The End Depends on the Beginning

The DEA hearing on cannabis rescheduling starts this week. Seven voices will be heard. All seven oppose rescheduling. Not one supporter of reform was invited. The government itself has to argue its own case in an empty room.

How did we get here?

We got here because the beginning was a lie.

Nixon’s War on Drugs was never about drugs. His own aide John Ehrlichman said it plainly years later — they couldn’t make it illegal to be Black or anti-war, so they associated those communities with heroin and marijuana and criminalized both. Aggressively. The science didn’t matter. The public health didn’t matter. It was about power and control. It was always about power and control.

Every institution built from that moment forward carries that lie in its foundation. Cultures are hard to break. The DEA. The Controlled Substances Act. The scheduling system that put cannabis in Schedule I alongside heroin — more dangerous, they said, than cocaine. A lie, compounding a lie, building an entire apparatus of enforcement and incarceration on top of it.

Decades of lives destroyed. Communities gutted. And now we’re supposed to trust that same apparatus to get it right? What was I thinking? Obviously, I wanted to believe. I definitely did not realize the challenge ahead.

New York tried to do something different. We built a licensing system designed specifically for the people and communities most harmed by the drug war. Restorative justice, on paper. A chance to rewrite at least part of the ending. Unfortunately, that has yet to work out, and it is very questionable if it will. The mistakes are countless.

But the federal framework underneath it all hasn’t changed. The DEA is still the DEA. And this hearing — stacked entirely with prohibitionists, with not a single reform advocate in the room — is proof that the beginning keeps poisoning the end.

I’m a progressive capitalist. I believe in markets and I believe in change. I’ve watched this industry get built from the ground up, slowly, painfully, against enormous resistance. And I believe cannabis rescheduling is right — morally, scientifically, economically.

But I also know that you cannot build something clean on a foundation of lies. The end depends on the beginning. And until we reckon honestly with where this all started — with Nixon, with racism, with deliberate political manipulation dressed up as public health policy — we are going to keep arriving at crooked endings.

Call me crazy, but this case might be one of them.