As reported earlier this month in Bloomberg Law, Bertha Madras, a Harvard Medical School professor and addiction researcher who served on President Donald Trump’s 2017 opioid commission, and a former government lawyer Paul Larkin, an attorney at the Heritage Foundation which helped develop the Project 2025 agenda, are urging the US Department of Justice to reject a plan that would ease federal restrictions on cannabis, which the industry has been counting on to grow their businesses

In a new paper published Madras and Larkin on June 11, 2025 in JAMA Psychiatry entitled, Rescheduling Cannabis, Medicine or Politics?, the authors argue that the Biden administration’s push to reclassify cannabis relied on flawed reasoning and downplayed health risks, including cannabis-use disorder and links to psychosis. As indicated in the Bloomberg article, “[t]he new paper adds to the arguments against rescheduling and could give the Trump administration more cover to block the move.”

The effort to reschedule cannabis from a Schedule 1 to a Schedule 3 controlled substance stalled during the end of the Biden administration, and has not gathered much steam in the current Trump administration. 

We will continue to monitor this situation as it develops and provide you with relevant updates.