Whose Weed Is It Anyway?

Wyoming’s Attorney General Keith Kautz decided, on his own authority, that marijuana will stay a Schedule I substance under state law, full stop, to ensure that marijuana remains a Schedule I controlled drug no matter what the federal government does. One person, in one office, overriding the direction the rest of the country is heading, because the legislature hadn’t explicitly told him otherwise. Wyoming voters have tried and failed for years to get any kind of cannabis reform onto the ballot. The people keep asking. The power structure keeps saying no. That’s the pattern with cannabis policy in this country. It is not being run by data, by the people who actually use the product, or, half the time, by elected officials who answer to voters. It’s being run by whoever happens to hold an administrative pen that week. Why? Power and lobbyists’ money.

Look at the federal rescheduling hearing that’s supposed to wrap up July 15. This is potentially the biggest shift in marijuana policy in over fifty years, deciding whether cannabis moves from Schedule I, next to heroin, to Schedule III. And the DEA invited seven participants to testify. All seven oppose rescheduling. Not one pro-reform voice got a seat at the table, including NORML, who asked to be included and got rejected. That’s not a hearing. That’s theater dressed up as due process. And even if the judge recommends the move, nobody has to listen. The ruling isn’t binding. The DEA and DOJ can sit on it, ignore it, slow-walk it into oblivion. Meanwhile, more litigation is guaranteed no matter what happens. Litigation in an industry that isn’t making money.

This is the same federal government that already rescheduled FDA-approved and state-licensed medical cannabis to Schedule III back in April, and states like Wyoming, Nebraska, Idaho, and Indiana are simply refusing to go along with even that. Let’s be clear about what rescheduling would and wouldn’t actually do. It would not federally legalize marijuana. It would not, by itself, get banks fully into the business or make credit cards standard at dispensaries — that still requires separate banking reform that Congress has stalled on for years. What it would mainly do is stop taxing cannabis businesses on gross revenue instead of profit, a punishing tax code provision that’s been bleeding this industry dry since day one. That’s meaningful, but it’s a fraction of what an actual functioning industry needs. And look at what happens even when states do legalize. New York is the case study in how not to do this, and it appears that NYS is spending more time listening to people outside the industry, such as unions.

Years after legalization, the legal market still hasn’t caught up to the illicit one. Licensing is a mess, the rollout was slow, and taxes and regulations made it hard for legal operators to compete with the unlicensed shops that never closed. Nobody’s running a healthy business, and the promise of legalization, tax revenue, safe, regulated products, and jobs has barely materialized. Meanwhile, everyone who wanted to use cannabis was already using it, legal or not. The only thing prohibition and half-measures ever actually accomplished was decades of arrests that fell overwhelmingly on Black and brown communities, for a product now sold in taxed dispensaries a few states over.

This whole system, federal and state, is a monument to politicians who’ve never touched the product, don’t understand the research, and don’t have to answer for the damage prohibition did. They are still leaning into a false narrative. Meanwhile, the people who voted for reform, the entrepreneurs trying to build legitimate businesses, the patients who need consistent access, the families of everyone who did time for something now legal ninety miles away- all of them are left waiting on a system built by people who are actively rooting against them.

At some point, the country has to decide whether policy gets made by the people who voted for it, or by whichever attorney general or unelected panel feels like overriding them that day. Right now, it’s very clearly the latter, and it is long past time for that to change.