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It's over. The hearing is scheduled for Dec 2, and there's usually a month between the official announcement and it taking effect, so even if they published it the day after the hearing it wouldn't be in time for the end of 2024.

FYI, there are five days remaining to submit public comments via the Federal eRulemaking Portal using the reference Docket No. DEA-1362.

What happens next?

Some timeline research:

Updating HCP from schedule III to schedule II was proposed Feb 27, 2014, and came into effect October 6, 2014. That's 7 months, 9 days.

Placing Tramadol on schedule IV was announced Nov 4, 2013, and came into effect on August 18th, 2014 (9 months, 14 days).

Rescheduling buprenorphine from schedule V to schedule III was 6 months, 16 days.

Marinol, schedule II -> III, proposed on Nov 7 1998 and implemented July 2 1999, for 7 months, 25 days.

This is going to be much higher profile (and HCPs/Tramadol are just a couple examples), hard to say what that will mean for the timeline. But if we assume the HCP timeline exactly applies to marijuana, it'll be about 7 months and 9 days, from the announcement to the rescheduling coming into effect.

That's pretty tight. If the announcement is tomorrow, then the change won't be in effect until January 9th. I think it's very likely this will be sped up from Biden administration pressure, but ~80% still seems high to me. Only a 1 in 5 chance that this follows a normal-ish timeline, or is stalled because of controversy?

@DanMan314 Great data points. Does decrease my odds slightly. But those cases came from lowering the schedule (more restrictive). Decreasing it has great public support, and one of the big hurdles here is the public comment phase, e.g. see what happened with Kratom in 2016.

I wrote up my analysis at https://twitter.com/dschwarz26/status/1785402347654692905

@DanSchwarz Nice thread.

I found Marinol, schedule II -> III, proposed on Nov 7 1998 and implemented July 2 1999, for 7 months, 25 days.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1999-07-02/pdf/99-16833.pdf

@DanSchwarz I'm trying to find more information about the gap between the end of the public comments phase (lasts about a month) and the actual implementation.

The DEA needs to respond to substantive comments, hold hearings, and has some other bureaucratic requirements, but I find nothing that really explains the ~5 months in between the end of the comment phase and implementation?

That's a big unknown to me right now. If the time is essentially explained by "meh, things aren't high priority" we could expect it to be drastically shorter for this.

Breaking news on this:

The critical thing is that the exact timeline of when the rescheduling would happen is still unclear.

But the below question will very likely resolve yes on the official announcement if this story is credible:

And we have this dashboard with other questions: https://manifold.markets/news/legal-weed

Here's another question on if it'll officially happen before election day, ~2 months earlier:

Wouldn’t be surprised if this is Biden’s October surprise to shore up the progressive vote.

tHCeta

I don’t want to leave limit orders up but I’ll buy 12k more yes @ 45%

Metaculus dropped from 38 to 33 👀

Biden might eventually promise to make this happen, but it would still be <50% likely to happen this year.

@HankyUSA I bet this up to almost double what it’s at on Metaculus and left a 10k YES order @50% if you want more shares

@june Cool. Thanks. What makes you believe this is more likely than not to happen this year?

@HankyUSA I throw mana around here and there, betting on this or that 🤷‍♀️

@june Put this quote on a shirt

polymarket up to 75%:

https://polymarket.com/event/will-weed-be-rescheduled-in-2024?tid=1709919606067

@benshindel I think Biden is pretty clearly floating the idea publicly right now to gauge the response before pulling the trigger. It seems like a low downside, high potential for upside risk to take since if he hasn't pulled ahead of Trump in the next couple months. The public is overwhelmingly pro-legalization.

@benshindel "Keep building public trust, as I’ve been doing by taking executive action on police reform, and calling for it to be the law of the land, directing my Cabinet to review the federal classification of marijuana, and expunging thousands of convictions for mere possession, because no one should be jailed for using or possessing marijuana!" President Biden SOTU 2024.

@becauseyoudo I didn't know that, that changes my perspective