Trump's Cannabis Support Craters as Rescheduling Stalls

October 21, 2026

Two quarters ago, three out of four cannabis consumers in legal states approved of how Trump was handling marijuana policy. Now it's barely more than one in four. That's not a dip, it's a collapse, and it tracks almost perfectly with a federal rescheduling process that has gone from headline news to radio silence.

The short version: approval ratings follow momentum, and momentum requires visible progress. Right now the DEA's Schedule III hearing is stuck behind a procedural fight over a government watchdog report, Administrator Terry Cole has no recommendation in front of him to act on, and the people who were most optimistic a few months ago are the ones now shrugging and saying they don't know what to think anymore.

This roundup walks through the numbers behind that approval slide, explains exactly what's holding up the DEA hearing, checks in on Massachusetts voters who'll decide the fate of their adult-use market on Nov. 3, and covers a Nebraska governor's race pledge along with new research on how dispensaries affect the businesses around them.

Consumer Approval of Trump Collapses in New Poll

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The latest quarterly Marijuana Moment/NuggMD survey puts Trump's approval among cannabis consumers at 29 percent, combining those who approve and strongly approve of his administration's cannabis-related actions. That's down from 48 percent just one quarter earlier, and a steep fall from 73 percent the quarter before that. In roughly six months, support has cut itself by more than half.

What's notable is where that lost approval went. Only 20 percent of respondents say they disapprove of Trump's cannabis record, a figure that hasn't moved dramatically. Instead, 51 percent now describe themselves as neutral or without an opinion. That's the real story in these numbers: people aren't turning hostile, they're disengaging. The enthusiasm that built up around talk of rescheduling and reform has nothing concrete to attach itself to anymore, so it's evaporating into indifference rather than curdling into opposition.

The partisan breakdown adds some texture. Republican cannabis consumers still approve at a notably higher rate, 46 percent, compared to just 18 percent among Democrats, with independents landing in between at 26 percent. That gap suggests a chunk of the remaining goodwill is more about general political loyalty than satisfaction with specific cannabis policy outcomes.

The poll surveyed 654 cannabis consumers living in legal-market states between Oct. 8 and Oct. 15, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.83 percentage points. It's a snapshot, not a trend line carved in stone, but three consecutive quarters moving in the same direction is hard to wave off as noise. Consumers who credited Trump early on with putting rescheduling back on the table are running out of patience watching the process stall.

Why Rescheduling Is Frozen: The DEA Hearing Stay

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The holdup traces back to a single, abrupt move. On Sept. 29, 2026, DEA Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek C. Julius issued a stay on the Schedule III rescheduling hearing at the exact moment his recommendation to DEA Administrator Terry Cole was expected. For months, that recommendation was treated as the last real procedural step before a final agency decision on whether to move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III. Then it simply stopped.

The stay followed a motion from the National Drug and Alcohol Screening Association and other parties involved in the hearing, asking Julius to admit a new government watchdog report into the official record. That report, released Sept. 23, isn't about marijuana specifically. It examined how DEA handled scheduling actions for 208 different controlled substances between 2020 and 2025 and found the agency rescheduled exactly none of them in that five-year window. The report's criticism centers on structural problems in DEA's scheduling process generally, including delays and inconsistent handling, rather than taking any position on cannabis.

Even so, the parties pushing to include it argue it's directly relevant to how fairly and efficiently the marijuana rescheduling hearing itself has been run. DEA, for its part, is opposing any move to reopen the hearing for new testimony or additional discovery tied to the report's findings, according to the agency's filings as of Oct. 21.

Until that dispute gets resolved, Julius can't send his recommendation to Cole, and Cole can't make a final call. The entire rescheduling process, which once looked like it was down to its last procedural mile, is now parked indefinitely behind an argument about a report that wasn't even written about marijuana.

