Jacob Golan, James Leva, and Richard Emmons

Federal efforts to reschedule cannabis typically are framed as a matter of drug policy, centering on taxation, criminal enforcement, and the plant’s classification under the Controlled Substances Act. Yet, this traditional framing increasingly obscures a deeper regulatory transformation. As a potential shift to Schedule III lowers long-standing barriers to genetic research, cannabis is rapidly entering the agricultural biotechnology era. This scientific leap is setting up an unprecedented collision with an unsettled federal oversight landscape. Following a federal court’s recent vacatur of the USDA’s 2020 SECURE Rule, the regulatory framework governing engineered crops has largely reverted to a restrictive, process-based system. Regulators must now confront whether advanced cannabis innovations will be governed solely as controlled substances or treated as genetically modified crops subject to complex agricultural pest risk oversight.