{"id":14189,"date":"2025-12-29T18:33:24","date_gmt":"2025-12-30T01:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/what-does-reclassification-of-marijuana-mean-for-states\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T19:33:03","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T19:33:03","slug":"what-does-reclassification-of-marijuana-mean-for-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/what-does-reclassification-of-marijuana-mean-for-states\/","title":{"rendered":"What does reclassification of marijuana mean for states?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Will
Will the reclassification of marijuana from a Schedule 1 drug to a Schedule III drug open the door to banking on a federal level? Will it hurt sales or help sales in states like Colorado that have already legalized the drug? (Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald file)<\/span>du1-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The reactions to President Donald Trump\u2019s recent executive order to move marijuana from a Schedule I drug, akin to heroin, to Schedule III \u2013 think ketamine \u2013 drew some immediate, perhaps expected, reactions.<\/p>\n

Colorado Leads, an alliance of cannabis business leaders in the state, welcomed the potential move, saying it represented \u201ca meaningful step toward aligning federal policy with scientific evidence, public opinion, and decades of state-level experience. Rescheduling marijuana acknowledges what patients, consumers, doctors, and public health and safety experts have long known: cannabis has significant medical benefits and does not belong in the same legal category as the most dangerous controlled substances.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the national nonprofit One Chance to Grow Up decried the decision.<\/p>\n

\u201cAcross the country, high-potency marijuana products are proliferating, even as research continues to demonstrate harm to the developing brain,\u201d it said in a statement. \u201cReclassifying marijuana at any potency or amount wrongly suggests that it carries a lower risk of misuse and has accepted medical value, claims the science debunks.\u201d<\/p>\n

The executive order prompted a lot of questions, ranging from whether the order will open the door to banking on a federal level to its impact on employment. And that, for right now, with the executive order in need of approval from the Department of Justice, seems to be the sweet spot \u2013 with no one really completely sure about what happens next, said Sam Kamin, a University of Denver law professor and cannabis industry expert.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe answer ranges everywhere from \u2018this will be a disaster\u2019 to \u2018this will be a boon,\u2019 and it really depends how much the federal government decides to enforce the federal laws that it\u2019s largely been ignoring now for 15 years,\u201d Kamin told Colorado Matters senior host Ryan Warner.<\/p>\n

The boon, in essence, would be a stamp of approval on what, in Colorado, is a multi-billion-dollar industry. According to a news release from Gov. Jared Polis, Colorado will likely surpass $1 billion in sales and $200 million in tax revenue before year\u2019s end; since marijuana sales were legalized in 2014, sales have topped $3 billion.<\/p>\n

Kamin likens the current system, where most adults can go to a dispensary and purchase cannabis, whether plants for smoking or edibles for chilling, to shopping in a candy store. But, he adds, that\u2019s where the potential for disaster lurks, with the Trump administration playing the role of a curmudgeon turning away trick-or-treaters at the front door.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo moving to Schedule three would mean that this would be like anabolic steroids or ketamine or the other things that are in that category, and it\u2019s illegal to sell those without a prescription,\u201d Kamin said. \u201cYou can\u2019t sell them out of a storefront to anyone who walks in the way we sell marijuana here in Colorado.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s sort of a through-the-looking-glass take on it, but it\u2019s not implausible to me that everything in this executive order speaks to medical use, speaks to CBD, speaks to the elderly and chronic pain and all of those things. I could see a Justice Department saying, \u2018Look, advocates for marijuana. You\u2019ve been saying this is great medicine for 50 years. We finally heard you. There\u2019s a medical path. Take the medical path. All other paths are closed.\u2019 \u2026 That would be completely disastrous (for retailers).\u201d<\/p>\n

Again, questions in search of answers.<\/p>\n

\u201cMarijuana is treated by the states and by people in the states far differently than the federal government treats it,\u201d Kamin said. \u201cThat would certainly remain true under this rescheduling. I don\u2019t think most people think of marijuana as a pill that you take for back pain. They think of it as gummies that you chew to go to bed at night, or something that you smoke or vape or inhale. The federal government is still not there. They\u2019re very much talking about medicine. They\u2019re not talking about fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

To read more stories from Colorado Public Radio, visit www.cpr.org<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trump\u2019s executive order prompts a lot of questions<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14190,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,135,1611,1610,994],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-14189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-headlines","tag-marijuana","tag-medical-marijuana","tag-recreational-marijuana","tag-trueanthem"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14189"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19376,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14189\/revisions\/19376"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14189"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=14189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}