Kevin Sabet, CEO of Smart Approaches to Marijuana and author of One Nation Under the Influence, warns Trump’s push to reclassify cannabis could backfire by accelerating commercialization via tax breaks tied to industry investors. He cites THC levels up to 99.9% in modern strains, linking them to psychosis, schizophrenia, and chronic diseases, while questioning Schedule III’s FDA-approval requirements—unlike today’s unregulated market. Hemp loopholes enabled deadly synthetic drugs, though bipartisan bans now address some risks. Sabet highlights lingering impairment dangers (e.g., pilots, bus drivers) and systemic failures like the opioid crisis, stressing evidence-based reforms over corporate-driven legalization to prevent exploitation. Federal legalization remains stalled, demanding careful, science-led policy shifts. [Automatically generated summary]
This morning, we turn our attention to marijuana, and joining us for that conversation is Kevin Sebette.
He's the president and CEO of Smart Approaches to Marijuana.
He's also the author of One Nation Under the Influence, America's Drug Habit and How We Can Overcome It.
Kevin Sebette, your reaction to the president trying to expedite the reclassification of marijuana yesterday, what did you think?
unidentified
Yeah, I think it's in some ways a mixed bag.
I mean, it wasn't wholly unexpected.
The president talked about it during the campaign trail and he even went further.
He said he was voting for the failed Florida effort to legalize marijuana outright.
You know, my concern and my concern with marijuana generally is that we're dealing with a fundamentally different drug today.
This is a new drug, really, that's been genetically altered to highly, highly potent, you know, strain, a highly potent level of THC, which is the active ingredient that gets you high.
And it's levels we've never seen.
It's exponentially higher, almost an order of magnitude more than in the Woodstock days where it was called weed for a reason.
It could have been 1% to 2% strong.
Now it's up to 99.9% strong with these vapes and dabs that are out there.
And it's causing terrible harm across the country.
It's causing psychosis, schizophrenia, other mental health problems.
New study almost every week.
Last week was heart disease, stroke, diabetes.
Then there was a big study in the journal of the American Medical Association saying that most of the reasons why people take medical marijuana, there's no evidence behind it.
And one in three of those cardholders are actually addicted to marijuana.
So I worry that this could expedite the normalization and really commercialization of marijuana.
I've spoken on this network and many others about my concern with the mass promotion.
I don't really care if an adult smokes a joint in the privacy of their own home.
And I don't want to arrest adults and put them in prison and give them a criminal record or anything like that.
But I think we've been sometimes caught in this false dichotomy between criminalization on the one hand and mass commercialization on the other.
And I am very concerned about the latter.
Of course, rescheduling would not legalize or commercialize the drug.
So it is important to emphasize that.
But what it would do, I think, is expedite the commercialization in some ways because it offers, it will offer tax breaks to the industry.
They're now able to, if it's a Schedule III, which it's not yet, it's just the process has been basically encouraged is what the executive order essentially is doing.
But if that ends up happening, companies can take tax breaks.
And that's really where this whole thing came from.
It came from one or two of the president's golf friends, really.
I mean, he was very open about it.
I mean, if it's one thing you can't, you know, you can say about this president is, you know, he pretty much tells it like it is, even if it's sort of hard to hear.
That, for example, his business associate and golf buddy and person that's invested in the industry was the one who convinced his entire administration to sort of grin and bear it and be okay with this.
That was kind of hard for many of us who've been doing this for so long and listening to the research and the science.
It's kind of hard to hear, but that's really where it came from.
And it came from some polling that the industry had done about medical marijuana.
So the president tried to draw a bright line between non-medical and medical, which in some ways I appreciate because I'm glad that he said he wouldn't take it.
He doesn't want people to do it.
I mean, he was very open about that.
This wasn't legalization.
So I'm grateful for that because maybe that clarified kind of a muddled message.
But I am very concerned this is really expediting the commercialization.
I'll just say one other thing about it that I think is an interesting point, which is that, you know, if marijuana is truly going to be a Schedule III drug, it'll be the only Schedule III drug that does not have an FDA approved, that is not FDA approved.
It's not an FDA-approved product or medication.
So we're going to be in really unknown territory in so many ways.
And, you know, Schedule III drugs have to go under strict guidelines with regards to advertising or disease claims.
I mean, Tylenol with codeine cannot be in a gummy bear and it cannot be, you know, touted as curing every disease under the sun, which is what marijuana is being touted as now.
So I don't know if the industry quite grasps that.
