Picture a parent standing in a dispensary, looking at a shelf of gummies, vapes and high-potency extracts, trusting that if the federal government is about to reclassify this stuff as Schedule III, someone in Washington must have proven it’s safe enough to sit next to actual medicine. Nobody proved that. The federal hearings on marijuana rescheduling in the US have wrapped up, and the record left behind doesn’t support that trust. It undercuts it.

That’s the conclusion drawn by Americans Against Legalizing Marijuana (AALM), which argues the Department of Justice failed to prove marijuana meets the legal bar required for Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act. AALM now wants Administrative Law Judge Derek C. Julius to weigh a record that repeatedly worked against the government’s own position.

The DEA’s own scientist made the case against rescheduling

The most damaging testimony didn’t come from opponents of rescheduling. It came from inside the DEA. DEA pharmacologist Dr Luli Akinfiresoye told the hearing that botanical marijuana isn’t a standardised medicine. Potency swings from product to product. Cannabinoid composition varies. Contaminants show up inconsistently. None of it goes through the FDA approval process required for prescription medication.

She also confirmed something regulators have flagged for years: state medical marijuana programmes remain a significant source of diversion into recreational markets. That’s one of the core reasons marijuana has stayed in Schedule I for decades, and it came from the government’s own expert, on the government’s own record. No standard, no proof, no case.

Across the hearings, government witnesses kept conceding points that worked against their own case. No FDA-approved botanical marijuana product exists under modern pharmaceutical standards. There’s no uniform dosage or manufacturing process. Commercial products vary wildly in potency. State systems sit entirely outside the standard drug approval framework. Diversion into illicit markets remains substantial. None of it supports rescheduling.

HHS changed the rules it couldn’t meet

The sharper problem wasn’t the evidence. It was the government’s attempt to change the legal test itself. For decades, the DEA applied a five-part standard to determine whether a drug had an “accepted medical use,” requiring substantial scientific evidence on chemistry, safety, efficacy and expert acceptance.

Rather than meet that standard, HHS built a new two-factor test that lowers the bar considerably, without congressional action or formal rulemaking explaining why decades of precedent should no longer apply. AALM calls this one of the most significant legal weaknesses in the government’s case. The underlying question isn’t whether HHS prefers a different policy outcome. It’s whether an agency can discard a legal standard it couldn’t meet and replace it with one it can.

The products don’t resemble medicine

The hearings also showed how far today’s commercial marijuana has drifted from anything resembling regulated medication. THC concentrations now run many times higher than historical levels. Manufacturing standards differ by state. Quality control remains inconsistent. The products themselves, sold as candies, beverages, concentrates and high-potency extracts, bear little resemblance to any other Schedule III medication regulated under federal law.

What happens now

The evidentiary phase has closed. The Administrative Law Judge will review the record and issue a recommended decision to the DEA Administrator. AALM’s position is clear: the record supports rejecting the rescheduling outright, not a partial fix or a compromise.

Administrative proceedings exist to keep agency decisions grounded in evidence and law rather than political momentum. On this record, that’s the conclusion for marijuana rescheduling in the US. No standard, no proof, no case.

A separate bill takes aim at the same blind spot

Somewhere in the US this year, a child died with drugs in their system, or in a home where drugs were present, and depending entirely on which state investigated it, that fact may never appear in any public record at all. Not because it doesn’t matter. Because most states simply aren’t required to write it down in any consistent way.

That’s the blind spot a separate federal bill is trying to close, and it’s the same blind spot that ran through the entire rescheduling hearing: you can’t fix what you won’t measure. The Child Death Drug Exposure Transparency Act would require every state to standardise how it investigates and reports child deaths involving drug use or proximity, whether that’s toxicology results in the child, a caregiver’s known or suspected drug use, or substances and paraphernalia found in the home at the time of death.

Right now, only a handful of states, including Arizona, Texas and Florida, publish this kind of data. The bill would make standardised reporting mandatory nationwide, require HHS to issue a uniform reporting template within a year of enactment, and require every state to publish its findings publicly by 30 June each year. States that don’t comply risk losing federal child welfare funding under Title IV-B of the Social Security Act. Reports would stay aggregated and privacy-protected, in line with HIPAA and the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, so no child, family or caregiver would be individually identifiable.

The parallel to the rescheduling hearings is direct. AALM’s case rests on the government failing to produce standardised, consistent evidence before a major policy shift. This bill exists because state and federal systems have made the same failure for years on how drugs are actually killing children. You can’t fix what you won’t measure, and right now, nobody’s measuring it the same way twice.

Read the full draft text of the Child Death Drug Exposure Transparency Act.

The Verdict

Two different fights, one shared failure: no standard, no proof, no case. A government agency that couldn’t meet its own legal test rewrote the test instead. A patchwork of state and federal systems that can’t even agree on how to count the harm still can’t tell anyone the truth about it. Put those two records side by side and the conclusion isn’t complicated. Rescheduling cannabis is a mistake. The science makes that clear. The law makes that clear. The only thing left to do is say so.