DEA Stacks Marijuana Rescheduling Hearing With Only Opponents

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A federal hearing that could shape the future of marijuana policy in the United States opened June 29, 2026, inside DEA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and it's scheduled to run through July 15. The topic on the table is whether adult-use marijuana should move out of Schedule I, the same tier as heroin, where the DEA insists a substance has no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. On June 18, the agency named seven "designated participants" for the proceeding — and every single one of them opposes rescheduling. Groups that have spent years pushing for reform, including NORML, the Drug Policy Alliance, and the American Trade Association for Cannabis and Hemp, all applied and all got turned away.

This hearing exists because of a narrower move Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche made on April 23, when he ordered FDA-approved and state-licensed medical marijuana products reclassified into Schedule III. That order left the bigger question — recreational, adult-use cannabis — unresolved, which is exactly what this DEA hearing is supposed to address. The contrast with the last attempt at this process, under the Biden administration, is hard to miss. That earlier hearing sat 25 designated participants, a mix that included voices actually arguing for loosening federal restrictions, before the whole thing collapsed under an interlocutory appeal before it could reach a conclusion. This time, the DEA built a room with only one side of the argument in it.

Who Made the Cut -- and Who Didn't

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The seven organizations and individuals cleared to participate read like a roster assembled specifically to argue against change. On the institutional side, there's the National Drug & Alcohol Screening Association, whose business model depends heavily on workplace drug testing regimes that get harder to justify as cannabis loses its Schedule I status. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is in the mix, alongside Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), a longtime anti-legalization advocacy group that has opposed reform efforts at both the state and federal level for over a decade. Four states — Nebraska, Idaho, Indiana, and Louisiana — were also approved, all jurisdictions with restrictive or nonexistent adult-use cannabis programs. Rounding out the list are DUID Victim Voices, an organization focused on drugged-driving fatalities, along with Dr. Kenneth Finn and Dr. Phillip A. Drum, two physicians who have testified previously against expanding cannabis access.

What's notably absent is any organization representing patients, consumers, or the licensed cannabis industry itself. NORML, the Drug Policy Alliance, and the American Trade Association for Cannabis and Hemp each sought designated-participant status and each was denied. DEA Administrator Terrance Cole delivered the rejection to the Drug Policy Alliance in blunt terms, writing that the organization had "not demonstrated you are adversely affected or aggrieved" — the legal standard spelled out under 21 CFR 1300.01(b). It's a technical justification, but one that conveniently filters out the exact perspectives that have driven the public push for rescheduling in the first place. When the only parties in the room are unified in opposition, the hearing record that emerges is going to look one-sided almost by design.

How This Hearing Differs From the Biden-Era Attempt

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To understand how unusual this lineup is, it helps to look back at what the DEA tried to do under the Biden administration. That earlier proceeding designated 25 participants, a roster that actually included voices in favor of loosening federal cannabis restrictions alongside the usual opposition groups. It never reached a resolution — the process stalled out amid an interlocutory appeal that effectively froze the hearing before substantive testimony could move forward. Blanche formally withdrew that stalled process this year, clearing the way for the DEA to start over with its own, considerably narrower guest list.

The person now overseeing the proceeding is also worth noting. Derek C. Julius, a former attorney with the DEA's own Office of Chief Counsel, has been installed as chief administrative law judge for this round. Having spent his career on the enforcement side of the agency, his presence at the top of this process is one more data point suggesting the deck was stacked before the first witness ever took a seat.

The procedural rules governing the hearing itself are fairly rigid. Each designated party gets 15 minutes for an opening statement, then can call up to two witnesses, with each witness allotted two hours of testimony. Parties get one hour to cross-examine government witnesses. But there's a structural quirk that matters here: interested parties aren't permitted to cross-examine each other's witnesses. In a hearing where every party shares the same position, that rule barely registers. Had reform advocates been seated at the table, it would have mattered enormously.

A Closed-Door Process

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The Biden-era hearing, whatever its other flaws, was livestreamed — anyone could watch the testimony unfold in real time. This one isn't. There's no public broadcast, no video feed, nothing offering outside observers a window into what's being said inside DEA headquarters during these two-plus weeks of testimony.

That opacity became a real problem on the third day of the hearing, when a journalist attempting to attend in person was turned away at the door. The explanation given was that the presiding judge had barred public attendees after 8:50 a.m. — a cutoff that had never been announced or published anywhere beforehand. Reporters and members of the public showing up expecting an open proceeding were simply locked out once that unannounced window closed.

Combined with a participant list built entirely from rescheduling opponents, the lack of any meaningful public access compounds an already lopsided situation. It's one thing to build a hearing record from a single perspective; it's another to also make sure almost nobody outside the room can watch how that record gets built. Legal observers following the proceeding have started flagging the access restrictions themselves as a potential vulnerability — if the secrecy around attendance rules gets challenged in court down the line, it could become its own point of contention separate from the substance of the rescheduling decision. A hearing that can't withstand scrutiny doesn't inspire much confidence in the conclusions it produces, regardless of what those conclusions turn out to be.

The Public Record Says Something Different

What makes the DEA's participant selections especially hard to square with reality is the public record on this exact question. Researchers from Johns Hopkins and UC San Diego reviewed the roughly 43,000 public comments submitted during the rescheduling process and found that 92.4% supported moving marijuana to Schedule III or wanted the government to go further with reform. That's not a narrow majority — it's a landslide of public sentiment running in the opposite direction of what the hearing room currently reflects.

None of that overwhelming pro-reform sentiment is represented among the seven designated participants chosen for this hearing. Not one. The disconnect between what the public told the government it wanted and who the DEA decided should get a seat at the table is stark enough that it's likely to become a central argument in whatever legal challenges follow this proceeding.

Those challenges are already underway, in fact. Three separate coalitions have filed consolidated petitions in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, seeking to either freeze the rescheduling order altogether or overturn it outright, depending on which side of the debate each petitioner sits on. The hearing happening this month in Arlington isn't occurring in a vacuum — it's playing out while a parallel legal fight over the same underlying question is already active in federal appellate court. Whatever record gets built during these three weeks of testimony will almost certainly become evidence, or ammunition, in that separate legal track.

Building a hearing record exclusively from the testimony of rescheduling opponents creates an obvious problem down the line, regardless of what conclusion the administrative law judge eventually reaches. Any future litigant challenging the outcome — in either direction — now has a straightforward argument available: that the process itself was rigged before a single witness testified, since the DEA hand-picked who got to speak and excluded every group representing patients, consumers, and the licensed industry. That's not a hard case to make when the numbers are sitting right there in the public comment record, showing over 92% support for reform against a hearing room stocked with seven parties who all agree on the opposite position.

Whatever recommendation emerges by July 15 probably won't settle anything. The real fight was always headed to the D.C. Circuit, where those consolidated petitions are already pending, and this hearing's one-sided composition just gives the eventual court battle more material to work with. Nobody should expect a tidy resolution to come out of Arlington this summer.

In the meantime, cannabis consumers and patients shouldn't wait around for a federal rescheduling decision to clarify their own situation. Schedule III status, and any further federal rescheduling that might follow, doesn't automatically override state licensing rules, possession limits, or the underlying legal frameworks that vary widely from Louisiana to Nebraska to states with fully operational adult-use markets. Check your own state's current cannabis laws directly rather than assuming a shift in federal scheduling changes anything about what's legal where you actually live.