US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana

One major effect of this is that weed stores will be able to use banks and payment processors legally once the regulators catch up.

Weed being illegal on a federal level has had some interesting effects. Because of these laws, all legal weed has to be grown, processed, and retailed within a single state. So much industry and local employment has been created by the legal barriers in place.<p>It’s probably still a net positive to release the federal restriction, but I hope all these small&#x2F;mid sized businesses don’t get gulped up by big tobacco or other mega corps

There you have it, the administrator themselves saying they believe in myths about cannabis: It’s a gateway drug; while simultaneously ignoring that the drug killing people, fent has a perfectly causal gateway drug in vicodin&#x2F;percs<p>&gt; Jack Riley, a former deputy administrator of the DEA, said he had concerns about the proposed change because he thinks marijuana remains a possible “gateway drug,” one that may lead to the use of other drugs.<p>&gt;“But in terms of us getting clear to use our resources to combat other major drugs, that’s a positive,” Riley said, noting that fentanyl alone accounts for more than 100,000 deaths in the U.S. a year.

Great news. A very sound move. Indeed, marijuana is much less dangerous of a drug yet considerably harmful in cases of chronic use in unreasonably high doses therefore should be controlled some way. What seems problematic nowadays is teenagers smoking too much. Also the idea of stoned people driving cars sounds scary. To me it seems it should be as available and legal as alcohol and cigarettes are, no less, no more.<p>What I&#x27;m curious about is how marijuana availability links to consumption of other drugs including hard drugs, alcohol, tobacco, tranquilizers and antidepressants. I hypothesize it may decrease these.

From the article: &quot;Then there’s the United States’ international treaty obligations, chief among them the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which requires the criminalization of cannabis.&quot;<p>Ah, I see. Somehow I doubt that if the US announced it would withdraw from this treaty, to be replaced by an amended version, we&#x27;d be invaded immediately by all our (former) allies and be driven straight into the sea. Like, I&#x27;m sure there are governments even more obsessed with cannabis than we&#x27;ve been, but like, they&#x27;ll have to get over it sometime.

On one hand I&#x27;m very happy with all the recent policy changes coming down from different federal agencies, but on the other there&#x27;s a very high likelihood that they will all be reversed a few months from now if&#x2F;when a new administration takes over. That is always the downside of executive rule. With Congress unwilling&#x2F;incapable of acting though I guess this is the best we&#x27;ll get.

America should have a long hard look at why it takes so long to do something that would have been considered &quot;reasonable&quot; by most of the country 15 years ago.

I’d rather the regime let Assange go, and pardoned Snowden. Allowing something most states already allow is weak sauce as far as populism is concerned.

Democrats will dangle the possibility of marijuana legalization to entice voters to turn out for the election. But I doubt legalization will actually happen; I&#x27;d be delighted to be proven wrong. I&#x27;m just too jaded, I guess.

Question: If this change goes into effect, will it effectively open up banking for all the cannabis related&#x2F;cannabis adjacent companies? Seems like a really smart move to bring them into the financial system.

Major impact will also be felt at cannabis research at land grant universities. Aka all the experiments to prove obvious stuff like different cultivars affect different people differently can finally happen at scale.<p>See cannabisstudieslab.com as an example of the kind of non plant touching research that Cannabis Studies majors have been doing due to the Schedule I status.

Great, let psychedelics be reclassified next

This is not good enough, in my opinion. It&#x27;s hard to treat the justice system seriously because of bullshit restrictions on victimless &quot;crimes&quot; like this. I&#x27;ll only be okay with this if alcohol gets reclassified as Schedule III.

For federal workers in legalized states, will they be able to use?

Here in Canada, it has been rather eye opening the extent of cannabis use. There are more cannabis shops then mcdonalds. You can grow your own and most people do. There&#x27;s online options.<p>A society which criminalizes something so popular and widely used; will ultimately fail at their prohibition.<p>The next step for society would be to attempt at changing opinion, but what are the unintended consequences? The answer is, bad news.

What an embarrassment to anyone in the DEA or public policy in general that this is still a thing.<p>Not sure how the DEA can consider itself a serious organization.

