US Rescheduling Hearing Nears End

Opposition’s own witness acknowledges Schedule III standard.

The landmark administrative hearing on US cannabis rescheduling will end today.

Yesterday, the last of the seven designated participants called to testify put their case on record, marking the end of a dramatic two weeks in which the government’s medical-use analysis, the legal test used to reach it, and the projected downstream consequences of rescheduling have all faced intense scrutiny.

We’ve seen witnesses under oath confirm an intra-agency divide, and leading opposition experts acknowledge that cannabis satisfies the legal standard for Schedule III classification.

As the hearing enters its final stage, and Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek Julius prepares to weigh up the evidence and issue his recommendation to the DEA, here’s what we’ve learned from the opposition’s testimony over the last two weeks.

An agency divided

Last week, long-time anti-cannabis campaign group Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) called Dr Luli Akinfiresoye, a pharmacologist in the DEA’s Drug and Chemical Evaluation Section, who holds a PhD in pharmacology and authored the DEA’s own 2024 Scientific Data Review of cannabis.

Called under subpoena, Akinfiresoye’s participation had been resisted by the DEA, which issued a letter limiting the scope of her testimony, but portions of those restrictions were overruled by Julius.

Akinfiresoye told the tribunal that she had prepared an independent eight-factor analysis in 2024 and a further review in December 2024, identifying gaps she said the HHS analysis had left unaddressed.

Applying the DEA’s traditional five-part CAMU test, which she argued is more rigorous and has been upheld in court, she concluded that cannabis lacks currently accepted medical use.

She testified that cannabis is not consistently reproducible, that state medical programmes are a primary source of diversion, and that the DEA’s own scientific review addressed critical issues the HHS analysis omitted.

The government declined to cross-examine her, leaving her conclusions unrebutted in the hearing record. It believes that Akinfiresoye’s analysis rests on a legal standard that has been superseded, and her testimony is aimed at the record for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rather than at persuading Julius.

SAM’s other marquee scientific expert was Dr Bertha K Madras, Professor of Psychobiology at Harvard Medical School, a researcher at McLean Hospital, and a former senior official at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

She was the first opposition witness to contest the medical-use evidence directly rather than its downstream consequences.

Madras testified that cannabis lacks the purity, batch-to-batch consistency, and validated dosing expected of pharmaceutical products, and that several clinical trials cited by the FDA were unblinded or conducted at potencies well below those found in current dispensaries.

She argued that state programs authorize use without the controlled trials required for conventional pharmaceutical approval.

Under cross-examination by the DEA, however, Madras acknowledged that cannabis meets the statutory criteria for Schedule III, according to The Marijuana Herald, whose reporting was corroborated by The Dales Report’s Washington correspondent Gretchen Gailey, who covered the hearing from inside the courtroom.

She also testified that cannabis does not produce the respiratory-depression deaths associated with opioids, because cannabinoid receptors do not regulate breathing in the same way.

This point supports the government’s comparative safety argument directly.

Other opposing positions

The National Drug and Alcohol Screening Association (NDASA), which opened the opposition’s case on July 02, had argued that rescheduling would undermine the legal framework for employer cannabis testing.

However, its own director, Mary Jo McGuire, conceded under DEA cross-examination that private employers can continue testing regardless, under company policy

The federally mandated Department of Transportation program, which covers safety-sensitive workers such as truck drivers and airline pilots, would be affected, private employer testing would not.

DUID Victim Voices, which testified July 07, estimated that rescheduling could produce roughly 6,000 additional drug-related traffic deaths per year.

The government declined to cross-examine, according to Vicente LLP’s legal analysis of the proceedings.

Dr Kenneth Finn, a pain physician who testified on July 08, took aim at the clinical trials the FDA used to establish cannabis’s medical credentials.

He argued that they were conducted with lower-potency products than those now commonly sold in state dispensaries.

Rescheduling, he argued, would effectively legitimize a commercial market selling products with little resemblance to the cannabis the research was actually based on.

DEA’s brief cross-examination established that cannabis carries some clinical benefit, without directly rebutting Finn’s product-mismatch argument.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation closed the hearing’s second week on July 10 with operational law-enforcement testimony from special agent Erica Stephens, who described seizing more than 10,000 lbs. of cannabis from ‘deregulated states’.

When asked to clarify what she meant by ‘deregulated’, Stephens said ‘rescheduling’. The informed her that Schedule III status would not decriminalize cannabis, end federal controls, or legalize diversion.

Further cross-examination from the government noted that Schedule II substances including OxyContin and Adderall are diverted without their scheduling status being used as grounds for reclassification.

The hearing paused for one day on 9 July after finishing ahead of schedule, before resuming with the TBI’s case.

What’s next?

The states of Nebraska, Idaho, Indiana and Louisiana presented their case yesterday with Dr Deepak Cyril D’Souza, founding director of the Yale Centre for the Science of Cannabis and Cannabinoids and editor of Marijuana and Madness, as their principal scientific expert, alongside Humboldt County, California Sheriff William Honsal.

Proceedings are scheduled to conclude no later than today, July 15.

After testimony closes, parties will submit proposed findings and post-hearing briefs.

Julius will issue a recommended decision, against which parties have 20 days to file exceptions.

The full record then passes to the DEA Administrator, who makes the final call on rescheduling.

That decision can be challenged in the US Court of Appeals, and building a strong record for exactly that challenge is what most opposition participants have been doing throughout.

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