed on page 3 are Mike Aldrich and Ed Sanders. Under a heading reading “consultant gurus,” the first name is Allen Ginsberg.

It is generally credited as the first American magazine devoted entirely to cannabis. High Times would not exist for another five years.

Reading it now, next to a federal docket, is a strange experience. Not because the 1969 magazine looks quaint. Because so little of the argument has moved.

“The Mugwumps’ Mistake”

The editorial runs on page 3 under that title, opening with a line from T.S. Eliot about the stripe down the middle of the road being yellow. A mugwump, in the American political vocabulary of the era, was a fence-sitter.

Its target is not the drug warriors. It is the moderates.

The editorial describes a specific type: people less openly bigoted than the narcotics bureaucracy, who will concede that marijuana is not a narcotic, is not inevitably a path to heroin, insanity or crime, and then say the sensible thing is to wait for more research before changing any laws. The magazine calls that position a way of ignoring the fact that virtually nothing is known about a drug people have used across a wide variety of cultures for centuries, and it accuses the moderates of demanding a standard nobody could ever meet: proof of harmlessness.

Its counterargument, set in capital letters because that is how you shouted in 1969, is that we already know enough about marijuana to change the laws.

The editorial ends by reframing the whole debate as a single question. Not whether marijuana is safe. Whether a program of marijuana regulation other than criminal prohibition would be more effective, more just and more humane than what exists.

Now hold that against what happened in Arlington this summer.

Over eleven hearing days, the parties opposing rescheduling did not primarily argue that cannabis is a narcotic or a gateway. They argued about sufficiency. That the studies supporting therapeutic use would not survive an FDA new drug application. That the two-part test the government used to establish accepted medical use is too permissive and the older five-part test should govern instead. That the evidence base is too thin, the products too variable, the research too incomplete.

The government’s answer, across fifty pages, is that one accepted medical use is enough under the statute, that federal health officials found three, and that the more demanding standard was set aside in 2024 as impermissibly narrow.

Which is to say the DEA spent this summer arguing the Mugwumps’ Mistake, in a federal proceeding, against a room full of mugwumps. It took fifty-seven years for a Buffalo dorm room and the Drug Enforcement Administration to arrive at the same position.

The Treaty Argument, Fifty-Seven Years Early

Page 11 carries a piece by Michael R. Aldrich arguing that the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the 1961 treaty that has anchored global drug prohibition ever since, does not actually require the United States to keep marijuana criminal.

Aldrich works through the treaty’s own text. He notes that Article 36, the provision on criminal penalties, is expressly subject to a signatory’s constitutional limitations. He notes that Article 2 asks each country to determine which form of control best fits its own conditions. He points out that the Indian delegation, during the treaty’s drafting, argued that prohibiting a relatively harmless habit would simply create a black market. And he quotes Harry Anslinger, the retired federal narcotics commissioner, telling a Senate committee in 1967 that one reason to join the convention was that people in the United States were agitating to liberalize marijuana controls, and that if the U.S. became a party, they would never be able to change the law.

Aldrich’s conclusion is that the treaty recommends punishment but does not compel it, and that the debate over a better system of marijuana control remains wide open under international law.

In April 2026, the acting attorney general used that same treaty as the legal mechanism to move state-licensed medical cannabis and FDA-approved cannabis products to Schedule III. His position was that treaty obligations left the government several viable scheduling options and that he could act on them directly.

Same document. Opposite use. Anslinger thought the Single Convention would lock the door forever. A graduate student with a mimeograph machine read it and said it wouldn’t. Fifty-seven years later, the Justice Department used it as a key.

What the Laws Were Actually Doing

The most quotable pages of the issue are the theory. The page that stops you is the accounting.

Under a masthead reading “Bust Measurements,” the magazine ran a running column of arrests and sentences collected from readers and the underground press. The entries from this issue include a Michigan man reported to be serving 20 to 30 years, a Seattle man appealing a 20-year sentence over a single joint sold for a dollar, and a Dallas case in which the magazine reports a 50-year sentence. The column ran alongside a Day of the Dead skeleton drawing and an appeal for readers to send in more clippings.

Elsewhere in the same issue, the magazine cites a figure it attributes to a drug policy official at the National Student Association: better than 100,000 people arrested on drug charges in California alone during 1968, about two thirds of them for marijuana, and the overwhelming majority young.

