President Donald Trump took two substantial, morally correct actions over the past week to liberalize the federal government’s drug policies — both long overdue from any president.
In a crowded Oval Office last Saturday, with superstar podcaster Joe Rogan standing directly behind him, Trump signed an executive order “to accelerate innovative research models and appropriate drug approvals to increase access to psychedelic drugs that could save lives and reverse the crisis of serious mental illness in America.”
On Thursday, Trump’s Justice Department announced it would move cannabis products from Schedule I — the most severe classification for highly addictive drugs such as heroin, with prohibitions on uses for medical research — to the far more lenient Schedule III, which includes over-the-counter medications like acetaminophen. The department also said it would set a hearing for late June to reclassify marijuana more broadly to Schedule III. The reclassification doesn’t legalize or decriminalize marijuana on the federal level, but it will create clearer pathways for legitimate medical research and provide tax relief for marijuana cultivators, who were heavily penalized in tax payments under Schedule I.
These two moves, however, do not mean Trump will end the immoral and disastrous war on drugs.
These are good things. We should be investing more as a nation in mental health research and adults should be free to grow, purchase and consume marijuana. And we should someday finally get to a place in this country where young people won’t have their life options, such as their ability to secure student loans, housing and employment, irreparably limited because of petty drug busts.
Rogan took a break from promoting pseudoscience to personally lobby Trump on the mental health virtues of the psychedelic drug ibogaine. If it was a different podcaster speaking to a different president in the Oval Office, MAGA brains might even have said Rogan’s pitch sounded vaguely “woke”: “These drugs are illegal not because they are harmful, they are illegal because of the 1970 controlled substances act passed by the Richard Nixon administration. They did it to target the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement.” (Rogan probably missed the irony of comparing Trump favorably to a corrupt Republican administration that fought an unpopular war abroad while trampling on Americans’ rights at home.)
These two moves, however, do not mean Trump will end the immoral and disastrous war on drugs. He has, in fact, conducted it with brutality.
The Trump administration has carried out, in what many experts have described as an extralegal fashion, at least 52 military strikes on suspected drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean. The strikes have killed at least 180 people, according to The New York Times, and include reported double-tap strikes on injured people clinging to the wreckage (a potential war crime). The administration said the boats were loaded with fentanyl and bound for the U.S. to kill Americans, thus making them enemy “combatants” rather than alleged civilian criminals. But it has yet to present evidence to back up those claims.
Trump had former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro seized and imprisoned, again supposedly in part because of the threat posed by fentanyl, even though the country has virtually no involvement in producing or trafficking the drug. The U.S. military literally has “boots on the ground” in operations against drug cartels in Ecuador and Mexico. The president also used the supposed menace of fentanyl smuggling from the Great White North to impose a 25% tariff on Canadian imports. But in all of 2024, Customs and Border Patrol seized just 43 pounds of fentanyl at the northern border, compared to 21,000 at the southern border.
The Trump administration has wielded the war on drugs itself as a weapon in its war on immigration. Thousands of people have been detained and deported under the pretext of nothing more than a long-past drug offense.
So why, then, did Trump take off his narc hat this week? Rogan and other psychedelic-friendly podcast bros have been calling out Trump for his disastrous and likely illegal Iran war that has made average Joes pay far more for everything, as well as for the fascistic and cruel tactics of his mass deportation regime. Looks to me like Trump, ever the showman and needy for approval, pulled a rabbit out of his hat: two momentous leaps in liberalization of federal drug policy.
But Trump hasn’t stopped the extralegal killings or the foreign incursions or the persecution of immigrants or the inexplicable trade warfare — all in the name of fighting a war on drugs. If this is what ending the drug war looks like to you, I daresay you’re high on your own supply.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW, often covering free speech, civil liberties and extremism. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider.