On December 18, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to complete the rulemaking process to move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act. If finalized, it would mark the most significant federal shift in cannabis policy in decades.
Importantly, the order itself does not reclassify marijuana. Instead, it accelerates a formal administrative process already underway and still subject to regulatory review. Even then, Schedule III status would not legalize cannabis at the federal level.
Rescheduling would formally acknowledge accepted medical use, expand access to scientific research, and potentially ease certain tax restrictions facing state-legal cannabis businesses.
However, it would not resolve conflicts between federal and state law, guarantee banking access, or deliver criminal justice remedies such as expungement or sentence relief. As a result, the gap between reform and repair remains wide.
Supporters of rescheduling describe it as overdue recognition of medical reality. Critics warn it could downplay risks. Markets have responded cautiously.
But those reactions, while politically relevant, only scratch the surface. Marijuana was never regulated purely on scientific grounds. Its criminalization was shaped by fear, politics, and social storytelling. That history gives today’s policy shift its deeper meaning.
For much of U.S. history, cannabis was legal and largely uncontroversial. It appeared in 19th-century patent medicines and was used medicinally across cultures for centuries before that. Its transformation into a national menace did not follow a discovery of new dangers, but a change in how the drug was described and who it was associated with.
That change accelerated in the early 20th century as marijuana became entangled with immigration politics and labor anxieties.
Following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, increased migration brought cannabis use into greater public view in border regions and agricultural communities. Rather than being treated as a neutral cultural practice, marijuana became racialized.
Public discourse shifted from “cannabis” to “marihuana,” a term that helped frame the drug as foreign and threatening. Newspapers and public officials increasingly linked marijuana to crime, violence, and moral disorder, often tying those claims directly to Mexican immigrants.
Historians have noted that drugs in the United States often became illegal only after being associated with groups labeled as deviant or undesirable. Marijuana followed that pattern closely. As Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, the short answer to why cannabis became illegal in the U.S. is rooted in racism.
During the 1920s and 1930s, sensational media coverage amplified those fears. Marijuana was portrayed as a trigger for insanity, predatory behavior, and violent crime. The claims were vivid, repetitive, and rarely supported by evidence.
The framing proved politically useful during periods of economic stress. During the Great Depression, Mexican workers who had been welcomed as labor in earlier decades were increasingly portrayed as surplus and dangerous. Marijuana laws became one tool among many used to justify surveillance, arrest, and deportation, often disproportionately affecting communities of color.
The federal government entered the fight in the 1930s. Under the leadership of Harry Anslinger, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics launched a nationwide campaign against marijuana. With limited resources to control a widely growing plant, the bureau relied heavily on messaging, education films, and congressional testimony that emphasized extreme dangers.
That effort culminated in the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, the first federal law targeting the drug. Rather than banning marijuana outright, the law required tax stamps for legal handling while making those stamps effectively unavailable. The result was prohibition by bureaucracy, backed by severe penalties.
Scientific challenges to the narrative were sidelined. Studies that failed to find strong links between marijuana use and violent crime were dismissed, and research momentum stalled.
Against that backdrop, today’s reclassification effort carries clear irony.
Marijuana was once central to a narrative that cast Mexican immigrants as dangerous and disorderly. Now, the federal government is moving to soften marijuana’s official status, acknowledging that its risks were overstated and its medical value long ignored.
However, the impulse to define immigration through criminality has not disappeared. Instead, it has shifted. Where marijuana once served as a symbol of danger, contemporary rhetoric more often centers on “murderers,” “rapists,” “drug dealers,” and “gang members.” The object has changed. The structure of the story has not.
Taken together, rescheduling marijuana would represent a meaningful policy shift. Still, it does not confront the deeper legacy of how fear shaped drug law, nor how those narratives continue to influence immigration debates today.
Cannabis is being reclassified based on evidence and medical metrics. However, the country continues to cling to the politics of fear that made that classification possible in the first place.