Both Sides Have Filed for a Seat at the DEA’s June Rescheduling Hearing. The Fight Is Just Starting.

The deadline to request a seat at the federal government’s marquee marijuana rescheduling hearing passed Sunday — and both cannabis reform advocates and some of their most vocal opponents have filed notices to participate. What happens in that hearing room starting June 29 could define the legal status of cannabis in America for a generation.

The Drug Enforcement Administration is set to begin formal administrative proceedings on June 29, 2026, to determine whether marijuana should be moved from Schedule I to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s order requires the hearing to conclude no later than July 15. The window to file participation notices closed Sunday, and the roster of interested parties now spans the full width of the debate.

NORML: Schedule III Isn’t Enough

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws filed its notice of intention to participate Tuesday, arguing that adult cannabis consumers — not just the medical industry and law enforcement — must have a formal voice in proceedings that will directly affect them.

“Marijuana cannot lawfully remain in Schedule I,” said Joseph A. Bondy, chair of NORML’s Board of Directors and the group’s counsel in the filing. “But Schedule III is not the end of the road. It is, at most, an interim correction.”

NORML’s position is nuanced: the group does not oppose removing marijuana from Schedule I, but it argues Schedule III still embeds cannabis inside a medicalized controlled-substance framework that fails to account for the roughly 55 million Americans who use cannabis legally under state adult-use laws.

“Adult cannabis consumers do not become patients because federal law lacks a better category for them,” Bondy said. “They are not abusing medicine. They are participating in state-regulated adult-use systems enacted by voters and legislatures.”

NORML is pushing the DEA to consider full descheduling — removing cannabis from the CSA schedules entirely — and replacing prohibition with a cannabis-specific federal regulatory structure built around consumer safety, product testing, labeling transparency, youth prevention, and displacement of the illicit market. Whether the acting attorney general grants them participant status, and whether the administrative judge allows descheduling arguments at all in a proceeding formally scoped to the Schedule I-to-III question, remains to be seen.

Smart Approaches to Marijuana: “This Fight Is Not Over”

On the other end of the spectrum, Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), one of the country’s most prominent prohibitionist organizations, also filed notice — making clear it intends to challenge the scientific and policy basis for rescheduling altogether.

“This fight is not over, and we will not sit on the sidelines while the federal government hands Big Marijuana its biggest political win in history,” said Kevin A. Sabet, SAM’s president and CEO. “Rescheduling marijuana to Schedule III has no scientific basis and would hand the industry billions of dollars in rewards for targeting children.”

Sabet’s framing reflects a familiar prohibitionist strategy: contest the evidentiary record and force DEA to defend the 2023 HHS recommendation — which found cannabis meets the criteria for Schedule III based on its accepted medical use and lower potential for abuse relative to Schedule I substances — from scratch in a formal adversarial proceeding.

What the Hearing Is — and Isn’t

The June 29 hearing is not a debate about full legalization, and it isn’t a congressional vote. It is an administrative proceeding governed by the Controlled Substances Act’s formal rulemaking process. An administrative law judge will preside. Blanche’s order, signed April 23, established the expedited timeline after years of delays that began under the Biden administration.

What happened before the hearing is already significant: Blanche’s April order immediately reclassified FDA-approved cannabis products and state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III — a legal change with immediate tax and regulatory implications for the medical cannabis industry. The June 29 proceedings will determine whether that reclassification extends more broadly to all marijuana under the CSA.

If marijuana moves fully to Schedule III, it would remain a federally controlled substance, but federal penalties for possession and trafficking would shift substantially, and the IRS’s long-running application of Section 280E — which has blocked cannabis businesses from deducting ordinary business expenses — would no longer apply.

The Stakes

The outcome will ripple well beyond policy. Cannabis companies operating in both medical and adult-use markets have been watching the rescheduling process since HHS issued its recommendation in 2023. For operators, Schedule III means access to standard business deductions, potentially lower effective tax rates, and reduced compliance friction with financial institutions still reluctant to serve Schedule I businesses.

For consumers — particularly the 38 states with some form of legal cannabis program — the hearing represents the first formal federal reckoning with the gap between state law and federal scheduling since the modern legal cannabis era began.

NORML’s filing is explicit on that point: the organization is not appearing as an industry-tax-relief group or a medical-only advocacy organization, but as the representative of adult consumers whose state-legal behavior remains technically criminalized at the federal level.

Acting Attorney General Blanche will select which witnesses will be invited to formally testify. The list of participants his office selects — and who gets excluded — may itself become a flashpoint before the gavel falls on June 29.

The hearing begins in 33 days.