GOP Congressman Says States Should Be Able To Legalize Marijuana, Even If He Prefers ‘Medical Margaritas’

A Republican congressman who President Donald Trump is campaigning to defeat in a primary election next month says states should be able to decide whether they want to legalize marijuana without federal interference.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) said in a new interview with The Cincinnati Enquirer that while he doesn’t “do recreational marijuana” and personally prefers “medicinal margaritas,” he does support scaling back the war on cannabis.

“I support anybody making their own decision,” the congressman said. “And the state of Kentucky should be deciding the marijuana laws for the state of Kentucky, not the federal government.”

The journalist doing the interview found a curious way into the marijuana issue by first noting that Massie has referred to his off-the-grid  homestead property in Kentucky as “the Shire,” a nod to the home of the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings series. She then noted that “hobbits smoke a lot of pipe-weed” before pivoting to the cannabis query.

Massie, for his part, has long supported cannabis reform—telling Marijuana Moment in a 2018 interview that failing to advance marijuana legalization has been a “huge missed opportunity for Republicans.”

During his time in office, the congressman has championed legislation to legalize industrial hemp and protect the Second Amendment gun rights of marijuana consumers.

Massie told Fox News in 2019 that rescheduling cannabis is good politics.

“The first party that does this—and I don’t understand why either party won’t do it—is going instantly gain 10 points in the general poll on which party versus the other,” he said at the time.

While the congressman has supported amendments to protect state marijuana from federal interference, he did vote against a cannabis legalization bill on the House floor, saying that it “creates new marijuana crimes” for not complying with new regulations the legislation sought to create.

Meanwhile, Massie has drawn Trump’s anger by pushing for release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein and for opposing key legislative initiatives such as spending bills.

The president has endorsed his primary challenger, Ed Gallrein, in the May 19 election.

US System For Classifying Marijuana And Other Drugs Does ‘Immense Damage,’ Former DEA Senior Official Says

Current federal laws that determine how marijuana and other drugs are classified have “fundamental flaws” that have done “immense damage,” according to a new analysis coauthored by a former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) senior advisor.

While the Department of Justice and its component agency DEA are currently working to finalize a rule to move cannabis from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) to Schedule III in accordance with an executive order from President Donald Trump, the agency’s “choices about how to regulate marijuana are sharply—and irrationally—constrained” by existing law, Matthew Lawrence, the former DEA official, argued in the new paper that he coauthored with Columbia Law School’s David Pozen.

“These schedules often force regulators into a Hobson’s choice between overcriminalizing drugs, through prohibitions that predictably backfire, or overcommercializing drugs, through hands-off approaches that leave users vulnerable to corporate exploitation,” Pozen and Lawrence, who worked in the office of the DEA deputy administrator from 2022 to 2023 and who is now at Emory University School of Law, write.

Rather than relying on criminal prohibition, the U.S. should instead look to what the authors call “capitalism controls” to more effectively regulate drugs, they say.

“US drug policy relies far too much on criminal prohibitions and far too little on what might be called capitalism controls. Criminal prohibitions have been shown time and again to be ineffective for widely used, habit-forming products. Worse than ineffective, they can lead illegal sellers to develop more-potent variants of, or substitutes for, whichever drug is the latest law enforcement priority. And yet, these prohibitions are a central pillar of the CSA and its state-level counterparts, with enormous costs in terms of arrests, imprisonments, and the undermining of racial justice and civil liberties.”

Capitalism controls, in contrast, focus on things like commercial and public availability, advertising restrictions and pricing policies such as excise taxes. They also involve checks on industry lobbying and restrictions on product additive to make products more addictive.

“None of these capitalism controls are present in the CSA,” Lawrence and Pozen say in the paper, which was published in the journal Science.

If you’re tired of incremental marijuana rescheduling announcements and interested in the root problem with drug scheduling, or how to fix it, check out my new piece with Dave Pozen, just out in Science!

SSRN version here: https://t.co/9DCEGQAuVr

— Matthew B. Lawrence (@mjblawrence) March 23, 2026

Additionally, current federal law only allows officials to consider medical benefits when making scheduling decisions, but the paper argues that nonmedical benefits such as religious, creative, social or recreational impacts should be considered, as well as policy benefits such as reduced incarceration that can stem from reform.

Because these factors are ignored, “no matter how wisely the DEA might implement the statute…the agency cannot reach a sensible outcome for a popular drug such as marijuana,” the authors argue.

“The policy that must change to bring rationality to the regulation of marijuana, along with many other controlled substances, is not the schedule in which marijuana is placed but rather the scheduling system itself.”

Taking a cue from how the Environmental Protection Agency approaches pollution control decisions, drug scheduling should consider “a wider range of interests and perspectives, with explicit attention given to the experiences of people who use or prescribe the drug in question,” they say.

Even worse than limiting perspectives, however, current scheduling policy “creates an information problem by restricting the very research into drugs’ benefits that might support their reclassification”—as researchers have continually pointed out that restrictions involved in working with Schedule I substances make it much more difficult to carry out their scientific investigations.

Looking ahead, Congress should create a new “harm reduction schedule” for drugs like heroin and fentanyl as well as an additional “managed market access schedule” where substances like cannabis and psilocybin could be classified, the paper argues.

“Under this latter schedule, marijuana sellers could be subject to a range of capitalism controls, including limits on potency, additives, marketing tactics, coordinated lobbying, and more,” Lawrence and Pozen write. “In the best tradition of federalism, Congress can learn from state legalization strategies that have curbed public health risks while surviving constitutional challenges brought by industry actors. To minimize conflict with state regulatory regimes that meet or exceed federal standards, Congress could further instruct that any firms operating within these regimes qualify for the managed market access schedule—and thus for all of the benefits of federal legal status—either indefinitely or for a transitional period.”

This new approach could extend beyond the U.S. and also be adopted on the global stage to reshape international drug control treaties and the scheduling system they created, the paper argues.

“Scholars broadly agree that marijuana policy in the United States today is neither coherent nor evidence based, even as they disagree on the solution,” Lawrence and Pozen say. “From the opioid crisis to the prison population boom to the ongoing marijuana mess, the prevailing framework for scheduling psychoactive drugs is a root cause of repeated failure.”

“To address this failure, the scientific community needs to stop fighting so much over the classification of specific substances and start focusing on the classificatory and regulatory framework itself,” they conclude. “Enlightened and effective drug policies will never be realized unless the schedules are straightened out.”

At a recent congressional hearing, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) similarly criticized the current U.S. drug scheduling system—making the case that placing substances like marijuana and LSD in the most restrictive category runs counter to evidence showing their medical potential, hinders research and is associated with criminal penalties that haven’t effectively prevented harms from substance misuse.

West Virginia Treasurer Allocates Medical Marijuana Revenue Despite Governor’s Veto

“The issue isn’t whether the funds should be used, it’s how they’re used and whether we’re doing it in a responsible, sustainable way.”

By Henry Culvyhouse, Mountain State Spotlight

This story was originally published by Mountain State Spotlight. Get stories like this delivered to your email inbox once a week; sign up for the free newsletter at https://mountainstatespotlight.org/newsletter.

In spite of a veto that could have further delayed the spending of $38 million in medical marijuana money collected over the last four years, state Treasurer Larry Pack (R) now says he will release the funds under the original mandate.

Last week, Gov. Patrick Morrisey (R) vetoed a bill that would’ve required the release of medical marijuana funds to help the homeless and expedite child abuse and neglect cases in the court system. He said the bill tied up monies for future spending.

In his veto letter, Morrisey wrote, “West Virginia must do better to plan for the future, and it can’t totally pre-commit future revenue streams like this if it’s going to have reserves to invest more in roads, water, sewer, site selection, rail, and future tax cuts.”

Morrisey said he was willing to negotiate with the Legislature on how to spend the money.

“The issue isn’t whether the funds should be used, it’s how they’re used and whether we’re doing it in a responsible, sustainable way,” governor’s office spokesman Lars Dalseide wrote in an email.

But the money was already pre-committed in state code.

Pack’s office said 100 percent of that money  will now go to various offices and programs prescribed by the original law—more than half to the Office of Medical Cannabis and the remainder of the funds split between a grant program for substance abuse treatment and grants for law enforcement. The move ignores the governor’s wishes for future reserves to tackle infrastructure and tax cuts.

In October, a Mountain State Spotlight investigation revealed $34 million had accumulated in an account held by the Treasurer’s Office from the state’s medical marijuana program.

Pack’s office said the money hadn’t been spent because of legal concerns surrounding the drug. Currently, marijuana is listed as a Schedule I narcotic under federal law, meaning it has no medical use and is illegal.

Pack isn’t the first state treasurer to express concern. State Treasurer John Perdue (D) said his office wouldn’t hold the money in 2018, following passage of the Medical Cannabis Act. Riley Moore (R), who beat Perdue in the 2020 race, never released the money, either.

Going into the 2026 Legislative Session, Del. Evan Worrell, R-Cabell, said he read a report about the amassed funds and wanted to change it. He successfully ran a bill that would force the state to spend the money on a commission to to help thousands of child abuse and neglect court cases, and homelessness services.

Had the governor not vetoed the bill, the money would have been designated to those things for one year. Money for substance abuse research, treatment and the abuse and neglect commission would continue in the following years.

The Treasurer’s Office spokeswoman Carrie Smith said due to the complexity of state and federal laws, the office had been working to release the money for months. She said the money has now been released to the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health.

This article first appeared on Mountain State Spotlight and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.