ONDCP director Sara Carter Bailey told Newsmax this week that marijuana is “still illegal” after the April 23 rescheduling order. The line is doing a lot of work. Schedule III moved state-licensed medical cannabis into the same federal category as ketamine and Tylenol with codeine. What’s still illegal in the strict sense is everything outside the medical lane, and the drug czar’s interview pointed exactly to the next enforcement targets: hemp THC, “high-potency” products and illicit grows.
“It’s still illegal,” Sara Carter Bailey told Newsmax this week.
The headlines treated the line as a clarification. It was closer to a policy memo.
Carter Bailey is the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. She was asked about the potency of marijuana products during an interview about the administration’s new National Drug Control Strategy. Her answer drew a hard line under what last month’s rescheduling order actually did.
“Executive-level Schedule III allows for doctors and research and for medicine, for medicinal purposes.”
That framing collapses a key distinction. Schedule III is not “illegal” in the lay sense. It is the same federal category as Tylenol with codeine, ketamine and testosterone, controlled substances with accepted medical use that are legal when prescribed. The April 23 order moved FDA-approved marijuana and state-licensed medical cannabis into that category. A Congressional Research Service report found that the order “appears to authorize end users to possess marijuana for medical use without a CSA-compliant prescription.” The industry around those patients remains in a gray zone, but the patients themselves are no longer in the “illegal” bucket Carter Bailey described.
What is still illegal, in the strict federal sense, is everything outside that medical lane. Recreational marijuana stays Schedule I. Most hemp THC products move to Schedule I on November 13, 2026. Any …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
