Across Massachusetts, medical marijuana care providers, advocates and business owners offered mixed reactions to the federal order reclassifying state-licensed medical marijuana as a less-dangerous drug.
After President Donald Trump’s acting attorney general on Thursday signed the order, some praised its potential to reduce stigma, lower tax rates for medical operators and open paths for new medical research. But many also noted the piecemeal approach lacks clarity for medical use patients and leaves recreational use businesses behind.
The order is a major policy shift long sought by advocates who said cannabis should never have been treated like heroin by the federal government.
The order signed by Todd Blanche does not legalize marijuana for medical or recreational use under U.S. law. But it does change the way it’s regulated, shifting licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I — reserved for drugs without medical use and with high potential for abuse — to the less strictly regulated Schedule III. It also gives licensed medical marijuana operators a major tax break and eases some barriers to researching cannabis.
Massachusetts Cannabis Coalition executive director Ryan Dominguez said called the reclassification “a great step in the direction of legalization” Thursday.
“While it does fall short of full legalization, I think it definitely helps to solidify that our products in the cannabis market have medical uses, and it’s also going to give some opportunities for our medical businesses to receive some relief,” he said, pointing to the section of the U.S. tax code that bars businesses “trafficking” Schedule I and II substances from deducting ordinary business expenses.
Many interpreted the Trump administration’s removal of medical marijuana businesses from the Schedule I classification as enabling them to make those deductions like other businesses.
“I think that means that they’re going to have kind of lower effective tax rates, improved margins, [and] stronger cash flow,” Dominguez said.
At the same time, others criticized the order over its failure to clarify what happens to medical marijuana users now that the drug is deemed less dangerous.
“The order is silent about how this change affects medical cannabis patients who have long faced violations of their civil rights and lost jobs, insurance and housing because of their medical needs,” said Shaleen Title, a cannabis policy attorney and former commissioner of Massachusetts’ Cannabis Control Commission.
Jeremiah MacKinnon, executive director of the Massachusetts Patient Advocacy Alliance, echoed that concern saying medical marijuana patients “don’t want to be in a situation where something feels like it’s both permitted and prohibited at the same time.”
“They haven’t told us whether we can travel with it, whether we can keep our housing if we’re in federal housing, whether we can avoid losing our other rights because we’re patients,” MacKinnon said. “We need to that guidance so that way we understand what this government change actually does in patients lives on the ground.”
“If federal agencies don’t issue guidance to clarify patient rights, then we could be seeing things like court cases happening because patients had their cannabis confiscated when they shouldn’t have,” he said.
The Trump administration also said it was jump-starting the process for reclassifying marijuana more broadly, setting a hearing to begin in late June.
Trump told his administration in December to work as quickly as possible to reclassify marijuana. On Saturday, as the Republican president signed an unrelated executive order about psychedelics, he seemed to express frustration that it was taking so long.
Blanche said Thursday that the Department of Justice was “delivering on President Trump’s promise” to expand Americans’ access to medical treatment options. “This rescheduling action allows for research on the safety and efficacy of this substance, ultimately providing patients with better care and doctors with more reliable information,” he said in a statement.
Blanche’s action Iargely legitimizes medical marijuana programs in the 40 states that have adopted them. It sets up an expedited system for state-licensed medical marijuana producers and distributors to register with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
It makes clear that cannabis researchers won’t be penalized for obtaining state-licensed marijuana or marijuana-derived products for use in their work, and it grants state-licensed medical marijuana companies a windfall by allowing them, for the first time, to deduct business expenses on their federal taxes.
Any marijuana-derived medicine approved by the Food and Drug Administration is similarly listed in Schedule III, it said.
Dr. Kevin Hill, chief of addiction psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, called the change a small, but positive step with the potential to broaden cannabis science.
“I do think that a larger barrier to research is the lack of funding for the science,” he told GBH News. “There have been a lot of people who’ve advocated for more research along the way, including cannabis advocates, and with a major barrier removed, like the scheduling here, this will give stakeholders an opportunity to fund some of that research, hopefully.”
Hill said researchers now will be able to examine more potent, modern cannabis and yield studies with insights “more applicable to what people are actually using.”
