[Irreverent editorial/karmic observation: One can't help but wonder why this story couldn't have broken ten days ago... on 4/20....]

Today it was confirmed that the federal government is finally going to officially retreat in fighting the War On Weed. The feds are backing down, for the first time in modern history. The Department of Justice is recommending moving marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act to Schedule III, after a required period of public commentary. It is not a complete capitulation in the War On Weed, but it is indeed a historic step in the right direction -- and the first one ever taken. So while this is not the end of the road for the pro-legalization activists, it is an enormous milestone and should be celebrated (even as only a partial victory).

Regular readers know that I have advocated for many years for marijuana to be reclassified in some way. There's a very good reason for this, and the reason is: "the current classification is insane." It just is. Marijuana is considered by the federal government to be more dangerous than fentanyl. That is clearly insane. Nobody's ever died from an overdose of marijuana, but federal law treats it as worse than a whole slew of far more dangerous drugs. Which, again, is absolutely insane.

So what is being proposed is that marijuana will still be considered a prescription drug, but a much more low-level prescription drug -- and crucially, it will become a drug that actually does have accepted medical uses as far as the federal government is concerned (whereas Schedule I drugs don't). While 38 states -- fully three-fourths of them -- have legalized medical marijuana in some form or another, the federal government has so far refused to budge from its position that there simply was no accepted medical use for marijuana at all. Rescheduling will also change things for the better for the growing marijuana industry, since they will now be able to do things like deduct business expenses that every other business in America is allowed to deduct. That is a big positive change right there.

But it won't change the basic dynamic. Even being listed further down on Schedule III means that recreational use will still be completely illegal, as far as federal law is concerned. Some future presidential administration could always attempt to order a big crackdown on recreational marijuana sales in all the states (24 and counting...) which have legalized its use at the state level, and because marijuana will still be on the Controlled Substances Act schedules (and because federal law always trumps state law), there will be nothing to stop them from doing so. Except maybe public opinion -- and the fact that doing so would already be a near-impossible task (because there are so many weed stores now in existence). Or they could even move to reverse what the Biden administration is doing and try to move marijuana back to Schedule I (or perhaps II).

This is why today's news is mixed, at best. The truly sane thing for the federal government to do with marijuana is patently obvious -- hand enforcement over to the "Department of Vice." Because there is indeed a federal department in existence which deals with alcohol and tobacco (as well as firearms and explosives), and this is the obvious natural fit for marijuana as well. The War On Weed won't officially be over until the federal government offers up a complete surrender to reality and de-schedules marijuana entirely. Deal with it the same way as they deal with booze and cigarettes, in other words, because that is the only thing that truly does make sense.

Reactions to today's news were also rather mixed:

"This is going to help to normalize cannabis more than anything that's ever occurred in the U.S. since they started the war on drugs," said David Culver, senior vice president of public affairs at the U.S. Cannabis Council, an industry advocacy group. "This is the most significant federal cannabis reform in modern history, and I think sets us on a path for the ultimate goal of federal legalization."

Other advocates asserted that the reclassification doesn't go far enough. They want to see marijuana removed from the schedule system entirely and regulated like tobacco and alcohol.

Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, an advocacy group, said treating marijuana as a prescription drug would not legitimize how cannabis is available through a vast network of dispensaries and delivery services in legal state markets.

"Those involved in the state legal marijuana industry and the tens of millions of Americans who patronize that industry are all acting in a manner that is inconsistent with federal law," Armentano said. "Theoretically, if the federal government wished to do so, all of these players could be prosecuted for being in violation of the federal law."

So, at best, this is merely a step in the right direction. But it is the first such step the federal government has ever taken, so it's still worth celebrating. Federal law has not achieved full sanity yet, but it's going to be a lot less insane from now on. That's a start, to be sure.

It's worth noting that President Joe Biden was the one to instigate this historic backdown by the feds. Biden was never a pro-legalization kind of guy -- in fact, his history as an enthusiastic "drug warrior" in the Senate is a rather long one, since it stretches all the way back to the days of Nancy Reagan and "Just Say No" and DARE and all the rest of the War On Weed frenzy of the 1980s. Biden is a reluctant latecomer to the idea of treating marijuana in a sane manner, to put this another way.

But Biden acted, when Barack Obama and Bill Clinton didn't. Both Clinton and Obama admitted using marijuana earlier in their lives before they were elected president, but neither one of them lifted a finger to change federal law while they were in office. Clinton, especially, felt threatened by the political fallout of championing sane marijuana policy (he even famously hedged his admission of college-age use, stating rather unbelievably: "I didn't inhale"). But the 1990s were a different time. Obama could far more easily have made this move, as the pro-legalization movement was beginning to score solid gains by the time he was in office -- which meant it wasn't nearly as politically risky for him to have supported legalization at the time. But Obama refused to act.

Biden will go down in history as being out in front of two rather large political wedge issues over the past two decades, when Obama was timid: gay marriage and marijuana legal reform at the federal level. Perhaps Biden is doing so for political reasons (his standing among young voters could certainly use a boost), but this really isn't some hasty election-year ploy -- it has been in the works for years (both the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services had to sign off on the rescheduling for us to have gotten where we now are, and this all took an inordinate amount of time). So Attorney General Merrick Garland didn't exactly wake up today and decide to make the official recommendation out of the blue -- it's been in the works for years.

So while the War On Weed is not yet over, the federal government is now in full retreat. They are backing down. They are admitting that there is a new reality out there. For the first time ever they are moving towards sanity and away from the crazy notion that marijuana is more dangerous than fentanyl. It is going to take years before the feds totally surrender this war, so the battle is not over yet. If Biden wins a second term, he probably won't move to deschedule marijuana during it -- instead he will likely rest on the laurels of what he's already accomplished. It will likely fall to some future president to finally get rid of the archaic notion that federal law should treat marijuana any differently than tobacco or alcohol. That is when the War On Weed will end, and not before. But for the first time in over half a century, at least we will now be moving in the right direction.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant