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The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is looking to substantially build up domestic production of delta-9 THC and other cannabinoids for research purposes next year, while also maintaining high levels of psychedelics production as scientific interest continues to grow.

Just days after DEA proposed increasing its 2023 quotas for cannabis compounds and psychedelics like psilocybin and ibogaine, the agency said in a notice published in the Federal Register on Thursday that it plans to continue that trend next year, in part due to a transition away from cannabinoid imports to domestic manufacturing.

Earlier this week, DEA announced that it wants to nearly double the amount of psilocybin, psilocyn and delta-9 THC that’s manufactured compared to initial levels set for this year, while quintupling how much ibogaine is produced.

While the agency hasn’t proposed changing its 2023 6.7 million-gram quota for marijuana for 2024, it is now calling for the manufacturing of 900,610 grams of delta-9 THC and 790,010 grams of all other tetrahydrocannabinol. That represents another increase after DEA already moved this week to nearly double the 2023 quota for delta-9 THC to 628,460 grams and called for 350,000 grams of other tetrahydrocannabinols.

The large increase in manufacturing of all other tetrahydrocannabinol may be due to growing interest in isomers such as delta-8-THC and delta-10-THC.

For 2024, the agency is so far keeping the psychedelics quotas the same as in the recent 2023 revision. The proposed limit is 15,000 grams for psilocybin, 24,00 grams of psilocyn and 150 grams of ibogaine. Substances like MDMA, LSD, 5-MeO-DMT and mescaline will remain at 2023 established levels that had represented significant increases under prior quotas.

“There has been a significant increase in the use of schedule I hallucinogenic controlled substances for research and clinical trial purposes,” the new notice says. “DEA has received and subsequently approved new registration applications for schedule I researchers and new applications for registration from manufacturers to grow, synthesize, extract, and prepare dosage forms containing specific schedule I hallucinogenic substances for research and clinical trial purposes.”

“DEA is proposing APQ for ibogaine, psilocyn, psilocybin, delta-9- tetrahydrocannabinol (d-9-THC), and all other tetrahydrocannabinols to support manufacturing activities related to the increased level of research and clinical trials with these schedule I controlled substances,” the agency said. “Additionally, DEA proposes APQs for d-9-THC and all other tetrahydrocannabinols for 2024 to reflect the relocation of manufacturing of these controlled substances from abroad to the United States.”

DEA’s cannabinoid quota levels, in grams, are as follows:

Substance	2021 final	2022 final	2023 final	2023 adjusted	2024 proposed
All other tetrahydrocannabinol	1,000	2,000	15,000	350,000	790,010
Delta-9-THC	384,460	384,460	384,460	628,460	900,610

To that end, DEA finally ended a longstanding monopoly on marijuana manufacturing for research purposes domestically. Additionally, as the agency acknowledged in the notice, it is implementing rules to streamline cannabis access for scientists following the enactment of a cannabis research bill late last year.

The proposed 2024 quotas, which are subject to a 30-day public comment period, come in the context of an ongoing administrative review into the scheduling status of cannabis that DEA is actively carrying after receiving a recommendation from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

It also comes as experts await a potential federal approval for certain psychedelics like psilocybin and MDMA as therapeutics for the treatment of serious mental health conditions.

DEA has touted its Schedule I drug production quotas as evidence that is supports rigorous research into the substances, but it’s faced criticism from advocates and scientists over actions that are viewed as antithetical to promoting studies.

Following pushback, DEA recently retreated on a proposed ban on psychedelic compounds that scientists say have research value.

That marked another win for scientific community, coming just one month after DEA abandoned separate plans to place five tryptamine psychedelics in Schedule I.

Meanwhile, a federal appeals court recently ruled against DEA in a lawsuit over a Washington State doctor’s petition to reschedule psilocybin. The court said DEA failed to explain its reasoning when it denied the petition, and it ordered the agency to provide a more complete justification.

With respect to the agency’s marijuana scheduling review, a coalition of 31 bipartisan House lawmakers has sent a letter to DEA Administrator Anne Milgram, urging her to take into account congressional and state marijuana legalization efforts as it completes that assessment. They also criticized the limitations of simple rescheduling as they push for complete a complete removal of marijuana from the CSA.

The letter serves as a counterbalance to other recent messages DEA has received from congressional opponents of reform and former DEA and White House drug czars who argue that even moving marijuana to Schedule III would go too far.

A coalition of 14 Republican congressional lawmakers recently urged DEA to “reject” the top federal health agency’s recommendation to reschedule marijuana and instead keep it in the most restrictive category under the CSA.

Meanwhile, two GOP senators, including the lead Republican sponsor of a marijuana banking bill that cleared a key committee last month, recently filed new legislation to prevent federal agencies from rescheduling cannabis without tacit approval from Congress.

