Someone in Congress Finally Opened the Rulebook
On Thursday, October 29, Representative Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, introduced an 89-page bill with a title only a legislative drafter could love: the Public Health and Research Reforms in Controlled Substances Act. Ignore the name and read what it does. It tears up the scheduling system that has governed every drug in America since 1970 and rebuilds it from the foundation.
I have waited a long time to write that sentence. Most of the cannabis bills I cover are tweaks. A tax tweak here, a banking tweak there, and lately a rescheduling tweak that moves marijuana from one wrong box into a slightly less wrong box. This bill goes after the boxes themselves.
Some quick history, because it explains why this matters. Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970 and Nixon signed it. Cannabis landed in Schedule I, the tier reserved for drugs with a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use, right alongside heroin. That placement was never the result of a careful finding. According to Cohen’s own office, the assistant secretary of health at the time recommended Schedule I only as a temporary holding spot until a national commission finished studying marijuana. That commission, the Shafer Commission, came back recommending against criminalizing private use. Nixon ignored it. The placeholder never left.
Think about that for a moment. More than half a century later, a temporary parking spot is the foundation of federal drug policy. Mandatory minimums, the research barriers that make it nearly impossible to study psilocybin, the felony records, all of it sits on top of a placeholder.
I am working from the Forbes and Marijuana Moment accounts and the sponsor’s summary, not from a line-by-line read of all 89 pages. With that said, here is the structure.
Two scales instead of one. Today’s five schedules mash risk and medical value into a single ranking. Cohen’s bill separates them. Schedules I through IV would rate a substance’s potential for substance use disorder and its threat to public health. Schedules A through E would rate medical efficacy on its own track. A drug can carry both labels, so something with high misuse potential and high therapeutic value would be Schedule I-A. That is simply true of plenty of medicine, and a system that cannot say so is a system that cannot think. The review itself grows from an eight-factor analysis to fifteen factors, run with input from a new federal committee of fifteen to twenty-five experts in pharmacology, addiction medicine and related fields.
A different decision-maker. Right now the Department of Health and Human Services recommends and law enforcement decides. The bill moves the core scheduling authority from the Justice Department and the DEA to HHS.
Cannabis comes out entirely. Not Schedule III. Out. Descheduling means federal prohibition ends. Within a year, HHS would have to hold at least three public meetings on regulation, safety, manufacturing, labeling, marketing and sale. Federal drug testing for employees could continue.
A psychedelics clock. Psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, DMT and ibogaine get priority treatment. They must be re-evaluated under the new system within two years, and if the agency fails to do it, the bill assigns them new default placements. Everything else gets re-evaluated within eight years.
Sentencing. The weight-based, drug-specific mandatory minimums go away. People whose offenses would carry lower penalties under the new framework get resentenced, and the Sentencing Commission is directed to rewrite its guidelines to match.
Why the Architecture Is the Story
Cannabis descheduling is the headline, but the machinery is what excites me. Rescheduling to Schedule III, the path the administration has been pursuing since the December 2025 executive order, keeps cannabis inside the Controlled Substances Act. It leaves the DEA in charge, and it keeps the compliance burden that favors companies with lawyers and capital over a farmer with a field. Descheduling plus a new scheduling process attacks the problem at the root: the next time anyone asks whether a substance belongs in a particular box, there is an actual method for answering.
Without that, we fight this drug by drug for another fifty years. First cannabis, then psilocybin, then MDMA, then whatever comes next, each one a separate campaign against an agency whose institutional instinct is to say no. A functioning process is worth more than any single win.
The Cohen bill also pulls research out of the hostage situation it has been in. Scientists who want to study Schedule I substances know the drill: licenses, storage rules, years of waiting. Cohen’s June bill, the Controlled Substances Act Clarification in Sciences Act, went after the same barriers and the definitions behind them. The new bill widens the attack. Unrestricted research is the thing I keep coming back to, because we cannot make rational rules about substances we are legally prevented from studying.
You hired me for honesty, not cheerleading, so here are the soft spots.
Is it pharma-proof? The pitch is that this approach does not hand the keys to Big Pharma, and descheduling does keep cannabis out of a pharmaceutical gatekeeping lane. But the bill moves authority to HHS, a department that includes the FDA. Removing the DEA veto is a real gain for researchers. Who sits on that fifteen-to-twenty-five member committee, and how the medical-efficacy axis is defined, will decide whether the system favors patentable molecules over plants and fungi. A medical value scale built around randomized trials rewards whoever can afford to run them. That is a thing to watch, not a defect I can point to in the text.
