The DEA says fine, add the GAO report, but opponents want a whole second round

The paused hearing over moving marijuana to Schedule III has a new set of filings, and they show how much a single government audit can slow a process. The DEA told the presiding judge, Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek Julius, that it has no objection to adding a recent Government Accountability Office report on drug scheduling to the hearing record. What it does not want is more briefing about what the report means.

The agency's argument is that the GAO found gaps in written procedures, specifically that neither the DEA nor the FDA has formal documents describing how staff run scheduling evaluations. In the DEA's reading, that is a paperwork problem and says nothing about whether the FDA's conclusion, that marijuana belongs in Schedule III, is wrong. Opponents read it differently and say the findings go to the substance of how the review was done.

Those opponents are pushing for much more than a footnote. One group filed a motion for a narrow reopening of the hearing, with limited document discovery and testimony on how the government's medical-use test was chosen and what the FDA used to judge abuse potential. A separate coalition that includes Smart Approaches to Marijuana and the states of Idaho, Indiana and Nebraska called the report competent and material evidence and asked for supplemental briefing.

For operators, the practical read is timing. The judge was expected to send a recommendation up to the DEA administrator, and each procedural detour pushes that further out. Medical products are already in Schedule III under the April order, so the open question is adult-use, and nothing in these filings changes your 280E math this quarter. Plan around a long runway rather than a sudden switch.