Those numbers are secondhand and nearly six decades old, and we present them as what the magazine printed rather than as verified counts. But the shape of the thing is not in dispute, and it is the part of this story that rescheduling does not touch. Moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III changes tax treatment and research access. It does not open a cell.

Rescheduling is movement. It is not freedom.

A Blueprint Nobody Followed

Page 2 reprints, with permission, a nine-point reform proposal that the psychiatrist Tod H. Mikuriya had originally Updated as a letter in Playboy in July 1968.

Read cold in 2026, it is uncanny. Mikuriya proposed moving regulatory responsibility away from narcotics enforcement and toward ordinary state and federal control agencies. He proposed that possession without intent to sell not be a crime. He proposed vending licenses modeled on alcohol, with prohibitions on sales to children. He proposed that the FDA take responsibility for assaying resin content, biological activity and purity where interstate commerce was involved. He proposed registration for growers, importers, manufacturers and dealers, and separate registration for physicians, pharmacists and researchers. He proposed a home-cultivation allowance and a tax on production and sale earmarked for research.

Strip the 1968 vocabulary and that is a state-legal cannabis market with a federal registration layer and product testing standards. It is, roughly, the thing the industry has spent thirty years building one state at a time, and the thing the DEA registration framework is now bolting onto the medical side.

Mikuriya went on to become one of the architects of California’s medical cannabis system. In 1969 he was a doctor writing to Playboy.

The Rest of the Issue

It is not all argument. The magazine is a genuine artifact of its moment and it is funnier than its subject matter suggests.

There is a letters page with a note signed by Timothy Leary. There is a column called the Gage Price Gauge listing what weed and hash were going for that December in New York, San Francisco, London, Toronto, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago and what the magazine calls the Midwest hinterlands, with editorial notes on quality and supply in each market. There is a recipe page, Kozy Kitchen Kannabis Kuisine, offering a guacamole and a chili. There is a cultural heritage feature on a South African pipe. There is coverage of Andrew Weil’s Boston study, then newly Updated in Science, with Weil identified as a 26-year-old Harvard medical student. There is a report on Britain’s Wootton Report. There are quotations from the 1894 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission. The back cover is a full-page ad for the Whole Earth Catalog.

And there is a short letter from the consumer relations department of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, replying to an inquiry about whether it had registered trademarks on strain names. The company says it has no plans along those lines and has not registered them, and offers to be quoted saying so.

Big Tobacco, in 1968, fielding a question from a legalization zine about weed branding. Somebody was thinking about that market a long time before anybody could sell into it.

Who Made It

Aldrich was a graduate student at Buffalo when this issue went out. He founded the first college chapter of LeMar there in 1967 and edited The Marijuana Review from 1968 to 1973. In 1970 he completed what is generally described as the first doctoral dissertation on cannabis at an American university. He later curated the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library, at one point the largest collection of drug literature and artifacts in the world, and co-founded a San Francisco dispensary. High Times interviewed him in 1998, when he described himself as an archivist and a rememberer.

Ed Sanders was a poet, a bookstore owner and a member of the Fugs. Ginsberg was Ginsberg. LeMar itself grew out of their circle, and the through-line from there to Amorphia to NORML to everything that followed is a straight one.

The issue is dedicated to a poet who had died three months earlier. The dedication line does not say he died. It says he was murdered by Cleveland.

The Part That Should Bother You

It would be easy to read all this as vindication. They were right, everyone else was wrong, the arc bends, and so on.

That is not quite the lesson.

The Mugwumps editorial was not making a prediction about science. It was making one about behavior. It said the wait-for-more-research position is not a scientific posture, it is a way of never having to decide, and that the people holding it would keep holding it no matter what the research said, because the point was the delay.

Fifty-seven years later, the federal government’s own scientific review has found accepted medical use for three conditions, more than 30,000 practitioners are authorized to recommend cannabis to more than six million patients, and the argument in front of the administrative law judge was still that the evidence isn’t good enough yet.

The magazine got the prediction right. That is the depressing part. Being right in 1969 bought nobody an early release, and it has not yet bought a final rule.

The judge has not filed his recommendation. The administrator has no deadline. Somewhere in a Buffalo mailbox in 1969, fifty cents bought you a magazine that already knew how this would go.

