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Built by a former cannabis regulator, Policy, Decoded helps operators read the policy terrain before it shifts beneath their feet.
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The testimony ended Wednesday afternoon in a hearing room at DEA headquarters that almost nobody saw. No cameras, no audio feed, a handful of public seats. For two and a half weeks the government argued under oath that cannabis belongs in Schedule III, seven designated opponents argued back, and everything the rest of us know arrived secondhand, through the people in the seats and the filings the parties made. The evidence is in. What it left behind is a record, and the record is the whole ballgame: the file a recommended decision, a final rule, and a federal appeals court will work from for years.
The government's case was lean and methodical, an FDA scientist and a pain physician reversing fifty years of institutional position in a single morning, under oath, permanently. The opposition's case did something I have rarely seen a litigation strategy manage: it argued against itself, putting DEA's own pharmacologist on the stand and watching its marquee scientific witness concede the statutory question in a five-minute cross. And the file's largest silence belongs to the people the rule governs, the 412,500 workers, by the industry's own count, that no witness was asked to know anything about.
There is history here too, and it should temper every celebration. The last time a DEA judge read a record like this one, in 1988, he called cannabis one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man, and the administrator rejected him anyway. The courts let it stand. A recommended decision is advice. The transcript is the document. And the real audience for everything said in that sealed room sits across the river at the D.C. Circuit. We walk through what made it into the record, what stayed out, who has to live with both, and what to do while the briefs get written.
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