We should legalize some of the less harmful mild uppers like khat while we&#x27;re legalizing depressants.

Feels like they were keeping this card in their sleeves for when they needed a popularity boost.

&gt; it’ll remain controlled substance<p>Got to make sure the doctors get a cut by requiring prescriptions.

This change is not gonna legalize it, but will just make it “less illegal” acknowledging its medical use. While logically it make sense to move in this direction, I am afraid that ultimate consequences might be few large companies dominating the market completely and probably growing stuff offshore. If it gets a pass for recreational use then we will see weed induced soda in vending machines at school in couple of generations.

Reminder that Marijuana was made illegal 90 years ago due to pressure by a cartel of other drug peddlers (including opium and cocaine), and also a culture of pervasive racism that painted Marijuana as a trap that brown&#x2F;black races had fallen into and must be outlawed for white people.<p>Whatever you think about the effects of Marijuana on yourself or society, it&#x27;s clear that it should have never been outlawed in the first place, and wouldn&#x27;t have been outlawed if not for the factors above.<p>It seems that the fentanyl crisis has finally defeated the archaic drug policy in the states, but not in the way you think. If alcohol and tobacco were outlawed in the US, it would immediately become impossible to buy them without risking getting a deadly dose of fentanyl. Legalization of marijuana, controlled legalization, is the only sane answer.<p>(And this is coming from someone who doesn&#x27;t partake)

I&#x27;m not sure how this will affect the current &quot;mom and pop&quot; weed stores. I know that The Big Dogs are just raring to get in on the action, and I&#x27;ll lay odds they have done things like preemptively register weed brands.

Elections have consequences!!

Why is it that in Amsterdam you have coffee-shops where you can sit relax and smoke cannabis but nothing like that seems to exist in New York City? Or elsewhere in America, is there?

It&#x27;s actually wild what the executive can get done in an election year... With the side effect of dangling bait for legislators to take a contrarian, nationally unpopular position.

ironic use of the word &quot;marijuana&quot; in the title

Will this open hiring options for government agencies?<p>Will nonviolent drug dealers be released from prison?

&gt; the U.S.&#x27;s international treaty obligations to criminalize cannabis<p>Is that a thing?

There’s been no strong studies on the harmful effects of weed due to its illegal status. Now that is legal in many places, in 30 years we will know a lot more as this natural experiment unfolds. I would not be surprised if we see different but equally harmful effects.<p>Let the experiment begin.

Great, now do psilocybin, LSD and MDMA.

While it being moved to Schedule ~II~ (Correction: III) rather than removed altogether is a bit disappointing, I&#x27;m not gonna miss the forest for the trees on this one: this is a big deal after all this time.

&gt; … and acknowledge it has less potential for abuse than some of the nation’s most dangerous drugs.<p>No, really, they&#x27;re prepared to concede that water is wet? Shocker!

The greatest thing about tight, upcoming elections is that governments actually start to do a tiny bit of what people want. Great result.