The Marijuana Review, Vol. 1 No. 2, January to March 1969, was Updated by LeMar International, Buffalo, New York. Quotations and descriptions are drawn from an original copy in the collection of Jeff Doshier, who provided photographs of the issue and permission to publish them. Figures reported by the magazine in 1969, including arrest counts and sentences, are presented as that publication reported them and have not been independently verified.

Source link

President Donald Trump has granted clemency to two people who are serving time for federal marijuana convictions as his administration advances the process of rescheduling cannabis.

The president on Thursday commuted the sentences of Jerry Haymon IV and Kevin Harden, effectively ending their sentences and putting them on the path to being free.

Haymon was given a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence in federal prison for his participation in a marijuana distribution conspiracy, and has been living in home confinement for the past year.

Until now, he has had about a year left to go and has experienced difficulty getting approval for jobs. For example, the private company overseeing his home confinement blocked his ability to handle social media for a cannabis company and to do research at a policy organization that touched on the issue of marijuana even though neither job would have involved him touching the plant.

“Today is an amazing day that I will never forget,” Haymon told Marijuana Moment on Friday after receiving the news of his commutation, saying it feels like he has been “reborn again.”

“I got my life back,” he said. “There are no words that can fully express what this act of clemency means to me and the people I love. I am deeply grateful to everyone who advocated for me, supported me and helped give me this second chance.”

Thirty-six members of Congress sent a letter to then-President Joe Biden in support of Haymon’s request for clemency.

“Jerry was a two-way football star in high school who went on to play defensive back in college, where he was majoring in economics (and even made the Dean’s List one semester),” the lawmakers wrote. “Prior to his arrest in 2017, Jerry was looking to try out for professional football. At sentencing, the trial judge regretfully noted that his hands were tied by federal mandatory minimum prison terms for marijuana.”

While Biden issued mass pardons to people who committed federal marijuana possession offenses, he did not heed calls to free people serving time in federal prison for involvement in selling cannabis.

Harden, the other person that Trump granted clemency to on Thursday, has been serving a 30-year sentence after being convicted of conspiracy to distribute marijuana.

His co-defendant in the cannabis case, James Romans, was granted clemency by Trump in 2021 on the final day of his first term in office.

While incarcerated, Harden has experienced several severe medical issues, including multiple open-heart surgeries, a seizure disorder and blood-clotting.

The clemency applications from Haymon and Harden were both accompanied by a letter that boxer Mike Tyson wrote to Trump in which he praised the president for making moves to federally reschedule marijuana.

“There are Americans still sitting in federal prison for the very conduct your order addresses, waiting to see if your historic words will extend to them,” he wrote. “With two-thirds of Americans in support of marijuana legalization, not more punishment, the politics align with common sense policy. Yet individuals remain behind bars under outdated federal laws for conduct that today would not result in prison in much of the country.”

“Granting clemency to non-violent marijuana offenders would reunite families, restore lost opportunity, and write the final chapter of the federal war on marijuana—a chapter that only you have the power to close,” Tyson said. “It would be a legacy moment: bold, decisive, and right. I respectfully urge you to act.”

The two cannabis commutations are part of a broader package of clemency grants the the president issued this week.

Trump’s move to free a handful of cannabis prisoners comes as his administration of moving forward with the process of federally rescheduling marijuana.

Attorney General Todd Blanche in April issued an order that immediately reclassified state-licensed medical cannabis, as well as marijuana products approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) to Schedule III.

Under a separate order he signed, the DEA hearing was held to consider more comprehensively moving marijuana to Schedule III. An agency judge is currently considering a recommendation on the issue, and then the DEA administrator will issue a final determination.

During the hearing, DEA officials charged with defending the cannabis rescheduling proposal highlighted testimony on marijuana’s medical benefits and its relative safety compared to other substances such as alcohol and opioids.

That included appearances from a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scientist and a medical doctor from New Hampshire who detailed how medical marijuana provides relief to pain patients and can serve as an alternative to opioids.

Weldon Angelos, founder of the criminal justice non-profit The Weldon Project who received a cannabis-related presidential pardon during Trump’s first term, said that “today is an extraordinary day for two deserving men and their families.”

“These grants of clemency are about mercy, redemption, second chances and recognizing the humanity in people who have already paid an enormous price for their mistakes,” he said.

“President Trump has granted clemency to two individuals serving prison time for cannabis, Jerry Haymon and Kevin Harden. Jerry, a former college football standout, has worked incredibly hard to demonstrate that a person’s worst moment should never define the rest of their life. Kevin has endured serious and debilitating medical conditions that have made his continued incarceration both extraordinarily difficult and increasingly dangerous.”

