Part V of our coverage of the federal rescheduling case. Part IV covered the post-hearing briefs.
294 fixes across 2,533 pages is roughly one every nine pages, and most are spelling and speaker names. A handful did something else: they changed the meaning, sometimes to its opposite.
For six weeks, one version of the federal marijuana rescheduling record had a Tennessee investigator testifying that cannabis shipments were arriving with lab paperwork showing illegal levels of delta-9 THC.
What he said was the opposite. The paperwork claimed legal levels. That was his point: the certificates travel with the shipment, they say the product is compliant, and when the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s own lab tests it, the delta-9 comes back much higher. One missing syllable, on page 1823, and the sentence argued against itself.
That was one of 294 corrections Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek C. Julius ordered before the DEA published the full transcript of its eleven-day rescheduling hearing this week. The parties proposed them, the government included, and Julius signed the order on August 20.
Most are exactly what you would expect from live transcription. Misspelled surnames, speaker labels attached to the wrong lawyer dozens of times, “Torridon Law LLC” corrected to “Torridon Law PLLC” on the opening page of nearly every day. A few are just funny, and Marijuana Moment collected those when the order came out: “pubic” for “public,” “anal” for “analysis,” and two places where “nubs” should have read “nuggs.”
A small number are not clerical at all. In those, the record had a witness saying the opposite of what they said.
The Corrections That Changed the Meaning
The rescheduling itself, backwards. On day ten, page 2070, Pueblo emergency physician Karen Randall warned that moving marijuana would change how the public sees it. The transcript had her describing the move as going from “a CS-III to a III.” The corrected version reads “CS-I to a III.” In the official record of a hearing convened to decide whether marijuana leaves Schedule I, the direction of the move came out wrong.
A conflict of interest, admitted or omitted. On day three, page 830, a witness being questioned about a potential conflict said he would have to check his professional timeline to see whether it had been “inadvertently omitted” that he had one, adding that it was “certainly not through any conscious obfuscation.” The uncorrected transcript read “admitted.” One word, and the sentence describes the opposite situation.
Perception of harm, up or down. Randall again, on page 2135, describing how the perception of harm has “decreased dramatically” over the last decade, especially among children. The record had her saying it increased, which would have made the rest of her argument incoherent.
Pure or impure. On day five, page 1222, Bertha Madras walked the judge through the questions pharmacology asks of any drug. One of them is whether the substance is contaminated: “Is it impure, with microbes, with chemicals, with heavy metals, pesticides, insecticides.” The transcript had “pure.”
The distinction the witness was making. On day six, page 1482, Ed Wood of DUID Victim Voices explained why an unscientific per se THC limit convicts unimpaired drivers and acquits impaired ones, and that Colorado’s permissible-inference structure solves half of it. The uncorrected version collapsed his closing line into “with a per se law,” erasing the distinction his entire answer rested on. The correction restores it: “with a per se, permissible inference, law.”
Two more that Marijuana Moment flagged when the order came out belong in the same category. On page 284, a lawyer asked whether dispensary cannabis is tested “to make sure there’s no adulterants,” and the record dropped the “no.” And a line rendered as the statement “This is a medication.” turned out to be the question “This is a medication?”
Why It Matters, and How Much
Perspective is in order. Court reporters work fast, and 294 corrections across 2,533 pages come out to about one every nine pages, which is not a scandal. The parties proposed them, which is how the process is designed to work, and Julius ordered them under the regulation that governs it. Most of the reversals are obvious enough in context that a careful reader would have caught them. The system did its job. The record was corrected before Julius issues his recommendation.
What is worth sitting with is the six weeks in between. The tribunal emailed uncorrected daily transcripts to counsel and to some of the parties as the hearing ran, a fact that surfaced in open court when the government tried to strike a witness for having read them. Those were the pages available while the parties drafted the post-hearing briefs that would become their final arguments to Julius, and while reporters, this outlet included, covered the case.
In a proceeding this technical, the difference between legal and illegal, increased and decreased, admitted and omitted, pure and impure is the difference between a witness’s point and its opposite. That is the argument for a correction process, and it is also the argument for checking any quotation from this hearing against the version the DEA posted this week.
Julius will issue a recommended decision to DEA Administrator Terrance Cole. There is no date for it. Whatever he recommends, the record he decides from now says what the witnesses actually said.
How we reported this: High Times compared Judge Julius’ August 20 order correcting the transcript against the corrected transcripts of all eleven hearing days, which the DEA has posted publicly on its rescheduling docket page. Page numbers refer to the continuous pagination of the hearing record, which runs from 1 to 2,533. On the published version, corrections appear in red and deleted text is struck through.