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The key question facing the division and commission is how the recalled products were created—and whether that process poses a risk to public health.

By Rebecca Rivas, Missouri Independent

The state rolled back its recall of nearly 15,000 cannabis products last week and allowed them to return to the dispensary shelves, after requiring Missouri companies to keep them in storage since early August.

The Missouri Division of Cannabis Regulation said in an October 20 notice that after a review of product-tracking records, regulators can verify that “some of the marijuana products on recall contain THC solely sourced from marijuana grown in the Missouri regulated market.”

The future of the other 45,000 products recalled on August 14—and those of dozens of marijuana businesses facing a steep financial loss if the products must be destroyed—is still pending.

The Robertsonville-based marijuana manufacturer Delta Extraction has asked the Administrative Hearing Commission to rescind the company’s license suspension and fully rollback the recall.

A trial is scheduled for the beginning of December, if the division and company can’t work out an agreement before then.

The key question facing the division and commission is how the recalled products were created—and whether that process poses a risk to public health.

If Delta Extraction can present evidence showing the products were created safely, then there’s a possibility the state won’t order 45,000 products to be destroyed. The company could still likely face a hefty fine, and even license revocation, for importing a hemp product into the state and adding it to Missouri-grown marijuana products.

The commissioner overseeing Delta’s appeal of the recall and license suspension issued a protective order on October 25 that will allow some records in the case to be closed and confidential.

Those records could include “trade secrets or financial and proprietary information,” the order states, as well as the division’s investigations of other licensees.

The imported product

At the center of the recall is a THC concentrate, or distillate, made partially from hemp.

In August, the state accused the company of adding “hemp-derived chemically modified ‘converted’ cannabinoids” to marijuana products.

Unlike marijuana, hemp has very little psychoactive properties naturally—which is why it was taken off the federal controlled substance list in the 2018 farm bill. But since then, businesses have been in a race to create ways to produce the most predominant psychoactive active element in marijuana, delta-9 THC, using the hemp plant.

The most common way to get delta-9 THC from hemp is usually a chemical conversion process from CBD, which is the more common cannabinoid in hemp.

Cannabis lab experts say it’s a process that could involve a variety of chemicals that Missouri marijuana labs don’t test for—making the labs unable to verify the product’s safety.

And because hemp is no longer a controlled substance, no agency in Missouri or in the federal government is monitoring the production of chemically converted THC from hemp.

However, the lab in Florida where Delta bought a good amount of product told The Independent in September that its distillate wasn’t created using harsh chemicals, as the state suspected, but rather through the same extraction process employed in the regulated marijuana market.

J.J. Coombs, owner and CEO of Arvida Labs in Fort Lauderdale, walked The Independent through the process to make the concentrated THC-A, which isn’t intoxicating unless you heat it up, at which point it turns into delta-9 THC.

For example, eating raw marijuana flower won’t produce a high because there’s only a small amount of delta-9 THC but a lot of THC-A.

It’s a fairly new process, Coombs said, that involves breeding hemp plants to have higher concentrations of the potentially intoxicating property THC-A.

Hemp has very little THC-A, so it takes about 90 pounds of hemp to make 1 kilo of THC-A isolate, or powder, Coombs said.

The confusion about Arvida Labs’ product being made using a chemical conversion process is understandable, Coombs said, because most people don’t know labs can extract large amounts of THC-A from the hemp plant.

It’s a process neither the state nor Delta leaders could explain during the company’s appeal proceedings, regarding how it’s different from the CBD conversion process.

Delta’s leadership testified the conversion process was being used, at one point, with its products—a revelation that shocked businesses who purchased Delta’s distillate and thought it was made with 100 percent marijuana.

Chemicals from this process is one concern, lab experts said, but another is the possibility that the hemp came from outside the United States—meaning they could contain foreign pesticides that cannabis labs don’t test for.

Coombs said Arvida purchased the hemp from farmers in Texas, Tennessee and Kentucky who’ve learned to breed the plants to have higher concentrations of THC-A, using federally-approved strains. Any of the pesticides used in those states would have shown up on a lab test as being safe, Coombs said.

Green Precision Analytics is one of the labs that Delta Extraction used to test the distillate at the heart of the recall. Anthony David, the lab’s owner and chief operating officer, told The Independent previously that he had no idea Delta was incorporating imported hemp in the products.

David also said there was no trace of the THC coming from a chemical conversion process. Usually he can see a difference in curves of the chromatography, David said, but he didn’t in this case.

Coombs said that’s because it was done through a normal extraction process.

Coombs said that marijuana companies who purchased Delta’s distillate should not feel “duped” because the same extraction process used to get delta-9 THC from marijuana was used to get THC-A from hemp.

“It’s the same exact thing,” he said. “There’s no difference. Hemp is cannabis, just with no delta-9 THC.”

This story was first published by Missouri Independent.

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A pair of Democratic congressmen have filed an amendment to a large-scale spending bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to interfere with state and local laws allowing the use and sale of psilocybin for medical purposes.

Reps. Robert Garcia (D-CA) and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) are seeking to attach the psychedelics measure to appropriations legislation covering Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies (CJS). It will be up to the House Rules Committee to determine whether the amendment will be made in order for a floor vote.

The members separately introduced standalone legislation in September to prevent federal interference in any jurisdiction that legalizes the psychedelic.

The new CJS amendment, meanwhile, states that no appropriated funds under the spending bill “may be used to prevent any State, the District of Columbia, any territory, commonwealth or possession of the United States, or any unit of local government from implementing its own laws authorizing the use, distribution, sale, possession, research, or cultivation of medical psilocybin.”

That language is similar to an existing CJS rider that has been annually renewed each year since 2014 prohibiting the use of federal funds to interfere in state medical marijuana programs. Efforts to expand that protection to cover adult-use cannabis laws have passed the House on several occasions but have never been enacted into law.

“I just think that there’s an opportunity to have a more progressive worldview on legalization and on [preventing] harm to people that are, in many ways, receiving huge medicinal benefits or recreational benefits” from cannabis and psychedelics, Garcia told Marijuana Moment in a phone interview on Tuesday before the psilocybin amendment was publicly posted.

If the psychedelics appropriations measure is cleared for the floor and ultimately enacted, it would specifically focus on medical psilocybin laws, so its practical impact may be limited in the short-term given that no states have explicitly authorized it as a therapeutic in the way they have for marijuana, with qualifying conditions and doctor recommendations, for example.

Rather, the psychedelics laws that have been enacted in states like Colorado and Oregon are more open-ended, acknowledging the therapeutic potential of substances like psilocybin without necessarily requiring adults to jump through regulatory hoops to establish their patient status in order to obtain state-legal services. At the local level, psychedelics reform has principally focused on deprioritizing criminalization.

It remains to be seen whether the Rules Committee will be willing to let the psilocybin amendment advance to the floor once it schedules a meeting on the CJS bill. Under Republican control, the panel has blocked numerous marijuana and psychedelics measures throughout the appropriations process, including Garcia’s repeated attempts to secure reform to prevent drug testing of federal job applicants for marijuana.

Most recently, he’s sought to attach the employment protections to a spending bill covering Financial Services and General Government (FSGG), which is also the legislation that Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) and Blumenauer are hoping to use to end the federal blockade preventing Washington, D.C. from legalizing marijuana sales.

The psilocybin amendment is a more novel proposal, however, and the Rules Committee has allowed a separate, GOP-led psychedelics measures to receive floor consideration as part of another appropriations bill that ultimately passed the full House.

One of those House-passed amendments would allow U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) doctors to issue medical cannabis recommendations to veterans, and the other would encourage research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelics like psilocybin and MDMA.

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The Senate Appropriations Committee also adopted a measure to its version of the MilCon/VA legislation that would similarly free up VA doctors to issue medical marijuana recommendations, increasing the chances of the reform making it into the final package to be signed into law.

A pair of psychedelics research measures, as well as an amendment on creating federal labeling requirements related to marijuana interactions with prescription drugs, were also approved by the House in September as part of a Department of Defense (DOD) spending bill.

A report attached to the spending legislation by the House Appropriations Committee separately includes a section noting that “VA has clarified that nothing in VA statutes or regulations specifically prohibits a veteran whose income is derived from state-legalized cannabis activities from obtaining a certificate of eligibility for VA home loan benefits.”

Over in the Senate, lawmakers passed defense legislation in July that contains provisions to bar intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA from denying security clearances to applicants solely due to their past marijuana use. But other cannabis proposals, such as one from Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) to allowed medical marijuana use by veterans, did not advance as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

More than a dozen marijuana and psychedelics amendments to the House version of the NDAA were blocked by the Rules Committee in July. That includes a measure introduced by Garcia that would have prevented security clearance denials for federal workers over prior cannabis use.

However, in September the House Oversight and Accountability Committee passed a standalone bipartisan bill that would prevent the denial of federal employment or security clearances based on a candidate’s past marijuana use.

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Two advocacy coalitions reresenting opposite ends of the political spectrum have joined forces to call for President Joe Biden to remove marijuana from the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA), saying it’s the only path that would fulfill the president’s campaign promises to decriminalize cannabis.