“I am deeply grateful to President Trump and Alice Johnson for continuing to give deserving people a pathway home,” Angelos said, referring to Trump’s White House pardon czar who herself received clemency from Trump in 2018.

“For Jerry and Kevin, and especially for the families who have waited and prayed for this day, this is life-changing,” he said. “We are also encouraged by the administration’s continued commitment to clemency and expect to see more deserving individuals receive relief in the future. This is exactly why we do this work.”

Haymon said he is “eternally grateful to President Donald J. Trump and Alice Johnson for granting me a full commutation for my marijuana offense and giving me the opportunity to move forward with my life without this conviction hanging over me.”

“I also want to thank Weldon Angelos and the entire Mission Green and Weldon Project team for believing in me, fighting for me, and never giving up on my case,” he said. “They stood beside me and my family throughout this process and worked tirelessly to make this moment possible.”

Erik Luna, who represented Haymon on behalf of the Mission Green Initiative and serves as director of research and legal policy at the Weldon Project, said his client “received a ten-year federal sentence for conduct that is now legal in both states where the offense occurred.”

“Jerry served years in prison for a first-time, nonviolent marijuana offense, while today multi-billion-dollar cannabis companies operate openly under state law—often with armed security—engaging in the very conduct for which Jerry was convicted and sentenced,” he said. “That is the definition of injustice.”

Earlier this year, Trump pardoned a former NFL star who was convicted of trafficking 175 pounds of marijuana.

At the start of his second term, the president fulfilled a campaign promise by commuting the life sentence of Ross Ulbricht, a man who was convicted of running a dark web illicit drug market.

Source link

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is teaming up with an anti-marijuana group to promote a public service announcement contest pegged to 4/20, inviting high school students to submit videos about why the use of cannabis “is harmful for the developing brain, mental health, and your life!”

“The contest is an opportunity for high schools to demonstrate how students are working to prevent cannabis misuse at their school and to encourage their peers to abstain,” a notice about the contest organized by Johnny’s Ambassadors says.

As with past PSA initiatives from the group, it made clear that videos submitted for consideration should “NOT IMITATE THE USE OF THC/MARIJUANA OR PARAPHERNALIA OF ANY KIND, EVEN AS A JOKE.”

“Any content which suggests, depicts, imitates, or promotes the possession or consumption of any THC product is prohibited,” it says, adding that, “No swearing or defamatory language allowed.”

In general, the videos for the contest—which opened late last month and closes on April 13—are meant to be educational, aimed at informing fellow students about “why young people shouldn’t use THC products (vapes, dabs, weed, edibles, gummies).” Personal stories about people being impacted by THC use are also welcome.

The group provided samples of the kind of content they’re looking for, including PSAs on “why THC impacts athletic performance on a team,” debunking a “commonly-held but incorrect myth about THC and “startling” statistics about cannabis use.

The first place winner will receive $500, second place gets $250 and third place gets $100. The winners will be announced on Instagram on April 20, the marijuana holiday that the anti-legalization group has designated as “Anti-420 Day.”

DEA is promoting the effort through its Just Think Twice and Get Smart About Drugs projects.

Last year, DEA separately promoted an “Anti-420 Day” campaign that similarly recruited students to send short videos warning their peers about marijuana use.

The agency has developed a reputation for its awkward messaging and educational materials around youth drug use.

For example, in 2023, DEA advised young people that, rather than doing drugs, they should focus on becoming Instagram influencers. The agency promoted tips on how to get a “natural high” as an alternative to drugs, sharing what it said were “7 Better Highs” such as becoming famous on Instagram, playing video games and going to a pet store to look at animals.

DEA is also known for its attempts to decode emojis that it claims are used to buy drugs.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s first pick for attorney general in his second term, former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), recent said that he’s been advised that DEA is actively drafting a rule to complete the process of rescheduling marijuana “ASAP.”

It’s been over a month since Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to expeditiously finalize that process of moving cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). Gaetz says he has it on authority that DEA is taking steps to see that through.

However, a Justice Department spokesperson told Marijuana Moment last week that the agency has “no update or comments” on the rescheduling matter.

