Trump Reschedules Marijuana - December 18th 2025

This Is Bigger Than Cannabis

What happened today is not a tweak to drug policy, nor a technical regulatory adjustment; the rescheduling of marijuana is a long overdue correction in how the federal government understands and enforces its own limits.

With the rescheduling of marijuana and the explicit protection of hemp and CBD, the federal government has taken a step away from a century of policy that was never rooted in science, never grounded in constitutional restraint, and never honest about its social cost.

This is a consequential moment in American history, not because cannabis suddenly becomes something new, but because the federal government finally acknowledged what it is not.

A Policy Built on Fiction Finally Collapses

Marijuana’s placement in Schedule I was always an intellectual fraud. The classification required two things to be true: that the substance had no accepted medical use and that it posed a high potential for abuse. Neither condition held up under scrutiny then, and they certainly do not today.

Rescheduling is not legalization, and it doesn't resolve the tension between state and federal law. BUT, it does something far more important: it admits that the premise underpinning decades of enforcement was wrong.

In American governance, that admission matters most.

The Criminal Justice Consequence

For over fifty years, cannabis policy functioned as an intake valve into the criminal justice system. This wasn't because cannabis posed an existential threat to public safety, but because prohibition proved politically convenient.

Entire communities were filtered through courts, probation offices, jails, and prisons over conduct that is now broadly understood to be less harmful than many legal alternatives. Careers were ended. Families destabilized. Futures narrowed. All of this damage done in service of a policy that couldn't withstand basic empirical scrutiny. Although  rescheduling doesn't erase that damage, it absolutely does remove the intellectual justification for continuing it.

This alone will ripple through policing priorities, prosecutorial discretion, sentencing frameworks, and public perception. When the federal government admits a substance doesn't belong in the most restrictive category of controlled drugs, enforcement can no longer hide behind moral panic.

The Cultural Shift We Rarely Name

Cannabis prohibition did not merely criminalize behavior, it also distorted culture. It taught entire generations to confuse legality with morality. It normalized the idea that the state may punish conduct simply because it disapproved of it, and it blurred the line between basic public health and social control.

Rescheduling marks a quiet but meaningful reversal. It recognizes that adults are capable of informed decision-making and that government’s role is to regulate responsibly, not to moralize arbitrarily. In our eyes, that cultural recalibration alone matters far beyond cannabis.

Why The Founders Would Have Appreciated This Moment

Thomas Jefferson warned that the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. He also believed that laws must evolve when they cease to reflect reason.

The principle at stake here is not whether cannabis should be consumed - to this question, we say "who cares, it's no different than asking if coffee should be consumed". The principle in question is whether the federal government should maintain policies that persist solely because reversing them would require admitting error.

Jefferson understood that legitimacy flows from restraint and from aligning law with observable reality. Public trust in our institutions is directly correlated on those institutions trusting citizens unless there is a compelling reason not to.

Rescheduling cannabis reflects that restraint; the state is FINALLY stepping back from an overreach it could no longer defend.

What This Signals Going Forward

This decision will reshape research access, taxation, medical legitimacy, and regulatory coherence. We believe that its deeper significance is philosophical. It signals that evidence can still move policy. It reminds us that federal authority is not immune to correction, and that decades old precedents are not sacred simply because they are old.

For hemp and CBD, the message is equally important. These are not loopholes, they are lawful products with legitimate uses that deserve clear, durable protection from regulatory whiplash.

Today’s action does not finish the work. But it restores an essential premise.

The government is not the arbiter of virtue. It is the steward of order. And when it drifts too far from that role, it must be willing to recalibrate. THAT is what happened today.