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ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Ten years after New York state made it legal, the federal Justice Department has reclassified state-licensed medical marijuana as a less-dangerous drug. Advocates for the change say it’s a long overdue recognition of the health benefits of cannabis for people who depend on it for treatment.
Several advocacy groups, from those who grow and process medical marijuana to those who prescribe it — and those who use it — applaud the move, which reclassifies medical marijuana from a Schedule I drug to Schedule III. That essentially puts it in the same category as a number of commonly prescribed medications. It also means tax changes for operators, who will now be able to write off business expenses, which they could not do under Schedule I. Non-medical operations still cannot use those write-offs.
Forty states, including New York, have medical marijuana programs. The Justice Department order also covers Food & Drug Administration-approved drug products containing marijuana.
“They come because they can’t stand the fact that their husband snores and they can’t get sleep, or they got a bad knee because they wrestled in college,” said Damien Cornwell, president of Cannabis Association of New York. “Or they have arthritis, or they have anxiety. They want a seltzer at the end of the night with five milligrams. So, in that regard that’s super important.”
Not everyone is on board. Smart Approaches to Marijuana, or SAM, is a political group opposed to legalization and sale. It issued a statement condemning “in the strongest possible terms the Trump administration’s illegal move to skip procedural requirements and reschedule marijuana from schedule I to schedule III without following federal law.”
Cornwell disagrees.
“The bottom line is, regardless of where you fall in the political spectrum, this will help you,” he said. “This will absolutely help you. There needs to be more research done. You need to have more accessibility to things that make you feel better. And you don’t have to apologize for it.”
The state Office of Cannabis Management issued a statement:
"OCM is still analyzing the implications of today’s order but New York welcomes the rescheduling of medial cannabis. We have long maintained that cannabis should not be classified as a Schedule I substance, and we support progress toward a federal framework that better reflects current science and public health considerations, and experiences of the thousands of patients across New York.”
OCM also points out the fact that this move does not address the broader use cannabis market.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is also looking at reclassification of marijuana as a whole, meaning adult recreational use. Hearings on that are expected to start at the end of June.