Source link

A hemp company is pushing back on a recent court filing from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) about the agency’s stance that a cannabinoid produced synthetically from components of the cannabis plant is federally illegal—saying that its denial of another business’s petition on the issue undermines the arguments the government is making in ongoing litigation.

DEA issued a rule in May saying that while it had already considered hexahydrocannabinol (HHC) to be a Schedule I illegal substance under the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA), the agency will now giving the compound its own unique drug code for classification.

Two hemp companies filed separate lawsuits challenging the move, however, and last week DEA filed a brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in response to one of them—arguing that the company, Bluestar Operations, LLC, does not have standing to bring the case and, even if it did, it would fail on the merits.

The agency essentially said it has considered HHC to be illegal for decades and that assigning the code does is “a technical change that has no substantive effect on HHC’s status as a schedule I substance.”

“All the rule does is assign a tracking code to HHC to facilitate DEA’s administration of the CSA,” the brief said, adding that because the change “imposes no new obligations or liabilities,” Bluestar has not “identified any injury traceable to the rule that can be remedied in this proceeding.”

Bluestar, in a reply brief filed on Thursday, said DEA’s filing provided “no substantive answer to the merits” of its case.

“The DEA Rule, according to the Respondents, is something both simultaneously important enough to warrant publication in the Code of Federal Regulations yet sufficiently inconsequential that no one it reaches may be heard to challenge it,” lawyers for the company wrote. “Both cannot be true. That strategy fails on its own terms, and cannot rescue the DEA Rule which is unlawful on the merits.”

DEA’s position, Bluestar said in the filing, is that the company’s “injuries flow from the ‘preexisting’ status of HHC rather than from the DEA Rule.” But the agency “cannot have it both ways,” it said. “If HHC was already unambiguously a Schedule I substance, then no new agency action was necessary.”

The Bluestar filing also said that DEA’s argument that HHC is not “part of” the hemp plant contradicts the 2018 Farm Bill’s definition of hemp as including “all derivatives, extracts, cannabinoids, isomers” as well as the agency’s own “fifty-year practice of treating plant-elaborated compounds as retaining their botanical lineage.”

The drug agency’s brief last week also pointed to forthcoming planned changes in the legal status of hemp products.

Hemp derivatives with less than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC on a dry-weight basis were federally legalized under the 2018 Farm Bill that President Donald Trump signed during his first term in office. But late last year, the president signed new legislation containing provisions that will redefine hemp to make it so only products with 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container will remain legal after November 12.

As such, DEA said that the legal theory behind Bluestar’s case “will soon be overtaken by events.” The scheduled recriminalization of many hemp products “will defeat whatever remains of Bluestar’s claims,” it argued.

That said, Senate recently approved a funding bill that includes a provision to delay the effective date of the hemp product ban until December 11—a move that was supported by the White House. While that change has not yet been approved by the House of Representatives or enacted into law, industry supports believe it could give them more time to convince Congress to enact a regulatory structure for hemp products as an alternative to broad prohibition.

The new Bluestar brief pushed back on DEA’s citation of the potential change in hemp products’ federally legal status, saying that “the 2025 amendment is prospective—it is not yet in effect, and cannot retroactively supply a limitation the language of the 2018 Farm Bill never contained.”

“If anything, the 2025 amendment underscores that under current law—the only law governing the DEA Rule—hemp-derived HHC is lawful hemp,” the company’s lawyers wrote.

Separately, a lawyer for Bluestar sent a letter to the Fourth Circuit’s clerk on Saturday to notify the court of what he called a “dispositive development bearing directly” on DEA’s “defensive argument that Bluestar has failed to exhaust its remedies through a petition for rulemaking.”

The agency’s brief last week had said the “appropriate” course for the company was to file an administrative petition to reschedule HHC rather than file the current lawsuit.

But what DEA “did not disclose to the Court was the critical fact that another HHC manufacturer pursued that very route on June 18, 2026,” J. Gregory Troutman of Troutman Law Office, PLLC wrote in the letter on behalf of Bluestar. “That petition made the same core procedural and substantive arguments that Bluestar makes here, including parallel constitutional arguments.”

Troutman noted that “a mere 17 hours after Bluestar filed” its initial reply brief, “DEA transmitted its denial of this parallel administrative petition.”

“The short temporal gap between Bluestar’s Reply brief and the DEA’s denial of a parallel administrative petition on the same issues cannot be a coincidence,” the lawyer wrote. “It infers futility vis-à-vis the Respondents’ exhaustion of remedies argument and negates their standing traceability, redressability and mootness arguments. It also confirms the Petitioners’ closed-door/moving-target defenses, infers that the DEA manufactured its defenses and further confirms the basis for granting relief here.”