The AP article has one critical thing wrong:<p>&quot;The DEA’s proposal, which still must be reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget, would recognize the medical uses of cannabis and acknowledge it has less potential for abuse than some of the nation’s most dangerous drugs. However, it would not legalize marijuana outright for recreational use.&quot;<p>It is in fact because they were ordered to do so by the US FDA, who by law decides what schedule drugs should be in. It started with MDMA, then LSD, Psilocybin and marijuana. In that order. They signaled the DEA to reschedule all those things because, in fact, they are legitimate medicine and I cannot help to wonder if that started with MAPS (maps.org) applying to do trials with MDMA for PTSD and being *beyond* due dilligent.<p>The FDA will collect data from any relevant agency whenever something (at least drugs( are applied for $whatever use. I have heard through the grapewine that the FDA were downright furious to learn the DEA had lied about MDMA for years while veterans are killing themselves daily. Much of the DEA data supposedly showed a ton of deaths attributed to MDMA just because a pill with a logo was being sold as if it was MDMA, while in fact it was sooooo many other dangerous things. The US DEA lies about just about everything. These substances are not depency-forming like opioids. If the DEA of any US alphabet soup move their lips they are lying.<p>The empathogen and psychdelics are not even habitforming: Do you know what happens if you do LSD daily for a week? I do, You can lick an entire sheet on the 7th day and hardly feel a thing, which I know because I have. Israel has been leading the way in marijuana research for decades. 90 year old holocaust surviors inhale marijuana vapor,for PTSD. I find extreme relief from PTSD myself using marijuana vapor: The nightmares stop, and suddenly I sleep 8 hrs a night, a few days of that I almost forget I have PTSD. Then I moved back the &quot;richest nation of earth&quot; (and it can go fuck itself) and essentially have to be a criminal to get regular sleep to function keep a job and not live in a perpetual nightmare. WE have Bedrocan &#x2F; Bedrolight, but nobody can get a script for it because of all the nonsense authorities and socialized medicine&#x2F;psychiatry thinks about it. Terminally ill cancer patients have begged to try it and at least on one occasion die 6 days after the news that he got denied died, in hospital from accute opioid poisoning. THey kill cancer patients with opiods all the time.<p>And WTF are DEA doing with offices in Copenhagen, Denmark?! They set up shop there and suddenly swedish police (SSI) has endless kilos of cocaine to plant and don&#x27;t want the labs analyzing it following swedish law (the law say to destroy within 3 months of seizure and lab analysis and it has been all over national tv in the Scandinavian nations they Police active tried to stop them destroy man y many kilos of it, 9kg of which they were caught planting.). Oh, and SSI police have a tendency to become cocaine addicts. -All that cocaine with no oversightmakes it an occupational hazard, I guess.<p>IMHO, if you go to war for me, you deserve the best treatment available for your injuries. MDMA assisted therapy trials have helped veterans I know personally. I stoppped drinking liquor &amp; wine the first time I tried marijuana, 20 years ago. The UN removed cannabis from the narcotics list in 2020, for decades it was embarassing: None of its cannabinoid components ever went on it as no narcotic effect were demonstrated they were listed as psychotropic substances, along with caffeine, psychdelics, nicotine, alcoholm etc. The original Opioum conventions had a clause specifically permitting businesses to have upto 500g for resale in small quanties to adults. That is how Dutch Coffee Shios exist. The UN listedcannabis in the 1930&#x27;s under the __assumption__ of opium like effects, nobody what was in marijuana until late in the 60s, many years after the 1961 Narcotics treaty.<p>I am still waiting for the war on tylenol, which has killed over 100k in US a year for decades. Remember when opioids killed 100k a year in the US? The entire world does, yet most people dunno about Iran&#x27;s struggle: almost half the afghan heroin ends up i Iran, has for decades. Afghanistan makes about 80% of illicit heroin.

Looks like Biden is really worried about re-election.

What the heck is going on? This is literally top post on HN and the comments look like a wasteland of nonsense and bots.

I did some AI-assisted research on this, and have come to the following tentative conclusions:<p>1. The re-scheduling will happen (90%), the administrative hurdles will be cleared. Only counterexample I could find was Kratom in 2016, which was the reverse of this situation, and the DEA dropped the proposal at the public comment stage.<p>2. Trump will not reverse it if elected (80%). He&#x27;s been pro-states-rights on cannabis (or outright legalization) going all the way back 1990, and has criticized Biden on this.<p>3. Unlikely many US states that outlaw it will change, but I do predict (75%) at least one major European country will follow suit within a year, given Germany beat US to the punch<p>4. Effects in the US will be minor, outside of weed stores using the banking system as another comment pointed out, since most enforcement is state level.<p>5. But if there are changes, the best evidence we have on this comes from state legalization, where the effects are estimated to be huge (+3% state income, +17% substance use disorders).

Utter bullshit. Reclassifying schedule 1 Drugs requires the approval of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of the UN. Otherwise, they are just reclassifying it under an already reclassified treaty structure as a red herring.<p>The Psychotropic Substances Act modified the existing schedule, but left other acts in tact - those other acts are the ones being modified by this nonsense circus.

