The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Robert W. Glover is an associate professor of political science and honors at the University of Maine. These are his views and do not express those of the University of Maine System or the University of Maine. He is co-leader of the Maine Chapter of the Scholars Strategy Network, which brings together scholars across the country to address public challenges and their policy implications.
If you’ve seen headlines about President Donald Trump “rescheduling” cannabis, you might reasonably think: “Did cannabis just become federally legal?” Or maybe: “Didn’t we already do this?” Or, most honestly: “What on earth does ‘rescheduling’ even mean?”
All fair questions. The short answer is that this move matters, but less than the administration or some breathless headlines are claiming.
Under U.S. law, drugs are governed by the Controlled Substances Act, which sorts substances into schedules. Schedule I is the most restrictive category, reserved for drugs deemed to have a high potential for abuse and “no accepted medical use.” For decades, cannabis sat there alongside heroin. Yes, really.
Rescheduling means moving cannabis out of Schedule I and into a less restrictive category. That’s meaningful. But it’s not the same thing as decriminalization (removing criminal penalties for possession and use), and it’s definitely not legalization (creating a lawful market with rules for production, sale, and taxation).
It’s also worth clearing up another misconception: Trump cannot unilaterally reschedule a drug. Scheduling decisions typically involve Congress or a slow, technical federal rulemaking process run through agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
In fact, this process was already well underway. So Trump’s announcement is best understood as endorsing a bureaucratic train that had already left the station (a move initiated by President Joe Biden no less). That doesn’t make it meaningless, but it does make it less revolutionary and immediate than the administration has claimed.
So what does rescheduling actually do?
First, it modestly improves opportunities for research. For decades, researchers have faced extraordinary regulatory barriers to studying cannabis. Moving cannabis out of Schedule I helps, but it doesn’t fix everything. Research remains tightly regulated, funding is limited, and navigating federal approval is still far from straightforward.
Second, and more immediately, rescheduling will eventually ease the tax burden on state-level legal cannabis businesses. Because cannabis remains federally prohibited, these businesses are currently barred from taking standard tax deductions for routine expenses like rent and payroll. For Maine’s largely small, locally owned cannabis businesses, that’s not a technical nuisance — it’s an existential problem.
Rescheduling opens the door to changing that. It won’t solve every challenge facing Maine’s cannabis market, but it could make compliance and survival more attainable.
What it does not do is allow interstate commerce. Cannabis grown in Maine still won’t be sold in Massachusetts or beyond. Counterintuitively, that may be a good thing. Interstate commerce would almost certainly advantage large, well-capitalized firms in states where it is cheaper and easier to grow cannabis, overwhelming smaller producers. The current system is inefficient, but it has allowed state-based ecosystems like Maine’s to take root.
Most importantly, rescheduling does nothing to dismantle the broader punitive architecture of the Controlled Substances Act. The CSA has long been criticized for fueling mass criminalization and racial disparities in enforcement. Rescheduling cannabis leaves that system largely intact.
Which brings us to politics.
Trump’s support for rescheduling highlights deep divisions among Republicans. Nationally, some Republican representatives are signaling openness to rethinking federal cannabis policy. At the same time, many conservative lawmakers pushed back aggressively on this move.
In Maine and Massachusetts, ongoing efforts to roll back recreational cannabis markets have come largely from the right. Such efforts are surprising. Historically, once states liberalize cannabis policy, they tend not to reverse course. But the push itself underscores how unsettled this issue remains for conservatives.
For Maine, the takeaway is straightforward. Rescheduling is better than nothing. If successful, it will reduce some harms, open some doors, and nudge federal policy closer to where public opinion has been for years.
But it’s not a finish line. Maine voters legalized recreational cannabis in 2016, and the state has spent nearly a decade building a cautious, locally oriented system. Rescheduling helps at the margins, but for now, meaningful policy reform will continue to happen where it always has: at the state level.
The real test will be whether federal policy eventually catches up — not just symbolically, but substantively — to the realities states like Maine have already been navigating for years.