Massachusetts Voters Signal They'll Keep Legal Weed

Massachusetts voters will decide on Nov. 3 whether to roll back a legal cannabis market that's been operating for years. Question 8 would repeal regulated recreational sales and home cultivation while leaving possession and the existing medical marijuana program untouched. It's a narrower repeal than past attempts elsewhere, targeting the commercial and home-grow pieces specifically rather than criminalizing cannabis outright.

Polling suggests it's not landing with voters. A Suffolk University/Boston Globe survey found 71 percent opposed to repeal against just 21 percent in support, a nearly 50-point gap. A separate UMass Amherst poll found 61 percent of voters saying they'd vote no, with 47 percent describing themselves as definitely voting no rather than leaning that way. Both surveys point in the same direction with enough separation that it's hard to read as statistical noise.

The Boston Globe's editorial board came out against the measure, framing it around the roughly 800 recreational cannabis businesses now operating in the state and the Massachusetts residents those businesses employ. That's a practical, jobs-and-tax-revenue argument rather than an ideological one, and it mirrors how a lot of the public debate has shaped up: less about whether cannabis should be legal at all, and more about whether unwinding an established industry makes sense this far in.

The repeal campaign has been financed largely by Kevin Sabet's Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a group that has pushed similar efforts in other states with mixed results. Given the margins in both polls, Question 8 looks like a steep climb for backers despite the funding behind it. As always, voters should confirm current Massachusetts law and ballot details directly before Nov. 3, since specifics can shift as the vote approaches.

Nebraska Candidate Pledges Day-One Action, Study Finds Dispensary Spillover Benefits

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In Nebraska, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Lynne Walz has made medical marijuana implementation a campaign promise rather than a side issue. Walz says that if elected, she'd sign an executive order on her first day in office aimed at expediting access to the state's voter-approved medical cannabis program. She's also floated removing members of the Medical Cannabis Commission she believes have been slow-walking the rollout, a pointed shot at the agency tasked with actually standing up the program voters approved.

Nebraska has been a useful case study in the gap between what voters authorize at the ballot box and what state officials actually deliver. Walz's pitch is essentially that the holdup isn't legal or logistical anymore, it's a matter of political will among the people running the commission, and that a new governor could break the logjam quickly.

On a separate track, new research is adding to the economic case for legal markets more broadly. A study examining business activity near recreational dispensaries found that once a dispensary opens, nearby businesses tend to see increases in foot traffic, transaction volume, and revenue. It's the kind of spillover effect that local chambers of commerce and city councils have cited anecdotally for years, now getting some empirical backing.

Taken together, these two items highlight different layers of the same underlying tension in cannabis policy. One is about whether elected officials and appointed commissions actually execute what voters approved. The other is about what happens economically once a market is actually allowed to function. Nebraska's race offers a test of the first question; the dispensary spillover research offers an answer to the second, independent of whatever happens in Washington.

The headline number here, that 44-point drop in Trump's approval among cannabis consumers, is easy to misread as a sign that people are souring on legalization itself. The internals don't support that. Disapproval barely moved; what grew was the neutral, no-opinion camp. That's frustration with stalled process, not a reversal on the underlying policy question. People still want rescheduling. They're just done being patient about when it'll actually happen.

And right now there's no clean timeline to point to. The entire federal process is sitting on a single procedural dispute over whether a government watchdog report about DEA's scheduling backlog gets added to the hearing record. Judge Julius's recommendation to Administrator Cole is written, or at least nearly so, and it's sitting unsent. Nobody outside the agency knows when that stay lifts.

While Washington idles, the more immediate action is at the state level. Massachusetts voters look poised to reject Question 8 by a wide margin, which would keep an established $1-billion-plus industry intact despite a well-funded repeal push. Nebraska's governor's race is shaping up as a referendum on whether elected officials will actually implement what voters already approved. Neither outcome depends on what DEA does next. Both are worth watching as evidence that cannabis politics are increasingly playing out locally, with or without federal reform catching up.