Congresswoman Says Federal Marijuana Policy Is At A ‘Standstill’ As Trump Weighs Rescheduling

A Democratic lawmaker says Congress is at a “crossroads” over marijuana reform, with ongoing uncertainty over where President Donald Trump will land on a rescheduling proposal that’s currently at a “standstill” before his adminstration.

Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV), co-chair of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus, spoke on Friday at an event with student researchers affiliated with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s (UNLV) Cannabis Policy Institute—stressing the need to expand research opportunities amid the state legalization movement.

Despite Trump endorsing the Biden administration-initiated push to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) while campaigning for his second term, Titus said that people “don’t know what to expect” from the current administration.

The president did say last month that a decision on rescheduling would come within weeks, but while “people got encouraged to think that maybe that meant something,” Titus said, “it’s just hard to tell. It’s one crisis after another.”

“We’re at kind of a crossroads right now at the federal level,” she said, adding that while Trump endorsed rescheduling as well as a 2024 Florida marijuana legalization ballot initiative, there was a political calculus at play during the election.

The then-candidate understood the “popularity of the issue,” she said. “So he promised to either deschedule or reschedule or unschedule marijuana during that campaign.”

“Now, he promised a lot of things during that campaign the haven’t happened, but that’s one of them,” Titus said, “and so we aren’t really sure what his position is going to be.”

To be sure, while the president explicitly endorsed the move to Schedule III while campaigning, his most recent comments about an imminent decision on the reform were more vague. And Titus said it’s unhelpful that the administration he’s constructed includes top officials who’ve been “historically anti-cannabis.”

“It’s all just kind of at a standstill,” the congresswoman said. “You don’t know what to expect.”

Titus also quipped that it’s unclear how U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would come down on cannabis reform. While he’s previously promoted legalization and access to psychedelic medicine, Kennedy “has a brain that’s been eaten by a worm,” she said, referring to revelation that he was diagnosed with a parasitic worm in his brain.

“The federal government remains behind” the states on marijuana, Titus said. “Congress is mixed. There’s a lot of legislation, but it’s not moving very fast, and it’s mostly sponsored by Democrats—but not solely.”

“It’s not some fringe issue. It’s a become a pretty mainstream issue—with many people from both parties saying that they support some legalization,” which has been “reflected in the states,” she said, adding that “as more states pass this through referendum or through their state legislatures, that puts more pressure on members of Congress to get something done at that level.”

Titus also criticized the lack of banking access for marijuana businesses, which she said makes the industry harder to regulate “because if you were going through a banking system, you could have more accountability and more transparency.”

Addressing students at the event, the congresswoman said that “having you do this work on cannabis is really exciting, because it wasn’t that long ago that people didn’t want to touch it on campuses.”

“They didn’t want to have anything to do with it. They were worried about federal government coming down and losing grant money,” she said. “They didn’t know what the consequences would be.”

Following Titus’s speech, several undergraduate and graduate students delivered presentations on their research into cannabis issues, which touched on a wide range of topics such as tax policy, marijuana use trends and the relationship between legalization and the illicit market.

Titus also said that a complicating factor in the push for federal marijuana reform is the ongoing debate over hemp regulations, which has seen mostly conservative lawmakers seek to ban intoxicating hemp cannabinoid products that were federally legalized under the 2018 Farm Bill that Trump signed into law during his first term.

The congresswoman further weighed in on psychedelics reform, noting that there’s been a move toward loosening laws around substances such as psilocybin.

“That may be well and good,” she said. But “that hasn’t been studied in any kind of legitimate way either.”

“Really, I just hope that we don’t jump to that and leave the cannabis behind—and also the animosity towards that because it’s seen as more extreme, I hope, doesn’t have a negative impact on the progress that we’re making for cannabis,” she said. “So it’s kind of a double-edged sword.”

Photo courtesy of Philip Steffan.