Filed
9:15 a.m. EST
12.19.2025
When the federal authorities modifications the way it categorizes a drug on paper, what modifications in the true world?
An individual prepares to smoke fentanyl in Portland, Ore., in 2024.
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This week, the Trump administration signaled two very completely different approaches to the nation’s lengthy, winding warfare on medication. On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an government order declaring illicit fentanyl, and the chemical substances used to provide it, as a “weapon of mass destruction,” in an specific escalation of the rhetoric on the nation’s opioid disaster. Then, on Thursday, Trump signed one other order directing federal businesses to loosen some federal restrictions on marijuana.
Fentanyl and hashish aren’t comparable substances, pharmacologically, and the executive mechanisms in play are fairly completely different. However each strikes elevate related sensible questions: When the federal government modifications the way it categorizes a drug on paper, what modifications in the true world?
The thought of designating fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction” just isn’t new. In 2019, the navy publication Job and Objective reported that an inside Division of Homeland Safety memo floated the thought of treating the drug as a WMD “when sure standards are met.” The idea was that fentanyl’s efficiency and availability may make it a sexy instrument for terrorists or criminals searching for “nonconventional materials” for a chemical weapon assault.
However even within the nationwide safety world that case has lengthy been contested. That very same 12 months, John P. Caves Jr., a WMD researcher on the Nationwide Protection College, concluded that whereas fentanyl compounds may theoretically be used as chemical weapons, “it isn’t evident that there’s any foundation or want for, or web profit to, formally designating fentanyl compounds as weapons of mass destruction.” He warned that such a designation may create collateral issues for the official fentanyl commerce and use.
Nonetheless, the spectre of weaponized fentanyl has attracted concern from throughout the political spectrum, together with from Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey in 2019, and a legislative proposal from Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert earlier this 12 months. In 2022, a bipartisan group of 18 state attorneys common requested the Biden administration to designate fentanyl as a WMD, citing related issues about weaponization. The administration declined. Rahul Gupta, then-director of the Workplace of Nationwide Drug Management Coverage, advised reporters on the time that “merely designating it — or any drug — as a ‘WMD’ wouldn’t present us with any authorities, capabilities, or assets that we don’t have already got and are already making use of to this drawback,” the drug coverage e-newsletter Substance reported.
The Trump administration has evidently come to a special conclusion. On paper, the administration didn’t create any new legal guidelines about drug use or commerce or designate new funding. Fairly, the manager order instructs federal businesses, together with the Departments of Justice, State, Treasury and Struggle (née Protection), to pursue fentanyl-related crimes extra aggressively, and to discover navy cooperation with civilian legislation enforcement.
In principle, the order may permit for harsher sentencing in federal drug instances, in keeping with The Atlantic, as using a WMD within the U.S. carries a most sentence of life in jail. One other probably downstream impact is monetary and diplomatic strain overseas: The Washington Put up reported that the designation may assist the U.S. goal overseas monetary establishments — significantly in China — linked to the manufacture of chemical substances wanted to make fentanyl.
Many specialists and media observers have characterised the transfer primarily as a symbolic and rhetorical one — a PR stunt. On X, former Libertarian congressman Justin Amash — now a Republican — referred to as the transfer “simply the most recent instance of the state twisting the plain which means of phrases to broaden its energy.”
In that vein, some observers additionally see the manager order as an effort to bolster the authorized case for the administration’s marketing campaign of deadly strikes on alleged narco-trafficking boats. The marketing campaign has killed at the least 99 individuals since September, and plenty of analysts say it’s unlawful underneath worldwide legislation. Tess Bridgeman, a former Nationwide Safety Council deputy authorized adviser and the co-editor-in-chief of Simply Safety, advised me that “no further label or designation — of individuals or of medicine — can rework the state of affairs into an armed battle or in any other case make using navy pressure lawful when it plainly just isn’t.”
In the meantime, on marijuana, the president has moved to expedite a really completely different sort of change in drug classification. It sounds sweeping at first, however in actuality, it modifications extra for the hashish trade’s backside line than the structure of prohibition.
Underneath the federal Managed Substances Act, marijuana is at present positioned in Schedule I, a class reserved for substances deemed to have “no at present accepted medical use.” That’s essentially the most restrictive managed substance class — extra critical than the place fentanyl is scheduled — and clearly at odds with at the least 40 states which have legalized medical marijuana.
Trump’s government order on Thursday prompts the Justice Division to hasten the rescheduling of marijuana as a Schedule III drug, alongside widespread prescription drugs like Tylenol with codeine. The change was already underway through a proper rule-making course of that started underneath President Joe Biden, together with public remark and hearings that had been scheduled for earlier this 12 months, however then postponed. The Trump administration didn’t provide a timeline for when rescheduling would possibly turn out to be official.
The change would permit medical and leisure dispensaries to deduct abnormal enterprise bills which might be at present prohibited by the Inside Income Service. CBS Information reported that some hashish companies pay efficient tax charges of as much as 80% because of these restrictions, greater than thrice the usually accepted U.S. common. These companies may discover a better time working with banks too, which have usually shunned the trade over issues of prosecution — although easy rescheduling wouldn’t eradicate all these points. As Trump famous in remarks at a signing ceremony, rescheduling marijuana would open up avenues for elevated scientific analysis on the drug.
Whereas Schedule III medication can legally be prescribed, they nonetheless require Meals and Drug Administration approval, which marijuana doesn’t have, famous a congressional report on rescheduling. Thus, rescheduling alone wouldn’t immediately legalize the U.S. leisure or medical hashish trade within the eyes of the federal authorities.
In principle, the order may cut back or eradicate some federal prison penalties, just like the punishment for promoting the sale of a Schedule I substance. Most federal penalties across the drug would keep the identical, nonetheless, as a result of most quantity-based components of federal drug sentencing — like trafficking offenses — are tied to the precise drug, not simply the schedule stage, the identical congressional report famous.
Even underneath present drug scheduling, federal prosecutors haven’t prioritized marijuana instances in recent times, particularly on the subject of exercise legalized on the state stage. As of January 2022, there was nobody in federal jail who had been sentenced solely for easy marijuana possession. Marijuana trafficking instances — which usually contain shifting a whole bunch or 1000’s of kilos — are additionally down almost 60% since 2020, in keeping with the U.S. Sentencing Fee.
Writing for The Guardian, authorized analyst Kojo Koram argued in a column that whereas rescheduling marijuana could be revolutionary in some methods, it “doesn’t dismantle the structure of arrests, deportations, necessary drug assessments and exclusion from public housing, scholar loans and journey visas that had been designed over the previous few a long time to implement the criminalisation of hashish.”
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