Who knows if that'll be enforced, even, but that is part of this whole thing.
So I think we don't really know what this means as there's a long way to go.
But it was certainly interesting to watch that press conference yesterday.
Well, we want our viewers to join us in this conversation.
We'll get your thoughts on the president's move to federally, not federally legalize marijuana, but his move would ease tax burdens for cannabis businesses and facilitate more research.
That's from reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug, as the Wall Street Journal reports.
We'll have you join in the conversation this morning.
Republicans dial in at 202-748-8001.
Democrats 202-748-8000.
And Independents 202-748-8002.
Text us with your thoughts if you'd like at 202-748-8003.
Kevin Sebette, before we get to calls, though, let's listen to the president in his own words yesterday.
So I've always told my children: don't take drugs, no drinking, no smoking, and just stay away from drugs.
I have been, they would look at me and they say, Dad, would you stop saying that?
I would say every time I looked at it practically, young Americans are especially at risk, so unless a drug is recommended by a doctor for medical reasons, just don't do it.
At the same time, the facts compel the federal government to recognize that marijuana can be legitimate in terms of medical applications when carefully administered in some cases.
This may include the use as a substitute for addictive and potentially lethal opioid painkillers.
They cause tremendous problems.
This can do it in a much lesser way, can make people feel much better and are living through tremendous pain and problems.
President Trump, on reclassifying marijuana yesterday, our guest this morning is Kevin Sebet.
He is the president and CEO of Smart Approaches to Marijuana and also the author of the book, One Nation Under the Influence: America's Drug Habit and How We Can Overcome It.
Let's get to calls.
Kevin Williams joining us in Virginia, Democratic Caller.
unidentified
Yes, I use marijuana for my pain.
I served 20 years of the Marines.
I had a serious accident in the Marine Corps.
I got both of my shoulders rotated cups of torn and can't be repaired.
I got severe arthritis in my cervical spine.
I got brushitis and arthritis in both my hips.
I'm losing muscle in both of my corticeps.
Need both of my knees replaced.
I got numbness in both of my feet, permanent nerve damage in my right hand.
Severe arthritis in my lower back that pushes on my nerve and cold numbness in my feet.
I got a brain tumor.
I got prostate cancer.
What if I got?
I got all kinds of things.
I use medical marijuana.
I tried tremidol for pain.
I had a bad reaction.
I passed out.
I tried the drug for nerve pain.
I passed out for that, so I stopped using it.
And I started using marijuana and I get around good.
I don't have any pain with all the stuff I got going on.
And for people to visualize that marijuana, when it's happening, people like me every day.
First of all, William, I mean, thank you for your service to our country.
And I'm very sorry for what you have gone through.
I want to be clear that I don't think anyone is saying that if marijuana, forget marijuana, methamphetamine, I mean, anything, even much more dangerous drugs in some ways, give people with, I mean, the number of things you listed, I don't think I've heard so many.
And so it's awful for one person.
You know, no one is saying that, you know, you should be going to jail or you shouldn't be getting that.
But my worry is that we're basing, and this is what the president emphasized when he said, people that I know, we're basing policy not so much on broad scientific evidence, but on anecdote.
And the plural of anecdote is not data.
So William, why think you should do what you need to do for yourself?
And, you know, interestingly enough, you're going to Washington, D.C., where it's actually not legal to sell.
So the product you're getting, I'm, you know, we don't know what's in it.
But the bigger issue is that's why we need FDA-approved medications.
I think, you know, we owe it to our veterans.
We owe it because we also know marijuana can cause PTSD.
It can cause long-term mental health damage.
So it might feel good in the short term mentally, but in the long term, it can be highly damaging, is what the data says.
So what I would like to see is, you know, FDA-approved medications, not so much medications by popular vote or medications by, you know, what a legislator or one president or another or where the political wins are, what that says, but actually what the scientific evidence says.
And, you know, something about rescheduling that was mentioned, of course, was they said that we can now do research.
It's possible that this will increase some research because it does make it slightly easier to do research.
But it's very, we need to be very clear that we have done almost $5 billion of research on marijuana in this country in the last 40 years, according to NIH reporter.
You can literally add up the numbers when you put in marijuana or THC or the cannabinoids.
And there are over 50,000 peer-reviewed published studies on marijuana.
So listen, I'm a PhD.
I definitely want more.
Always want more research.
Okay.
Research is good.
Love to do more research.
But what's going to drive research is funding, not just these sort of, you know, proclamations that we should do something.
It's funding will drive the research.
So, you know, I don't know if the president's prepared to fund.
I mean, the NIH budget was cut.
So if we could increase the NIH budget for funding, including into cannabinoids, including into other medications as well that are not marijuana or opioid-based medications.
There's a suite of medications.
Now with AI, we're learning so much more about personalized medicine.
I mean, there's so much we should be investing in to get these answers.
But for the people that can't wait, like our caller that we just heard, you know, I'm not against them taking something that might help them.
The issue is, how do we form public policy and what do we base public policy on?
He just answered my question, but I'd like him to clarify it a little bit more.
My question was if he would clarify on the legality of doing research on a Schedule I drug, which is where marijuana is now.
And there are other Schedule I's that you can't do research on, but by moving it into a Schedule III, it will now allow whatever mechanism it is to get research done other than through the NIH.
I don't know if that's possible, but could you go into some of that?
How research monies are granted?
Can you get it through anyone other than the NIH?
Appreciate your time.
Take care.
Yeah, that's a great question.
Thank you.
There's so much misinformation about research and how it's done and the scheduling system because, you know, the scheduling system is over 50 years old.
I would reform the scheduling system.
I would change it in the whole system in some ways.
There's probably smarter ways to do it now.
But I think some of the misconceptions sometimes people have is they think that because marijuana is in a Schedule I, and let's say heroin and LSD and PCP, for example, are also in Schedule I, that therefore we think marijuana is as dangerous as heroin.
And that's actually not what it means.
It's not a harm index by any means.
It's not even an index for criminal penalties.
There are Schedule II drugs that carry much harsher criminal penalties than Schedule I drugs.
So it's very confusing, admittedly.
You know, what Schedule I means is that it doesn't have accepted medical use.
In other words, the FDA has not approved a product called marijuana, just general marijuana.
That's why, by definition, it sort of has to be in Schedule I.
And the way that I think the government's trying to get around it now, and this was started, you know, admittedly in the Biden administration, is I think what they're trying to say is, well, because it's so popular, because it's been passed in so many places and thousands of people use it, therefore it has accepted medical use.
And that's the first time that definition has ever been used.
So the government had to sort of do a lot of legal and regulatory gymnastics to get to this justifiable idea that it can be anything other than Schedule I because it's not an actual approved product.
Now, there are marijuana-based medications that are not in Schedule I that are interesting.
So Schedule II, Schedule III, Schedule IV, those are, and there are things like Marinol, which is a synthetic THC.
It's been around since 1985.
It was fast-tracked through the National Cancer Institute during the early part of the AIDS epidemic and also for nausea related to cancer pain.
Interestingly, marinol is not widely used now.
We have much more superior drugs than marijuana-based drugs for nausea, but it is available if you need it.
There's also Epidialex, a newer drug that took over a billion and a half of dollars of more than that of private investment, not government investment, to get it passed.
And Epidialex is a purified CBD oil for seizures if those seizures do not react to normal, or I should say, to traditional medication.
And by the way, that's a minority.
Most of the seizures react well to traditional medication.
Some don't.
And those are some stories you see on TV with some of the kids that don't react well.
It's heartbreaking or having multiple seizures a day.
Cannabidiol oil, and it's called epidialex, is available through the FDA, through your pharmacists.
And so it's purified and you know what you're getting.
And so that's all I'm saying: let's do this like we do any other medicine and do the research, see what it is.
And you can do research, though, with Schedule I drugs.
And to answer the caller's question directly, we have plenty of research we're doing on heroin.
That's a Schedule I drug.
We have research on PCP, LSD, MDMA.
In fact, MDMA almost passed trials.
It failed because of safety concerns that MDMA is not safe, actually.
And there's a lot on the psychedelics front, which we're not talking about this morning, maybe another day.
But that failed.
But there was a lot of research that you could do with it.
And that was a private company that was doing the MDMA, a very interested private company.
So private companies can do research with Schedule I drugs.
It does make it slightly easier in that, for example, with Schedule III versus Schedule I, you know, you can have few, you don't need to have as many safes that cover the product.
I mean, it's like little things like that.
Like you don't need to have the same exact kind of license.
You can transfer the license to someone in your lab if they're certified with something else.
I mean, it's some of those intricacies that change.
And maybe that will spur a lot more research.
It's possible.
But I don't, I'm skeptical.
I think what's going to spur research is the funding, not so much the schedule status.