Meanwhile, the appeals court considering Bluestar’s challenge in June denied the company’s request for a stay on the drug code rule pending resolution of the litigation.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is considering a separate similar case brought by the hemp company IHC Investments, Inc., which also filed the rescheduling petition that Bluestar’s lawyer noted in his letter to the Fourth Circuit.

Both suits say the agency’s decision is “unlawful.”

In earlier briefs filed in June, DEA has said that each petitioner “fails to meet any of the factors required to show that a stay pending review would be warranted.”

HHC can be found in trace amounts in cannabis plants but is also synthesized by hydrogenating cannabidiol (CBD). It’s sometimes sprayed on cannabis flowers that are low in delta-9 THC, the most well-known psychoactive component of marijuana, and its psychoactive effects are reportedly similar.

While the 2018 Farm Bill federally legalized hemp and its derivatives with less than .3 percent delta-9 THC on a dry-weight basis, DEA says that only applies to naturally occurring, and not synthetic, cannabinoids. As such, it is the agency’s position that HHC does not fall under the definition of legal hemp.

The Bluestar case cited a prior ruling in the Fourth Circuit that found the hemp-derived cannabinoid THC-O-acetate is federally legal despite DEA’s claim to the contrary.

“Congress intentionally employed expansive statutory language and did not prohibit cannabinoids subjected to ordinary extraction, refinement, conversion, hydrogenation, distillation, or similar manufacturing processes commonly utilized throughout the hemp industry,” the complaint said.

DEA’s move “conflicts with the plain text, structure, and purpose of the 2018 Farm Bill and unlawfully inserts limitations Congress neither intended, nor enacted,” it said. The agency’s action has “already caused immediate and concrete harm to the Petitioner, including substantial compliance costs, business uncertainty, reputational harm, disruption of commercial relationships, and interference with ongoing operations.”

“Congress, not executive agencies like the DEA, defines the scope of federal criminal liability. The DEA lacks authority to narrow Congress’s legalization of hemp cannabinoids through interpretive construction unsupported by statutory text.”

The IHC Investments case cited a prior Ninth Circuit ruling that the federal legalization of hemp through the 2018 Farm Bill removed restrictions on a wide range of molecules produced by the cannabis plant—including the psychoactive cannabinoid delta-8 THC.

The petition said that “DEA effectively, and thus unlawfully, attempts to expand federal criminal liability through administrative interpretation, unsupported by the plain statutory text of the enabling legislation.”

“Congress did not prohibit converted cannabinoids, hydrogenated cannabinoids, or cannabinoids subjected to ordinary commercial processing techniques,” the complaint said. “Congress did not clearly authorize the DEA to criminalize broad categories of hemp-derived cannabinoids through administrative interpretation.”

Both petitions argued that DEA’s move violates the major questions doctrine, a precedent holding that if an agency seeks to decide an issue of major national significance, that action needs to be supported by clear congressional authorization.

The agency’s ban of HHC “carries enormous economic and political significance affecting a nationwide hemp industry involving billions of dollars in commerce,” the litigation brought by Bluestar said.

DEA, for its part, said in the HHC rule it filed that “only tetrahydrocannabinols in or derived from the cannabis plant—not synthetic tetrahydrocannabinols—are excluded from control as ‘tetrahydrocannabinols in hemp.’”

“To clarify further, tetrahydrocannabinols produced through chemical conversion, even when hemp derived are considered synthetically produced for purposes of the CSA, do not qualify as ‘tetrahydrocannabinols in hemp’ under” the 2018 Farm Bill, the agency said.

The Federal Register notice wasn’t the first time that DEA addressed the legal status of HHC.

In a 2023 letter, Terrance Boos, chief of DEA’s Drug and Chemical Evaluation Section, wrote that HHC “does not occur naturally in the cannabis plant and can only be obtained synthetically, and therefore does not fall under the definition of hemp.”

The recent filing signed by DEA Administrator Terrance Cole said that “this rule does not affect the continuing status of hexahydrocannabinol as a schedule I controlled substance in any way.”

