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this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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He recommended the HHS (overarching org of the FDA) reevaluate the schedule status of it back in October '22. The HHS took like a year to do their thing and then made a recommendation to the DEA to change it to schedule III. The rest of the time from them until now was the DEA also doing their own internal review.
I feel like if the timing was political, they would have pushed this news out to late summer closer to the election. That's not even considering the fact that a simple majority in Congress could have done the same damn thing without any of this beurocracy.
Pretty sure the president can reschedule drugs with the stroke of a pen, and this whole process Iis basically political insulation.
Not really though. Executive orders can easily be tied up and overturned in court. If Congress isn't willing to sign legislation to reschedule it, there will absolutely be enough opposition to overturn any blanket order. He essentially did sign an executive order for this, but it was to order the HHS review and do it the slow way.
Ok, so try. Do something and make them oppose it, don't piddle around your entire time in office because maybe they will be able to effectively counter what you do.
It's easy to get caught in the weeds (so to speak) on how exactly to change things, but it's clear that much more can be done. And the president has like 100 people on-call to handle the details folks like us aren't sure of offhand.
I get the frustration, but in this case I think it's a little unfair. Our archaic drugs laws are dictated by the Controlled Substances Act and the only two avenues to update the schedule status are a formal DEA review or an act of Congress. The latter clearly has no legitimate interest beyond political grandstanding so the other possible path to change was used. He took the most effective route in this case.
The vast majority of our legislators are not there because they want to make the world a better place. They're there to further their own self interests and most political dealings work on a quid pro quo arrangement. Forcing a DEA review cost almost nothing politically. The real problem is that this extremely popular action that was unnecessarily harming a lot of fucking people even required executive action at all instead of being addressed 30 years ago by actual legislation.
Some good info for the discussion:
https://mainelaw.maine.edu/faculty/can-the-president-reschedule-or-deschedule-marijuana%EF%BF%BC/
I think the question is whether Biden had to go through some lengthy process to coax the DEA to reschedule, or if he could have just ordered them to. Even supposing there's a statutory requirement to go through some review process, he could have (1) set the process in motion on January 21, 2021, instead of waiting 22 months, and (2) applied political pressure to the agency to expedite the review. I agree this is the only route to rescheduling, but even assuming he couldn't just order the DEA to do it, there was still a lot of meat left on the bone.
I could only get the abstract for the article, but the linked brief is likely more than enough. You're right that intense pressure could have been out on the agencies to expedite the process, specifically, the Attorney General, FDA, and DEA heads are all appointed positions and can be removed from office with relative ease, but that move would come at a heavy cost.
The subtext though is that it's not a priority for him besides being a campaign bullet point, which you've already touched on plenty and I agree with. Rescheduling doesn't redeem anything in my eyes, but I'm not going to look down on positive progress when it happens. So make sure to 420blazeit and celebrate.
You should be able to get it from SSRN by clicking "Download This Paper", then "Download without registration" on the following page (you may need to scroll down a bit if you're on mobile), and finally "Download".
Oh shit, thanks for letting me know. Funny enough, I even tried to download the pdf, but mistook that "download without registration" as a heading for their marketing section!
Weird how every democrat piece of progressive legislation just somehow mysteriously ends up perfectly timed to overlap into a Republican administration that will overturn it!