I worry the schedule status instead is going to encourage some of the bad players, the for-profit pharma, other types of players that really don't really, they haven't been playing by the rules for the last 20 years and sort of don't intend to do so now.
I was wondering how getting marijuana reclassified under Schedule III may intersect or impact the recent redefining of hemp that was included in the bill to end the government shutdown earlier this year.
So just for some background, essentially, hemp was, you know, for years, we've had hemp available in your Whole Foods market and in your mall, little kiosks to get the necklaces and stuff.
And those have been imported from Canada and China because they produce hemp so cheaply.
And we have imported it for years.
Seven years ago, hemp farmers, mainly in Kentucky, said, you know, we want to give American farmers a chance to grow hemp and be part of that business.
So the government agreed to that.
And what ended up happening was the legitimate hemp market, I mean, it didn't really help U.S. farmers because it's too cheap from Canada and China, even with tariffs.
Of course, there weren't tariffs then, but even with tariffs.
And the market is too small.
So, you know, the idea of American farmers in a southeastern state competing with China on hemp, that wasn't really going to happen.
But what unfortunately happened is you had some very entrepreneurial, essentially drug producers and dealers and networks, criminal networks, that exploited that hemp provision and found a loophole to allow them to create synthetic marijuana products based on the hemp plant.
That's nothing to do with hemp other than it was based on the hemp plant.
But they got the chemical structure, they altered the chemical structure, and they infused it in things like gummy bears and edibles and elixirs.
And they sold them at gas stations because they were totally quote unquote legal under this hemp provision, but not regulated at all because the government certainly wasn't expecting this.
It was a disaster.
We had deaths.
We had hundreds of thousands of emergency room admissions.
It was not a good thing other than for this industry that was making a lot of money, which is always usually what it comes down to.
So we actually are our colleague, our group, Smart Approaches to Marijuana and other groups.
We worked very, very hard to reverse this.
Mitch McConnell did not want this as his legacy either because, of course, he's Kentucky and he got the first farm bill passed.
So we, to Rand Paul's consternation, who wants to legalize all drugs, he was okay with it.
But almost everybody else wasn't okay with it.
And we had 25 Democrats join 50 Republicans, one of the few bipartisan things probably this year in banning hemp as part of the government spending bill.
That's where we are now.
The executive order yesterday does direct agencies to try and find CBD derived, you know, hemp-derived CBD products that can be helpful and do research and expedite that through, you know, HHS.
And we don't really know what that looks like.
It's very vague in the EO.
We have no idea.
But they are trying to do that.
I don't think, I never thought that the repeal of the hemp provision was actually going to affect sort of some of the CBD supplement type things that you see at the store.
What I will say about those supplements is I just tell people, including my neighbors and even relatives and good friends who ask me, hey, I'm taking CBD gummies to fall asleep.
Is this helpful?
Is it good?
Is it bad?
What I tell them is just buyer beware.
This isn't really regulated at all.
No one really knows what's in it.
A lot of the studies show placebo.
They show really very little change.
Some of them show extreme liver damage.
In fact, my understanding was the FTA was looking at a black box warning for CBD products because of liver damage.
I don't know if that's happening anymore, but there's data on liver.
It's a nickname because I don't want to be called to HR in the morning or Monday morning.
My question is, I've always wondered, and it's about time.
I was always wondering when this subject was going to come up on the show.
How employers are going to deal with this and insurance companies?
Because I wouldn't want one of my bridge inspectors up on a bucket truck or on a crane inspecting a bridge, a very old bridge, which takes a lot of time to do.
And you spend a lot of time by yourself up there burning one if they thought that was acceptable, you know?
And you're right, this stuff is so strong anymore.
You see walking down the road with my dog and then somebody comes by and I feel like I got a contact high coming from their car.
It's a very, very good comment, a very astute observation.
And if you think it's bad where you are, Milo, walking your dog, you should go to our wonderful cities like New York City and see what it smells like, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles.
It's complete legalization and commercialization has totally changed the landscape.
And we actually think that it's one of the reasons we've seen a backlash to marijuana.
And I'm encouraged that you were on the Democratic line and said this, because this is not a partisan issue.
It should not be a partisan issue.
We now have people in very blue states that want to repeal the sales of marijuana because they are concerned about commercialization.
It's not so much about the adults' right to use and the privacy of their own home.
It's about this public display and the smell, which travels.
It's much more carcinogenic than tobacco smoke in terms of a secondhand contact high.
