Economic boon or disaster? Trying to move through the haze surrounding marijuana reclassification91%
By Anthony Cotton0%
12/25/2025, 11:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 24 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Anchoring Bias, and Confirmation Bias, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 44.4% saturation with 283 hits. Analysis detected 1,630 faulty-reasoning hits from 638 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 84.1% and a BS Rank of 91% (2,140 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 90.20% of the article peer group.
The reactions to President Trump’s recent executive order to move marijuana from a Schedule I drug, akin to heroin, to Schedule III — think ketamine — drew some immediate, perhaps expected, reactions.
Colorado Leads, an alliance of cannabis business leaders in the state, welcomed the potential move, saying it represented “a meaningful step toward aligning federal policy with scientific evidence, public opinion, and decades of state-level experience.
Rescheduling marijuana acknowledges what patients, consumers, doctors, and public health and safety experts have long known: cannabis has significant medical benefits and does not belong in the same legal category as the most dangerous controlled substances.”
Meanwhile, the national nonprofit One Chance to Grow Up decried the decision.
“Across the country, high-potency marijuana products are proliferating, even as research continues to demonstrate harm to the developing brain,” it said in a statement.
Reclassifying marijuana at any potency or amount wrongly suggests that it carries a lower risk of misuse and has accepted medical value, claims the science debunks.”
The executive order prompted a lot of questions, ranging from whether the order will open the door to banking on a federal level to its impact on employment.
And that, for right now, with the executive order in need of approval from the Department of Justice, seems to be the sweet spot — with no one really completely sure about what happens next, said Sam Kamin, a University of Denver law professor and cannabis industry expert.
“The answer ranges everywhere from this will be a disaster to this will be a boon, and it really depends how much the federal government decides to enforce the federal laws that it's largely been ignoring now for 15 years,” Kamin told Colorado Matters senior host Ryan Warner.
The boon, in essence, would be a stamp of approval on what, in Colorado, is a multi-billion-dollar industry.
According to a press release from Governor Jared Polis, Colorado will likely surpass $1 billion in sales and $200 million in tax revenue before year’s end; since marijuana sales were legalized in 2014, sales have topped $3 billion.
Kamin likens the current system, where most adults can go to a dispensary and purchase cannabis, whether plants for smoking or edibles for chilling, to shopping in a candy store.
But, he adds, that’s where the potential for disaster lurks, with the Trump administration playing the role of a curmudgeon turning away trick-or-treaters at the front door,
“So moving to Schedule three would mean that this would be like anabolic steroids or ketamine or the other things that are in that category, and it's illegal to sell those without a prescription,” Kamin said.
You can't sell them out of a storefront to anyone who walks in the way we sell marijuana here in Colorado.
“It's sort of a through-the-looking-glass take on it, but it's not implausible to me that everything in this executive order speaks to medical use, speaks to CBD, speaks to the elderly and chronic pain and all of those things.
I could see a Justice Department saying, ‘Look, advocates for marijuana.
You've been saying this is great medicine for 50 years.
We finally heard you.
There's a medical path.
Take the medical path.
All other paths are closed.’... That would be completely disastrous (for retailers).”
Again, questions in search of answers.
“Marijuana is treated by the states and by people in the states far differently than the federal government treats it," Kamin said.
That would certainly remain true under this rescheduling.
I don't think most people think of marijuana as a pill that you take for back pain.
They think of it as gummies that you chew to go to bed at night, or something that you smoke or vape or inhale.
The federal government is still not there.
They're very much talking about medicine.
They're not talking about fun.”
Speakers
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