President Donald Trump’s former acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is predicting that the administration will soon “dig in” to the state-federal marijuana policy conflict, emphasizing the need to “eliminate confusion, not create it” amid the rescheduling process.
In a somewhat surprising interview appearance on the cannabis-focused podcast The Dales Report on Friday, former DEA Acting Administrator Derek Maltz stressed that he didn’t want to “start second-guessing” current officials by taking a personal position on rescheduling—but he reiterated his previously articulated claim that the push for reform under the Biden administration was politically, rather than scientifically, motivated.
Maltz—who retired from DEA in 2014 after 28 years of service and subsequently served four months as the agency’s interim leader under Trump earlier this year—made it clear throughout the conversation that he didn’t want to make any definitive statements about where he stands on the proposal to move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).
And while he echoed points he’s made in the past about the potential harms of cannabis use, linking it to psychosis and schizophrenia and stressing the need to prevent youth access, he did seem to an extent to distinguish
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