I think most people agree that weed shouldn&#x27;t be a schedule 1 drug, but I believe that the movement to decriminalize will have unforeseen consequences on our society. Marijuana use leads to cognitive decline and exacerbates psychiatric conditions even in healthy individuals, full stop. The literature on this is clear. Whether the tradeoff is worth it or not (the increased pleasure, for the decrease in cognitive ability), should be up to the individual to decide.<p>The problem I have is that <i>no one is talking about the potential consequences</i> when they&#x27;re talking about legalization. My 70 year old mom is going to parties with her friends where they all have a new habit of smoking marijuana because &quot;it&#x27;s legal and safe&quot;. Regulators, politicians, and advocates only hail the positive effects of marijuana and no one is talking about the cognitive risks involved.<p>The reason probably is because I think most people agree that it&#x27;s stupid to send people to jail for smoking marijuana. But they&#x27;re conflating the idea that decriminalization is good with the idea that marijuana then must not be bad for you. And this is wholly not true, and I wish more people were talking about this.<p>Btw, I know I will probably get downvoted for this because marijuana users don&#x27;t want to face the fact that they might be dampening their long-term cognitive potential but <i>please</i> go do a full review of the literature—you will begin to share the doubt that I have.

Is the weed strength so strong these days that actually it should at this class

Honestly, we should look to fix the issues that lead to people depending on weed, alcohol, and other drugs instead.<p>These drugs are escapes for people - and a lot of them, especially younger kids get completely hooked on the escaped from reality from these drugs (including alcohol).<p>We should instead be limit the use of these drugs and have teams dedicated to studying why people are turning to these instead. It&#x27;s OK to have them on the weekends, but most people I know who smoke weed are on it the majority of the time. Alcohol isn&#x27;t much better - most do limit it to after hours &#x2F; weekends, but there are a few who tend to overdo it.<p>From a biased point of view, I&#x27;ve had a few young family members and friends who turned to weed as their go-to for their daily lives, and it has changed their lifestyle, made them far less willing to live out their life and pursue actual goals. They definitely had both the potential and backing of their families (mid to high class) to do great, but chose to instead live a life of &#x27;rotting away&#x27; in their words. Out of them only one has turned their life around (still smoking on weekends) citing that it made them not want to do absolutely anything in their day to day life.

I&#x27;m sorry but after seeing how american gradually get into worse and worse drugs, and seeing channel 5&#x27;s video on people using tranq... yeah I think complete ban on drugs for non medical reasons is the best choice.

however, the weed these days is much stronger, and not the one our grandfathers smoked.<p>if something could be done about the thc content -- that will be nice.<p>weed isn&#x27;t exactly harmful -- but long term it will be interesting to see the consequences. now already a lot of people are paranoid due to weed use.

Just in time for the election. It baffles me why this took so long given the number of states legalizing it.

Did nobody else notice that this is a story based on sources &quot;Familiar with the matter&quot;?<p>Have we learned nothing from the Mueller Investigation? How are we all still falling for unsourced stories 5 years later?

Finally!<p>Then hopefully the f... UN can do that too.<p>I&#x27;m totally shocked that the UN has such a hard and shitty drug policy.

FWIW I asked ChatGPT how long the process would take from DEA putting the rule out for public comment until it becomes an active rule:<p>&gt; <i>The entire process can take from a few months to several years, depending on the complexity of the issue, the volume of public feedback, and the urgency of the reclassification.</i>

It&#x27;s a trap, you will be drug addict.

I really don&#x27;t think this is a positive in any way, unless you oppose recreational marijuana usage.<p>Making it a schedule III puts it back in &quot;Doctor prescription&quot; territory, and since there&#x27;s now a legal route to getting it, a lot of these businesses that have operated with impunity are breaking a different set of laws if it&#x27;s schedule III. No doubt that laws and decriminalization statutes would need to be updated to comply federally. Banks may be able to be used, but only if you&#x27;re a registered pharmacy. It&#x27;s really just a lot more questions and a lot more people to profit on the chain to selling it.<p>Most of the world still treats it as an illegal substance. In the US we have definitely allowed popular sentiment to make it appear much less harmful than it is. I&#x27;m not sure it belongs in schedule I, but it certainly doesn&#x27;t belong OTC.