The two groups are the left-leaning Marijuana Justice Coalition and the more conservative Cannabis Freedom Alliance. The former includes members such as American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, Center for American Progress, Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights and Drug Policy Alliance, while the latter is steered by organizations including the libertarian-minded Reason Foundation, Americans for Prosperity and R Street Institute.

In a joint letter to Biden sent on Thursday, the two coalitions note that together, they “represent a diverse range of non-profit and public interest groups.”

“We are writing with a unified voice,” they wrote, “to emphasize that only by descheduling marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) can you fulfill your promise to the American people regarding cannabis decriminalization.”

While the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has recently recommended to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) that marijuana be rescheduled from Schedule I to Schedule III of the CSA, the two coalitions say that change would fall short of Biden’s promised reform.

“Any action to move marijuana to another CSA schedule rather than removing it would simply maintain federal criminalization of these programs, licensed companies, and individuals operating in a fully legal manner under existing state rules and regulations,” the groups wrote. “Further, this mere change of scheduling classification as opposed to descheduling would not alleviate existing distrust in law enforcement around cannabis given the supermajority public support for ending criminalization.”

“For those reasons and more,” they continued, “we sincerely request that you oppose merely rescheduling cannabis under the CSA and instead urge you to deschedule the substance entirely.”

Removing marijuana completely from the CSA would allow state-based regulatory programs “to function as intended without unnecessary federal interference,” the letter says, although the groups also call on Biden to encourage Congress to craft “a well-thought-out plan for reasonable federal regulation and for implementing interstate commerce” as part of federal descheduling legislation.

“Now is the time to end federal marijuana criminalization, Mr. President,” the letter concludes, “not to rebrand it.”

Justin Strekal, founder of Better Organizing to Win Legalization and a member of the Marijuana Justice Coalition, said in a press release that “never before has ending marijuana criminalization enjoyed this level of organized cross-ideological support.”

“It is critical for the president and his administration to recognize that now is the time for them to seize the moment and deliver a win for the American People in the form of a rational and just cannabis policy future,” he said. “At this point, not doing so, should be considered political malpractice.”

(Disclosure: Strekal supports Marijuana Moment’s work via a monthly Patreon pledge.)

The advocates’ letter comes on the heels of a separate effort by 31 bipartisan House members who last month urged DEA to consider descheduling marijuana completely rather than moving the substance to Schedule III. They also called on the agency to consider current state and congressional legalization efforts as it carries out its review of the HHS recommendation.

That letter, sent to DEA Administrator Anne Milgram and led by Congressional Cannabis Caucus co-chairs Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), Dave Joyce (D-OR), Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Brian Mast (R-FL), said that “the administration and relevant agencies such as yours should recognize the merits of full descheduling and work with congressional leaders to ensure this happens,” adding that prohibition “does not reflect the will of the broader American electorate” and “it is time that [DEA’s] work fully reflects this reality as well.”

Lawmakers pointed out that the vast majority of states have enacted some form of legalization, and members from both sides of the aisle have introduced legislation to follow suit at the federal level. The House has twice passed comprehensive legalization legislation, they noted.

While moving marijuana to Schedule III would “start to remedy this disconnect” between federal and state policies, they said it would not go far enough for “marijuana businesses, patients, and consumers.”

Other signatories of the letter Reps. Jack Bergman (R-MI), Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ), Lou Correa (D-CA), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), James McGovern (D-MA), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), Dean Phillips (D-MN), Katie Porter (D-CA), David Trone (D-MD) and others.

The letter serves as a counterbalance to other recent messages DEA has received from congressional opponents of reform and former DEA and White House drug czars who argue that even moving marijuana to Schedule III would go too far.

A coalition of 14 Republican congressional lawmakers recently urged DEA to “reject” the top federal health agency’s recommendation to reschedule marijuana and instead keep it in the most restrictive category under the CSA.

Meanwhile, two GOP senators, including the lead Republican sponsor of a marijuana banking bill that cleared a key committee last month, recently filed new legislation to prevent federal agencies from rescheduling cannabis without tacit approval from Congress.

Advocates and lawmakers who support cannabis reform, meanwhile, marked the one-year anniversary of Biden’s mass marijuana pardon and scheduling directive by calling on him to do more—including by expanding the scope of relief that his pardon had and by expressly supporting federal legalization.

Late last month, HHS released a highly redacted version of a brief letter to DEA’s Milgram regarding the agency’s marijuana rescheduling recommendation. The letter confirmed certain previously reported details, such as the date of the correspondence, August 29, and the author, HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine. But it was redacted to exclude the substance of the message, including both the scheduling recommendation itself and a scientific review that was attached to the letter.

Read the organizations’ full marijuana letter to Biden below:

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