It does not enshrine consciousness as a right. I would love a bill that did. This one does not. Nothing in the coverage suggests it recognizes a right to alter your own consciousness. What it does is make scheduling follow evidence and cut some of the harshest penalties. Cognitive liberty is the argument I would bolt onto this foundation, and it is worth making loudly, but it is our argument, not the bill’s.
Descheduling leaves a hole. Three public meetings is a study, not a framework. Who regulates the product, who taxes it, how states and the federal government divide the work: the reporting does not say, and a market without rules is its own kind of mess. Keeping cannabis in federal workplace drug testing will also keep a lot of people looking over their shoulders.
No, and I will say that plainly. Cohen is retiring at the end of 2026. The 119th Congress ends on January 3, 2027, and bills that have not passed die with it. The coverage I found names no cosponsors and no Republican sponsor. An 89-page rewrite of the Controlled Substances Act introduced weeks before adjournment is not a legislative vehicle. It is a marker.
Markers matter. The next member who wants to carry this work gets a drafted text instead of a blank page. Cohen has also been building a record: the June bill would let states effectively force federal rescheduling by changing their own laws, and he has pressed the Attorney General and the DEA on the status of the Schedule III process. Put those together and you have the outline of a platform.
The platform needs a Republican. I have argued before that legalization is a Republican issue, and this bill hands conservatives a pitch that fits their own stated values: move power away from a federal law-enforcement agency, tie decisions to evidence, end sentences that treat a drug’s weight as a moral measure, cut the cost of mass incarceration. If the next Congress sees this reintroduced with a bipartisan name on it, the odds change.
Calls are cheap and staffers keep tallies. So here is a script.
Find your representative and both senators. Say that you want them to read the Cohen bill, that you support rewriting the Controlled Substances Act on scientific grounds, and that you want a commitment to cosponsor a reintroduced version in the next Congress. Ask your senators whether they will introduce a companion bill. Ask for hearings. Cohen’s own supporting brief says nearly nine in ten Americans want marijuana legal for medical or recreational use. Tell them you are one of the nine.
Groups like NORML, the Drug Policy Alliance, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and Students for Sensible Drug Policy have already endorsed the bill, and they will tell you what is moving and when.
For fifty-five years we have run drug policy on a placeholder written in a hurry by people who ignored their own commission. This bill is the first serious attempt I have seen to replace it with something built on evidence, and it arrives with a short shelf life, a Democratic sponsor on his way out the door, and gaps I just listed.
I will take it anyway. Not because it is perfect, but because it asks the right question: why is this substance in this box, and who decided? The people who cannot answer that honestly are the ones who should worry.
Make the call.
Sources
- Forbes, “New Bill Would Legalize Marijuana And Overhaul U.S. Drug Laws,” Oct. 30, 2026: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ajherrington/2026/10/30/new-bill-would-legalize-marijuana-and-overhaul-us-drug-laws/
- Marijuana Moment, “New Bill In Congress Would Dramatically Overhaul How The Federal Government Classifies Drugs While Legalizing Marijuana”: https://www.marijuanamoment.net/new-bill-in-congress-would-dramatically-overhaul-how-the-federal-government-classifies-drugs-while-legalizing-marijuana/
- Cannabis Business Times, “US Congressman Introduces Bill to Legalize Cannabis, Rewrite Controlled Substances Act”: https://www.cannabisbusinesstimes.com/legislation-and-regulation/federal-cannabis-legalization/news/16050512/us-congressman-introduces-bill-to-legalize-cannabis-rewrite-controlled-substances-act
- Rep. Cohen, press release on the CARERS Act (history of the Schedule I placement), June 3, 2015: https://cohen.house.gov/press-release/congressman-cohen-today%E2%80%99s-votes-may-signal-watershed-support-bipartisan-carers-act
- Rep. Cohen, Controlled Substances Act Clarification in Sciences Act (H.R. 9186), June 8, 2026: https://cohen.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/congressman-cohen-introduces-controlled-substances-act-clarification
- Rep. Cohen, letter to the Attorney General and DEA Administrator on rescheduling and the HALT Fentanyl Act: https://cohen.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/cohen.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/letter-to-ag-bondi-and-dea-administrator-reschedule-and-halt_v2.pdf
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