It travels much further than tobacco.
That's why you smell it more likely to smell marijuana than tobacco when you're walking down the street.
Because if someone's doing it in any near vicinity, you're going to smell it.
So it's a huge issue.
And the contact high and secondhand smoke issue is something we don't talk enough about in this country.
The other thing that we don't talk enough about that you mentioned was the issue of testing.
And it's very important because we don't want people building bridges and up high and inspecting them and driving our trucks and driving our kids on the school bus and operating in our surgical rooms.
We do not want them high on anything.
And marijuana stays in your system longer.
It doesn't mean that you're not intoxicated, but you test longer.
It actually means you are affected longer than a drug, for example, like alcohol, which is in and out of your system in 24 hours.
And for marijuana, the effects can last a few days.
Studies show that.
They show that it's not just right when you feel high.
It's even when you feel like you're not high anymore, you will do poorly on tests when they test you for different things.
So I'm very concerned about it.
There's a drug testing organization called Endesa, which is very highly respected, that's looking at what this means for our pilots, what this means for our Department of Transportation, mandated testing.
I don't think these things were thought of by the president and his golf buddies, to be honest.
There are wide implications about what this means, and it's extremely uncertain.
Yeah, I would just say that I like the topic today.
I like the guest and what he's saying.
I would say the commercialization, that cow is already well out of the barn.
I do social work in Philadelphia, so I get to go to the schools.
I smell it all over in the high schools.
I smell it all over in the middle schools.
I smell it when I'm driving.
It's wasting out of the windows.
The other driver in the car is using it.
Commercialization, it's done.
Colorado, it started.
It's legal in Jersey.
That cow is well out of the barn.
So what do we do from this point?
You know, our drug treatment is a failure.
Our drug policies are a failure.
Mass incarceration didn't work.
None of this stuff is working.
I like that the person here is talking about getting data to drive policy.
The problem is, is that in this country, data doesn't drive policy.
Billionaires do.
Insiders do.
This is a billion-dollar industry.
And so they're going to drive policy.
They're going to write the policy that Congress is going to pass.
And that's a problem.
And then, as far as the FDA, and we just need to maybe regulate or get the FDA more involved, look at the Sackler family.
They did more mass killing of Americans than any other thing or entity.
If you look at one family and the pillaging and murder of our citizens, all approved by the FDA and the medical community, when they knew the research was in for a decade that that was bad.
So I would just challenge why we're talking about marijuana, why we're not broadening the conversation to why so many Americans are so miserable when I walk around Kennedy.
Hey, Tony, I've got to jump in at that point and get a response from our guest.
unidentified
Well, Tony, first of all, thank you for your service working with kids in the city of Brotherly Love.
It's a great city.
And it's not easy what you do.
And I know you are underpaid and underappreciated, but people do appreciate you.
Those kids need you.
They're the future of our country.
And we very much appreciate your perspective.
And in some ways, it's depressing what you said, but in many ways, you're right.
I mean, we fought the Sacklers.
I fought the Sacklers very hard in the opioid epidemic and early when I was in the Obama administration when we saw that wave of prescription drugs.
Now, of course, there's a place for prescription drugs.
We don't know.
They help some people, of course, too.
And thankfully, a minority of people who use those prescription drugs got addicted to them.
But that minority was such a big number still and caused so much damage.
And we didn't listen.
And instead, we listened to them because they had a lot of money, just like we listened to the tobacco industry for 80 years, even longer than we listened to the Sacklers.
When we allowed the tobacco industry to manipulate a product that had been used for thousands of years relatively innocuously, think about it: tobacco used for thousands of years, very few deaths.
And it started killing people more than any weapon of mass destruction when they turned it into a cigarette.
And that was an industry innovation that did that.
And my worry is if we turn this over to the marijuana industry and the people who are invested in the pot industry, like some of those people around the Oval Office, which I never thought I would see around the Resolute Desk yesterday, I think that that's not a good thing.
We should not turn this over to that billionaire class.
What we can do, though, Tony, is we can, first of all, educate, educate, educate.
Young people are smart.
They're actually drinking and using drugs generally a lot less than previous generations, even though marijuana is sort of an exception because of legalization, as you note.
But generally, they are smart.
We need to educate, not fear-based, science-based, but also, you know, who's into who's making money from this?
And do you want to be a pawn, a stooge in a corporate profit sheet?
Or do you want to rise above this and get naturally high, not high from all these things that are around you?
So education is important in terms of where we go on legalization.