Just three months before the election, the Biden administration is trying to score political points by initiating a process to loosen federal restrictions on marijuana. Unable to meet either the legal or scientific standards for this change, the Biden-Harris administration is playing a cynical shell game: rewriting the rules and ignoring the science to achieve its partisan goal.

Federal law – the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 – requires the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to classify drugs according to a five-tier classification system. Schedule I drugs are those that have no currently recognized medical use and have a high potential for abuse and dependence. Their production and distribution are generally prohibited under federal law.

In contrast, drugs with accepted medical uses are placed in the less restrictive Schedules II through V. Their production, distribution and medical use are therefore subject to federal regulation based on their relative risk of abuse and dependence. Schedule II drugs are the most strictly controlled and Schedule V drugs the least controlled.

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There have been previous attempts to loosen restrictions on marijuana by downgrading it to a lower level, but these attempts have failed.

To appease its political base, the Biden-Harris administration wants to loosen marijuana laws, even though science does not support this move.

Most recently, an attempt failed in 2016 under the Obama administration, when the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recommended that the DEA not reclassify marijuana. It concluded that the drug “has a high potential for abuse, has no accepted medical use in the United States, and does not demonstrate an acceptable level of safety for use even under medical supervision.” But eight years later, under political pressure from the Biden administration, the HHS has changed course – even though the DEA has not endorsed a change.

To please progressive voters, the administration is pushing hard to reclassify marijuana, bypassing the DEA. In October 2022, President Joe Biden asked HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and Attorney General Merrick Garland to “expeditiously” review marijuana’s status as a Schedule I substance.

In response, HHS recommended reclassifying marijuana, bypassing established standards for classifying drugs and developing new criteria designed to achieve the government’s desired outcome. The DEA concluded that the available data did not justify reclassification and disagreed with the proposed change. DEA Director Anne Milgram did not sign it.

Instead, Attorney General Merrick Garland, noting the “significantly different views” between DEA and HHS, signed the final proposed rule at the DEA. Before the proposed rule becomes final and effective, the DEA must receive evidence in a formal hearing before an administrative law judge.

Politics, not science, is driving the Biden-Harris administration’s effort to reclassify marijuana. Had it not thrown out established standards and relaxed the rigor of the scientific process, the administration could not justify the reclassification.

First of all, marijuana clearly meets the first criterion for Schedule I drugs: it has a high potential for abuse. This was true eight years ago when the Department of Health reached this conclusion, and the facts supporting this ruling have not changed since then. On the contrary, the potential for abuse has only increased as the drug has become more potent due to increasing THC concentrations.

The data continues to refute the cannabis industry’s narrative that marijuana is a harmless feel-good drug. Marijuana is highly addictive: One-third of people who used marijuana in the past year met the criteria for addiction, and half of daily users become addicted to the drug.

In addition, marijuana has wide-ranging negative effects on mental and physical health. Long-term cannabis use is credibly linked to an increased risk of psychosis, including schizophrenia, suicidal thoughts, and hallucinations or paranoia. Marijuana is particularly harmful to children and adolescents, among whom the drug is becoming increasingly popular.

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The facts are also clear: marijuana meets the second criterion for Schedule I drugs. As former President Barack Obama’s HHS noted back in 2016, there is still no recognized medical use for marijuana in the United States.

While the FDA has approved several specific synthetic compounds derived from marijuana to treat certain seizures, chemotherapy-induced nausea, and AIDS-related anorexia, the FDA has never approved cannabis itself—or any other marijuana compound or derivative—to treat any disease.

The FDA currently states that “there has been no FDA review of data from rigorous clinical testing demonstrating that these unapproved products are safe and effective for the various therapeutic purposes for which they are used.” Because marijuana has no legitimate medical use, it cannot be prescribed by doctors.

To get around the inconvenient fact that there is no approved medical use for marijuana, the Biden-Harris HHS argued that the fact that some states have passed laws allowing the medical use of marijuana is enough to establish that there is a legitimate medical use.

This is simply wrong. In the United States, the availability of drugs for medical use is not based on their political popularity, but solely on the FDA’s determination, based on rigorous scientific studies, that the drug is safe, effective, and uniformly manufactured. The FDA has still not found an acceptable medical use for marijuana.

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Drug laws are designed to protect American citizens—and especially American children—from dangerous substances. But by politicizing the reclassification process, the Biden administration is gambling with people’s lives in the midst of the worst drug crisis our country has ever seen.

Not all marijuana users later turn to harder drugs, but the vast majority of people who use harder drugs started with marijuana. It is extremely irresponsible to facilitate the use of a gateway drug while more than 100,000 Americans die from drug overdoses each year.

The data continues to refute the cannabis industry’s narrative that marijuana is a harmless feel-good drug. Marijuana is highly addictive: One-third of people who used marijuana in the past year met the criteria for addiction, and half of daily users become addicted to the drug.

An important practical effect of the reorganization is that marijuana dealers will be able to deduct their expenses as business expenses. In effect, taxpayers would subsidize the marijuana industry. The reorganization would give government approval to the cannabis industry’s campaign to downplay marijuana’s addictiveness and health risks, allowing marijuana dealers to cultivate widespread dependence on the drug and increase their base of regular customers.

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This comes at a time when cartels and transnational criminal organizations with ties to Mexico and China have expanded their cultivation and distribution of marijuana within the United States.

We hear a lot about the “rule of law” from the current administration, but by ignoring legal standards and scientific evidence in their rush to loosen marijuana restrictions, they are trampling on the rule of law and recklessly dealing with the health and safety of the American people—all for political reasons.

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William P. Barr served twice as U.S. Attorney General (1991-93 and 2019-20) and is a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute. His law firm, Torridon Law PLLC, submitted comments on behalf of the nonpartisan nonprofit Smart Approaches to Marijuana in the DEA rescheduling process.