Folio Weed: Way Behind Schedule 

Words by Shelton Hull 

Last month’s column noted that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had recommended last Aug. 29 to remove marijuana from the DEA’s list of Schedule I narcotics, and a number of readers were curious to know what that actually means, in words and actions related to legalization. And the answer to that is: nothing. 

The DEA’s drug scheduling actually has five parts: I (“Drug is not safe to use, even under medical supervision”), II (“Abusing the drug can cause severe physical and mental addiction”), III (“Abusing the drug can cause severe mental addiction, or moderate physical addiction”), IV (“Abusing the drug may lead to moderate mental or physical addiction”) and V (“Abusing the drug may lead to mild mental or physical addiction”). 

It’s really a mess, and it could do with substantial revisions from the medical community — that is, if drug policy was actually influenced by the medical community, which it is not, and has never been. The seeming specificity of their definitions belies the real-world malleability of those terms, and that’s where the trouble began for countless Americans over the past 52 years. 

Schedule I currently lists hundreds of different substances, mostly opioids and their derivatives, which are the main cause of most overdoses in America in this century with that process, of course, accelerating as more drugs are being laced with fentanyl over the past decade, increasing the lethal potential of everything else. It also includes depressants, specifically Quaaludes and GHB.

Schedule I narcotics are supposed to be the worst of the worst, and the placement of cannabis on that list has been a running joke since your parents were kids. Now, that applies no matter how old you are, because it resulted from the infamous Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which, for my money, is one of the 10 most disastrous pieces of legislation ever signed into law in this country. Signed by Richard Nixon, a man known for bad decisions, it was the beginning of the Drug War, as we know it. 

Marijuana was targeted specifically because of its association with liberals and minorities, which is exactly how it always was, going back to the Marijuana Tax Act of 1914, where the plant was first made illegal. In 1970, however, there were distinctly political implications, like the anti-war movement and a civil rights movement that had gotten much angrier after the government helped kill (and helped cover up killings of) many of the movement’s key leaders in the 1960s. The legislation went hand-in-hand with COINTELPRO, a top-down systematized effort to destabilize groups they didn’t like — and it worked. Reagan/Bush escalated in the 1980s, then Clinton escalated in the 1990s, and that is the status quo that persisted through much of the past 30 years: mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws, no-knock warrants and probable cause, all applied with the subtlety of dry rub on a brisket. The result? Thousands of people dead, hundreds of thousands imprisoned, millions and millions of years’ worth of time served, for nothing — for no good reason at all. HHS has now washed their hands of it.

(Schedule I also includes most types of hallucinogens, including mescaline and peyote, though it’s worth noting that psilocybin mushrooms have been decriminalized on local levels in Denver, Oakland, Ann Arbor, Northampton, Cambridge, Santa Cruz and Seattle, as well as in Oregon, Colorado and, ironically, Washington, D.C. itself. In most cases, efforts to decriminalize cannabis helped lead directly to those changes, all of which have happened in just the last few years. Psilocybin and MDMA were both given “breakthrough” status by the FDA in 2017, and Glenn Greenwald’s magazine “The Intercept” published material in 2022 suggesting that MDMA might be approved for official therapeutic use by the FDA this year. In the cases of MDMA and psilocybin, as well as cannabis, the U.S veteran community has played a crucial role in both advocacy and organization.)

Elections, especially big national ones like these, always present great opportunities for citizens to advocate even more effectively than usual on behalf of the causes they care about. With legalization of cannabis likely to make the Florida ballot in 2024, cannabisseurs constitute a voting bloc that all sides will definitely be reaching out to, in service of their own candidates. 

Democrats are already doing that, since their current state chairwoman, Nikki Fried (one of my favorite people ever), oversaw that industry as secretary of agriculture in Florida from 2019 to 2023. Business really began in January 2015, but the period of greatest growth occurred under her watch. If legalization does happen, it will instantly push the market here into the low ten figures, and it will happen because of her efforts, then and now, and that’s good news for the White House. Gov. Ron DeSantis also has every right to take credit for that growth — fair is fair — but he probably won’t, which is also good news for all of us.