Experts say Donald Trump’s recent executive order on cannabis rescheduling is unlikely to make a meaningful difference for those most vulnerable to cannabis-related criminal charges, which the president has ramped up in various ways during his second term.

Under the Biden administration, the Department of Health and Human Services recommended that cannabis be removed from schedule I, a category reserved for substances with “no accepted medical use”, to schedule III, a category that includes substances eligible for FDA approval as medications. Last month, Trump urged the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, to speed up the process in his executive order, citing 2023 FDA findings supporting cannabis’s potential “to treat anorexia related to a medical condition, nausea and vomiting, and pain”.

Still, the executive order has not yet materialized into a change in policy. While the attorney general has discretion to expedite the rescheduling process, Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University and executive director of the Drug Enforcement Policy Center, said: “There’s already pushback on Capitol Hill from a variety of folks about doing it in this kind of expedited way, notwithstanding that that seems to be what the president ordered.”

That pushback is coming from congressional Republicans who do not want cannabis to be rescheduled, and advocates who want cannabis reform to go further and remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) altogether and place it in the same category as alcohol and tobacco, Berman explained.

Cat Packer, director of drug markets and legal regulation at the Drug Policy Alliance, said that rescheduling will not reduce criminal penalties for cannabis because “under the CSA, marijuana is special, and marijuana has specific penalties that are not dependent on whatever schedule marijuana is on”, so even if it got moved to schedule V, which includes products such as cough syrup with codeine, formulations of cannabis that have not been FDA-approved would still be just as criminalized.

On paper, rescheduling “wouldn’t make any formal difference”, Berman said, echoing Packer.

“Though I think it’s important not to lose sight of the importance of informality. We have seen across the country significant reductions in the number of people arrested for cannabis offenses, even in states where the law hasn’t changed at all. And so the reality is, nationwide, reforms, changes in culture and attitudes always trickle down to enforcement in a variety of ways,” Berman said.

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which compiles FBI data on cannabis arrests each year, has found that arrests have been trending down overall as state-level medical and recreational legalization has become more common.

“It’s meaningful that the federal government is acknowledging that marijuana is not as dangerous as it was purported to be, and that we should be utilizing that information to make adjustments at various levels,” Packer said, before adding: “In the same breath that he articulated support and benefits for medical marijuana, Trump simultaneously threw recreational and adult use under the bus.”

The Department of Justice rescinded Biden-era guidance in September that directed US attorneys to refrain from prosecuting simple cannabis possession cases. In response, the US attorney for the district of Wyoming, Darin Smith, announced his intention to use “every prosecutorial tool available to hold [cannabis] offenders accountable”.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has also used cannabis-related offenses, including simple possession, as a justification for deportation. Some ICE raids have targeted state-legal recreational grow operations under Trump. In July, agricultural worker Jaime Alanís Garcia fell to his death running from ICE officers during a California raid of a Glass House Farms facility. Arrests for minor cannabis offenses in Washington DC accelerated after Trump declared a “crime emergency” there and demanded increased policing in DC parks, where public cannabis use is common.

Packer said that 2025 cannabis arrest data was unlikely to be available until October of this year, but noted that it was possible that Trump administration efforts may have tempered the downward trend in cannabis criminalization.

“Noncitizens remain the most vulnerable to these types of prosecutions … and I also think that Black and brown folks will continue to bear the brunt of enforcement,” Packer said.

“Part of that is because of different circumstances like public consumption, different economic considerations that will mean that certain people are outside and other people are inside … I haven’t seen anything to suggest that that will change.”