The DEA invited only opponents to its rescheduling hearing, turned reform supporters away and refused to livestream it. Then the government’s own witnesses stood up and made the case that cannabis has real medical value and is safer than substances sold at every gas station. Here is what has been happening inside a room the public is not allowed to see.
The most consequential federal cannabis hearing in more than fifty years began on June 29 in a courtroom in Arlington, Virginia, with roughly 25 public seats and no cameras. The DEA denied a request from Marijuana Moment, a congressman and other news outlets to livestream the proceedings. So what the country gets is secondhand, filtered through the handful of reporters and attorneys allowed in the room, and through the daily social media broadcasts of the people who want the reform dead.
Strip away the noise and the picture inside is clear. The government is arguing, with its own scientists, that cannabis belongs out of Schedule I. The case against it has so far amounted to attacking the test rather than the plant.
A Hearing Built for One Side
The setup matters because it shapes everything that follows. The DEA is the proponent of the rule, a strange posture for an agency that spent half a century defending prohibition. Under the process Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche set in motion, only “interested persons” could participate, and DEA Administrator Terrance Cole decided reform supporters did not qualify because they were not “adversely affected or aggrieved” by the reform. The result is an official participant list, published on the DEA’s own website, made up entirely of opponents: the National Drug and Alcohol Screening Association, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, the states of Nebraska, Idaho, Indiana and Louisiana, DUID …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