“This action, as an administrative matter, establishes a separate, specific listing for hexahydrocannabinol in schedule I of the CSA and assigns a DEA drug code for this substance,” it said. “This action will allow DEA to establish an aggregate production quota and grant individual manufacturing and procurement quotas to DEA-registered manufacturers of hexahydrocannabinol, who had previously been granted individual quotas for such purposes under the drug code for tetrahydrocannabinols.”

The DEA notice cited a move last year by an international drug control body to add HHC to Schedule II of the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971—but the document doesn’t note that when the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) took the action, the U.S. was the only country to abstain from the vote.

DEA said that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “concurs with the direct listing and drug code assignment of hexahydrocannabinol in the CSA.”

Read the filing and letter in the HHC lawsuit below:

Source link

A drug company spent nearly eight years fighting the DEA to make cannabis medicine the hard way. Now that everyone else is getting an easier path, it’s in court trying to undo the whole thing, a move that could send cannabis back to Schedule I for the entire industry.

MMJ International Holdings spent nearly eight years and millions of dollars fighting the DEA for the right to grow cannabis. It sued the agency. Its CEO called the delays “obstruction in uniform.” Now that the federal government has created a new, easier path for state-licensed cannabis businesses, MMJ is in court challenging the rescheduling.

For nearly a decade, it was the kind of company cannabis reformers could point to as a victim of the DEA. It did everything the federal government said to do. It filed drug applications with the FDA, won an Orphan Drug Designation, stood up a DEA-licensed lab, and asked the agency for permission to grow cannabis for clinical trials. Then it waited. And waited. Its application has been pending since December 2018.

The company was furious about it, loudly and for years. Its CEO, Duane Boise, did not mince words about the agency’s conduct. Now that same company is in federal court trying to reverse the rescheduling of marijuana, the first major federal marijuana reform in half a century. If it wins, cannabis could revert to Schedule I, the punishing 280E tax bill could return, and every state operator that just applied for federal relief could be left holding a voided application.

The company that spent the better part of a decade trying to get through the front door is now asking a court to decide whether everyone else should have to use it, too.

The Hard Road

To be fair to MMJ, and the story does not work unless you are, its grievance is real. The company, through its subsidiaries MMJ BioPharma Cultivation and MMJ BioPharma Labs, has chased FDA approval for cannabinoid medicines aimed at Huntington’s disease and multiple sclerosis since 2015. It holds FDA Investigational New Drug (IND) applications and FDA Orphan Drug Designation, and its lab carries a DEA Schedule I analytical registration. This is the expensive, slow, by-the-book pharmaceutical route the federal government has long told cannabis companies was the only legitimate one.

And the DEA stonewalled it. MMJ BioPharma Cultivation applied in December 2018 to become a federally authorized bulk manufacturer of cannabis for those trials. The DEA opened its pre-registration investigation in 2021 and inspected the facility that October. Then nothing. As Cannabis Business Times reported, MMJ sued the agency in 2024 over the delays, accusing it of obstructing legitimate research and running what the company called a “kangaroo court.” MMJ even challenged the constitutionality of the DEA’s in-house judges, and the Justice Department later conceded that the removal protections shielding those judges violate the separation of powers, though that concession did not resolve MMJ’s own stalled application.

On that record, MMJ had a point. A company that did everything right sat in limbo for years while the agency that demanded the rigor refused to act on it.

The Turn

Then the ground shifted. In April 2026, the Trump administration rescheduled state-licensed medical cannabis to Schedule III and opened an expedited DEA registration path for state operators. While MMJ kept pursuing FDA-approved cannabinoid medicines, state-licensed cannabis businesses were suddenly getting federal relief through a faster route, no INDs required.

So, MMJ joined the other side. It is now one of the petitioners in the consolidated challenge to the rescheduling order before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. As Business of Cannabis reported, MMJ filed alongside an addiction recovery clinic, a victims’ group and two doctors, naming President Trump, the Justice Department, the DEA, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and DEA Administrator Terrance Cole as defendants. The petitioners are not asking for a tweak. They want the court to stay the order and vacate it entirely.

Read what that means in plain terms. A stay freezes the reform. Vacatur erases it. Cannabis would revert to Schedule I, the 280E tax penalty that costs operators an effective rate far above ordinary businesses would come roaring back, and the DEA applications state companies are racing to file would rest on a legal foundation the court had just voided. A win for MMJ could become a major setback for the state-licensed industry.

