‘A lifelong battle’: Cannabis activist weighs in on move to reclassify marijuana

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to fast-track the reclassification of cannabis. However, it wouldn’t make the drug legal.

“We have people begging for me to do this, people that are in great pain,” Trump said.

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Trump signed the order, which would speed up the process to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug and allow the Food and Drug Administration to study it for medical purposes.

The order doesn’t legalize marijuana, but would reclassify it as a Schedule III substance, or a drug with a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence. Moving the drug from Schedule I to Schedule III would ease regulatory hurdles and allow the FDA to study cannabis for medical purposes, potentially opening it up for wider medical use by seniors, veterans and others as a pharmaceutical drug.

“Polls at 82% will help many of those patients live a far better life,” Trump said.

A recent Gallup poll found that 64% of U.S. adults think the use of marijuana should be legal.

Brady Cobb is a longtime cannabis advocate from Fort Lauderdale and has been lobbying Congress on cannabis reform since 2015.

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“It’s been a lifelong battle to see cannabis reformed,” Cobb said. “At the end of the day, there’s a lot of people who use cannabis for relief.”

Cobb launched three different cannabis companies under Florida’s medical marijuana cannabis program.

“Cannabis has been stigmatized for a long time as something that’s dangerous or deadly, it’s not,” Cobb said. “It needs to be used responsibly just like anything else.”

Cobb says Thursday’s move is a massive step forward, but now the real work starts.

“Now we have to work on integrating what this change looks like into the federal government,” Cobb said. “You have over dozens of federal agencies that are going to have to update their policies.”