Easing weed rules will harm ‘Golden Age’ . . . and boost China

President Donald Trump is facing a pivotal decision: whether to ease national restrictions on marijuana, a policy shift he hinted at during his 2024 campaign.

President Donald Trump is facing a pivotal decision: whether to ease national restrictions on marijuana, a policy shift he hinted at during his 2024 campaign.

But a major federal bust this week in Massachusetts — where the FBI arrested seven Chinese nationals connected with a multimillion-dollar pot-growing conspiracy — shows why loosening the rules would be a soft-power disaster.

First, some context.

The federal government, under the Controlled Substances Act, uses a five-part schedule to classify various drugs and other potentially addictive items. Drugs with no accepted medical use and high potential for abuse get listed on Schedule I.

That’s where marijuana is now placed — right where it belongs.

FDA-approved marijuana-based medications are rightly classified on lower schedules.

Raw weed, however, has no accepted medical use (whatever may be claimed in states that have legalized it), and addiction rates are around 30% and rising, with younger people hit hard.

That didn’t concern President Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services Department, which recommended moving cannabis to Schedule III, the list of drugs with an accepted medical use and a lower risk of abuse.

Now celebrities, star athletes and some MAGA influencers are pushing Trump to follow the Biden-era recommendation.

But this president — who correctly grasps the multifaceted strategic threat China poses to the United States — should reject their urgings.

Look at this week’s Justice Department charges.

Federal law enforcement on Tuesday rolled up a network of marijuana grow houses in Massachusetts and Maine, allegedly run by Chinese nationals and staffed with illegal immigrants pressed into what amounts to indentured servitude.

The operations generated millions of dollars in profits, which the growers sank into assets like jewelry, cars and real estate that expanded their criminal enterprise.

Chinese criminals played a major role in the US fentanyl crisis by manufacturing the drug’s precursor chemicals and selling them to Mexican cartels. Trump slammed China with a 20% tariff over that very fact.

Marijuana is looking like another big-time business unit for Beijing.

But it gets worse: China’s communist government appears to have significant links with these criminal weed enterprises.

Two Chinese nationals charged with running an illegal grow operation in Maine in 2023 had deep links to the Sijiu Association, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit reportedly connected to China’s New York consulate and to the United Front Work Department — the branch of the CCP’s Central Committee that handles influence operations abroad.

Another report in 2024 tracked the connections of Zhu Di, one of China’s top US diplomats, to an Oklahoma cultural association that Sooner State authorities investigated for its links to the illicit weed business.

It’s beyond clear that Beijing smells the skunky funk of a tactical play against the United States rising from the red-hot marijuana trade.  

That’s what makes rescheduling weed such a risk.

Moving marijuana to Schedule III would supercharge the pot market, letting canna-businesses take regular deductions — including on advertising — at tax time, and easing their access to banking and credit.

In other words, it would be a major step towards commercially normalizing Big Weed, and a massive boost for Chinese organized criminals with apparent CCP connections.

Worse — as New York has seen firsthand — far from eliminating the drug dealers, a juiced-up legal weed market leads to a bigger illegal market.

Post-legalization in the Empire State, New York City alone contains an estimated 3,600 illegal pot stores, dwarfing the mere dozens of legal ones. California and Michigan have seen a similar trend.

That’s yet another way rescheduling would hand an unforced victory to China, which is already elbow-deep in illegal weed operations stateside.

The worst part is that there’s no domestic benefit to this tradeoff.

If weed goes on Schedule III, it will do nothing except help addiction profiteers get rich — and damage public health irreparably, even as a flood of new data confirms that marijuana is as bad as it gets for users’ mental and physical well-being.

Heart disease, schizophrenia, dementia, even tooth rot: Weed truly is the drug that does it all.

Yes, the American public seems to be waking up. Every state considering recreational marijuana at the ballot box in 2024 rejected it.

But Trump should remember that Beijing will exploit any and every policy misstep we make to the utmost.

That’s as true of spy balloons as it is of public-health policies with nothing but negative domestic implications.

Rescheduling marijuana would put Americans last, at home and abroad — and usher in the very opposite of the Golden Age the president has so memorably promised.

Kevin Sabet is president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana and a former White House drug policy adviser.