The Argument, And the Witnesses

MMJ frames this as principle, not spite. Asked directly whether a company that fought to enter the federal system is now trying to block reform for everyone else, Boise rejected the premise. “That question assumes rescheduling is about helping an industry. It isn’t,” he told High Times. “We don’t oppose legitimate medicine, we oppose lowering the scientific standard for what gets called medicine.” The broader industry, he argued, “has spent years bastardizing the word ‘medicine’” by marketing state products as medical without the reproducible formulations, stability testing and clinical trials the FDA pathway demands. “MMJ chose the harder path because patients deserve medicines backed by science, not marketing.”

That distinction sits at the heart of the dispute, and so does the word itself. MMJ uses “medicine” in its pharmaceutical sense, in reference to products that have completed the FDA approval process. Much of the state-licensed cannabis industry, by contrast, has never argued that dispensary flower is equivalent to an FDA-approved pharmaceutical. It argues the two serve different purposes under different regulatory systems. So, the fight is less about whether pharmaceutical standards matter than whether state medical cannabis should have to become a pharmaceutical product before federal law can acknowledge it at all.

The company’s core claim is a regulatory double standard: it argues the government cannot extend Schedule III benefits to state operators who skipped the FDA pathway while companies that spent years and millions following it remain stuck in limbo. Its filings raise constitutional, statutory and treaty objections, including the argument that the rescheduling order creates a “hybrid schedule” Congress never authorized. On the consequences, a stay that would freeze the relief the whole industry is counting on, Boise was unmoved. If the court finds the order unlawful, he said, “any consequences for tax treatment, registrations, or existing business models would be the legal result of correcting an invalid agency action, not the objective of MMJ’s lawsuit. Our case is about restoring the rule of law, not restoring Schedule I for its own sake.”

To carry the message, MMJ has put forward people with federal pedigrees. In a June 17 announcement, it pointed to Jorge Jimenez, a retired DEA supervisory diversion investigator who once served as a section chief at DEA headquarters overseeing registrations, and Dr. Elio Mariani, a pharmaceutical scientist with decades in drug development. Their pitch is that opposition to rescheduling is not all ideology, that some of it comes from people who built the federal drug approval system. Also cited in the broader opposition is Dr. Bertha Madras, the Harvard Medical School professor and longtime cannabis skeptic who served on President Trump’s 2017 opioid commission, a figure with her own decades-long record on drug policy, not a witness MMJ brought forward.

The Ladder Problem

Here is the tension the company cannot fully escape. For years, MMJ argued that the DEA was the villain, that it ignored science, defied the rule of law and kept medicine from sick patients. Now it is asking a federal court whether anyone else should be allowed to enter through a different door. MMJ says it is a matter of scientific standards and equal treatment. Critics see a company trying to keep everyone else out of a system it spent years trying to enter.

You can read MMJ’s move two ways, and the company would insist on the first. One, it is a consistent demand that the government hold everyone to the same scientific standard, even if that means slowing the whole thing down. Two, it is a company that did the hard work, got beaten by the bureaucracy, and now wants to make sure nobody else gets the prize it was denied. The filings are about standards. The effect, if they succeed, is to pull the ladder up behind it.

Boise rejects the second reading outright. “This isn’t about denying anyone relief. It’s about ensuring that everyone who wants to market products as medicine plays by the same scientific rules,” he said. “Equal treatment doesn’t mean lowering the standard, it means applying the same standard to everyone.”

He also pushed back on the idea that simply granting MMJ its long-stalled DEA license would make the lawsuit go away. The application, filed in 2018, is still pending, and resolving it “would certainly address one part of the harm MMJ has experienced,” he said, but “even if MMJ received its DEA registration tomorrow, the legal questions before the Court would remain.”

That distinction matters. By MMJ’s own account, simply receiving its long-delayed registration would not end the dispute. The company is not only asking to enter the federal system itself. It is asking the court to throw out the easier path the rest of the industry just started using.

The stakes are not abstract, and they are close. The petitioners asked the D.C. Circuit to freeze the rescheduling order while the case plays out. That fight runs parallel to a separate DEA hearing on rescheduling that begins June 29, and there is no fixed deadline for either to resolve. If the court grants a stay, the relief the industry has been counting on, the tax break, the registration path, the first real federal thaw in half a century, stalls while the lawyers argue. There is an irony in that. The company that spent years condemning the DEA for making it wait is now asking a court to make everyone else wait, too.

Source link