Trump’s executive order does little more than offer a tax cut to an industry that profits from addiction.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order today that committed the Justice Department to “rescheduling” marijuana. Although the order won’t legalize pot, it will relax a series of restrictions that the federal government has long enforced. The move has a broad coalition of supporters, including many progressives, who say that it will enable medical research and alleviate mass incarceration. But in reality, rescheduling marijauna will do little more than hand a tax break to the corporations that spent millions of dollars lobbying for it.
The term rescheduling comes from the Controlled Substances Act, the legal foundation of America’s drug-control regime. Under the CSA, controlled drugs (as opposed to uncontrolled ones, such as acetaminophen and ibuprofen) are sorted into five schedules. For decades, the government has listed marijuana under Schedule I, which it reserves for drugs that have no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. If the administration’s plan goes through, marijuana will shift to Schedule III, a classification for drugs that have a medical use and a relatively low potential for abuse or dependence.
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Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
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