Bill Barr Joins Fight to Reverse Marijuana Rescheduling

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Bill Barr spent two stints as U.S. Attorney General telling federal prosecutors how to enforce the Controlled Substances Act. Now he's on the other side of the fight, retained by a prohibitionist advocacy group to sue the federal government over its own plan to loosen that same law's grip on marijuana. Smart Approaches to Marijuana, the anti-legalization group led by Kevin Sabet, announced it has brought Barr on to challenge marijuana rescheduling, arguing the drug carries what Barr and Sabet describe as horrific and undisclosed health risks and delivers no legitimate medical benefit.

The timing isn't incidental. Barr's retention lands just weeks after a DEA administrative law judge wrapped a marathon hearing on whether marijuana should move out of Schedule I, with a ruling now expected any time. That decision alone won't settle anything. The rescheduling fight is currently running on three separate tracks at once: the DEA hearing record now sitting with the judge, a pending appeal before the D.C. Circuit, and this newly threatened lawsuit from SAM. Anyone hoping for a clean resolution to marijuana's federal scheduling saga this year should probably recalibrate their expectations.

Who's Behind the Lawsuit Threat

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Smart Approaches to Marijuana has been the most organized voice against legalization in the country for more than a decade, and Kevin Sabet has built a career out of testifying against ballot measures and state bills from Sacramento to Tallahassee. Bringing on Bill Barr is a step up in both firepower and symbolism. Barr served as Attorney General under George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s and again under Donald Trump from 2019 to 2020, giving him a name recognition and legal pedigree that SAM's usual roster of academics and former DEA officials can't match.

SAM isn't just talking about one lawsuit. The group says it intends to file suit to reverse rescheduling once any final rule is actually on the books, and separately plans to pursue its own administrative petition asking the DEA to keep marijuana classified in Schedule I no matter what the current proceeding concludes. That's a belt-and-suspenders strategy: even if the litigation over an already-finalized rule stalls or fails, the petition keeps a parallel argument alive inside the agency itself.

Sabet has not been shy about the rhetoric. He's called the push toward rescheduling a full betrayal of Trump's promise to keep Americans safe and healthy, and has described the effort as a gift to what he calls Big Marijuana. That framing matters here, because SAM has spent years trying to position cannabis companies as the moral equivalent of tobacco or opioid manufacturers, hoping that comparison sticks with regulators, judges, and voters the way it once did to those older industries.

Barr's Case Against Cannabis

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Barr's substantive argument leans heavily on writings he co-authored with John Walters, the drug czar under George W. Bush and another longtime legalization opponent. Their central claim is straightforward: more than a decade into state-level legalization, the experiment has been nothing short of a disaster, with commercialized cannabis producing harms that outweigh whatever tax revenue or criminal justice benefits legalization supporters promised. They point to research suggesting regular marijuana use may be associated with elevated cardiovascular risk, including heart attack and stroke, as evidence that the health story on cannabis is far from settled or benign.

The comparison Barr and Walters keep returning to is Big Tobacco. Their argument runs that the cannabis industry has followed the same playbook cigarette makers used decades ago: build broad social acceptance and normalize the product commercially before the full scope of its health consequences becomes impossible to ignore. It's a rhetorically effective comparison, whether or not the underlying science supports a one-to-one mapping between smoked cannabis and combustible cigarettes.

That argument isn't confined to advocacy statements. A class-action lawsuit filed in Illinois and Connecticut in May 2026 makes a similar case in court, alleging the cannabis industry oversold medical benefits to consumers while downplaying known risks. Public health researchers occupy more of a middle ground than either side of this fight tends to acknowledge. Cannabis use does carry documented risks worth taking seriously, including dependency in a meaningful subset of regular users, impaired driving, and respiratory effects from smoking. But researchers generally push back hard on the claim of zero medical value, pointing to FDA-approved cannabinoid medications like Marinol and Epidiolex already sitting on pharmacy shelves as proof that at least some medical utility is well established.

Inside the Rescheduling Timeline

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The current rescheduling push traces back to an executive order Trump signed on December 18, 2025, directing the Justice Department to expedite moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III. That order set a fast-moving chain of events into motion. On April 23, 2026, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a final order placing FDA-approved and state-licensed medical marijuana into Schedule III, a narrower move than full descheduling but still a historic shift for a drug that has sat alongside heroin on the federal government's most restrictive tier since 1970.

Blanche didn't stop there. His order also directed a new, expedited DEA hearing on the broader question of how marijuana should be scheduled going forward. That hearing, presided over by DEA Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek C. Julius, ran from June 29 through July 15, 2026, and wrapped up roughly two weeks before this latest news broke. A ruling from Judge Julius is expected soon, and whatever he decides will shape how much institutional weight the DEA ultimately gives to arguments from groups like SAM versus the medical and industry stakeholders pushing for rescheduling.

Layer onto that a separate legal track: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is currently weighing multiple challenges to Blanche's April 23 final order, filed by parties on both sides of the debate who think the administrative process either went too far or didn't go far enough. Three moving pieces, three different timelines, and no guarantee any of them resolves cleanly or quickly.

What Happens Next

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If Judge Julius rules in favor of rescheduling marijuana to Schedule III, expect Barr and SAM to move fast. Both have signaled they'll challenge a favorable ruling in court almost immediately rather than wait to see how the broader regulatory process plays out. At the same time, SAM's separate administrative petition would keep pressing the DEA to leave marijuana in Schedule I regardless of what the ALJ concludes, giving the group a second avenue even if the hearing outcome goes against them.

Add the pending D.C. Circuit case to that mix and you get a third front, which means the core question of where marijuana sits on the federal schedule could remain genuinely unsettled well into 2026 and beyond. That uncertainty matters far beyond legal circles. Industry groups and medical cannabis patients are watching all three tracks closely, since a confirmed shift to Schedule III would ease some of the tightest federal research restrictions on cannabis and could meaningfully improve access to banking services that most cannabis businesses currently can't get.

It's worth remembering that state-legal cannabis programs keep operating regardless of how any of this shakes out federally. Dispensaries in states with legal markets aren't waiting on Washington. But federal scheduling still has teeth for businesses even in fully legal states, most notably through IRC Section 280E, the tax code provision that bars cannabis companies from deducting ordinary business expenses as long as marijuana remains a Schedule I or Schedule II substance. Moving to Schedule III would resolve that particular headache even if it doesn't touch state licensing at all. As always, legal status and enforcement priorities vary considerably by state and country, and readers should confirm current local law rather than assume federal scheduling changes translate directly into changed rights or protections where they live.

Barr's decision to take this case tells you something worth paying attention to: prohibitionist opposition isn't fading as rescheduling nears what looked like a finish line, it's escalating into coordinated, well-funded litigation with a former U.S. Attorney General fronting the effort. That's a different kind of resistance than the op-eds and legislative testimony SAM has relied on for years.

Where this actually lands now depends on three things happening in parallel rather than in sequence: how Judge Julius rules on the DEA hearing record, whether SAM's administrative petition gains any traction inside the agency, and how the D.C. Circuit handles the pending challenges to Blanche's April order. Any single one of those three could delay rescheduling by months or unravel it entirely, and there's no procedural mechanism forcing them to resolve in a tidy order.

Whatever happens to Schedule III specifically, the deeper argument here isn't going away. Whether cannabis carries risks serious enough to justify federal restriction, and whether it has genuine medical value worth protecting, is a fight that will keep resurfacing in courtrooms, state legislatures, and campaign season for years regardless of which schedule the drug technically sits in.