Every nongovernment participant selected for the DEA’s rescheduling hearing opposed reform. By the time the record closed, one marquee witness had undercut a central part of his side’s case, another had reportedly acknowledged that cannabis meets the Schedule III criteria, and the opposition’s strongest agency scientist had exposed the legal question likely to shape what comes next. Briefs and transcript corrections are due August 17, while a parallel court fight is already underway.
This is the third installment in High Times’ coverage of the DEA’s rescheduling hearing. Read Part I, “The DEA Blocked the Cameras at This Cannabis Hearing. Here’s What They Didn’t Want You to See,” and Part II, “Prohibitionists Just Argued Themselves Into a Corner: To Stop Weed Reform, They Told a Court How Much Money They’d Lose”
The states of Nebraska, Idaho and Indiana called Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal to make a straightforward argument: that legal cannabis fuels crime, and that federal rescheduling would make it worse. Honsal runs law enforcement in the heart of California’s Emerald Triangle, the most storied weed-growing region in the country. If anyone could tell a federal tribunal that legalization bred lawlessness, it was supposed to be him.
Then the Justice Department got him on cross-examination, and he complicated his own side’s theory. Regulated cannabis can help law enforcement, Honsal told the tribunal, and most of the California product diverted to other states comes from unlicensed operators, not the legal market. That is according to attorneys from Vicente LLP who were in the room. It did not erase every concern in the states’ filing. But it undercut a central implication of their crime argument, that the regulated market itself was the engine of the crime they described.
The states’ own pre-hearing statement had …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
