Cohen Bill Would Move Drug Scheduling From the DEA to HHS

Rep. Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat and senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced legislation Thursday that would rewrite the Controlled Substances Act, moving the power to classify drugs from the Drug Enforcement Administration to the Department of Health and Human Services and eliminating mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses. His office described the six-title bill, the Public Health and Research Reforms in Controlled Substances Act, as the most comprehensive overhaul of the 1970 law since it was enacted and as Cohen's 500th sponsored measure since he entered Congress.

The bill has no announced hearing, and a comprehensive rewrite of drug scheduling faces long odds in a Republican-controlled House. What it does provide is the most detailed statement yet of how the federal drug-scheduling system would work if the judgments the DEA currently makes about medical usefulness were made by physicians and researchers instead.

The authority moves, and so do the registrations

Under the current structure, HHS evaluates the science and the DEA makes the legal determination. Cohen's bill reverses that arrangement: the HHS secretary, not the attorney general or the DEA, would schedule substances. Researchers studying controlled substances would register with HHS rather than the DEA, and the bill creates blanket research licenses intended to cover work across a class of compounds rather than a single protocol. Authority to set production quotas for controlled substances also moves to the HHS secretary.

The division of labor the bill describes is explicit. HHS handles science and medicine; the DEA handles diversion and illicit use. Cohen's prepared statement describes the war on drugs as "a failure at cross purposes with good public policy," aimed largely at minorities through mandatory minimums, and calls a thoughtful review of national drug policy overdue.

The bill also reworks how the government justifies a scheduling decision. A new statutory factor analysis would be scored and weighted by an external advisory committee whose reasoning would be published, replacing the internal judgment that today produces a rule and an accompanying explanation. Emergency scheduling authority would be updated rather than left as written, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy would get an expanded role in coordinating responses to emerging drug trends, a function first authorized in the SUPPORT Act.

Two axes instead of a single ladder

The most consequential structural change is to the schedules themselves. In an analysis published the same day, Reason described a system in which each controlled substance would receive two ratings: a Roman numeral from I to IV reflecting the risk of misuse, substance use disorder and public health harm, and a letter from A to E reflecting therapeutic value. A drug could then be graded as high-risk and high-value at the same time, which is how clinicians already think about fentanyl — an anesthetic and analgesic that can also cause fatal respiratory depression.

The bill replaces the phrase "potential for abuse" with a standard based on the potential to produce a substance use disorder, and states that isolated or occasional nontherapeutic use does not by itself meet that threshold. About 30 substances, including fentanyl, morphine, methamphetamine, psilocybin and ibogaine, would be evaluated first under the new framework. Cohen's office was careful to say none of them would be descheduled, only rescheduled with more granularity.

Substitution effects become a statutory factor

One provision matters more for the addiction field than its placement in the bill suggests. Officials would be required to consider whether scheduling a substance would itself harm public health — including by pushing people toward other drugs, or toward an unregulated supply of uncertain potency. They would also have to weigh whether people use a substance to control problematic use of another scheduled drug, and what harms that other drug causes.

That language fits the fight now underway over kratom and its alkaloid 7-hydroxymitragynine, which the DEA moved to restrict this fall and which consumers describe using for pain or to reduce opioid use. Under the bill, those consumer reports would have to appear in the government's own analysis of what a ban would cost. The DEA's threshold notice from October 18 is the current reference point for that debate.

Timelines would be statutory. Reason reads the bill as setting a two-year deadline for evaluating 32 named substances and an eight-year deadline for most others, with automatic fallback classifications if the government misses them; Cohen's release describes the first group as about 30 substances. Whether agencies can meet those clocks with the staff they have is a question the text does not answer.

Research access and the psychedelic bottleneck

For the researchers who study psychedelics as addiction treatment, the registration changes may matter more than the schedules. Investigators currently must show evidence of medical benefit to obtain a registration that the same rules make it hard to use for the studies that would produce that evidence. Cohen's bill creates an expedited pathway for qualifying researchers and faster decisions for small preclinical pilot studies, and it strengthens research language attached to last year's HALT Fentanyl Act.

The bill also corrects the statutory definition of a "controlled substance analogue," a term that has driven prosecutions of people selling compounds that were not explicitly scheduled at the time of sale. And it would remove the requirement that the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy oppose specified legalization efforts — a requirement Reason called remarkable for an office supposedly focused on evaluating drug policy.

Sentencing provisions are the other half of the package. The bill would eliminate quantity-based trafficking mandatory minimums and the mandatory penalties that attach when death or serious injury results, while keeping judicial discretion and directing the Sentencing Commission to account for retroactivity.

Endorsements, and the absence of a number

MAPS, Students for Sensible Drug Policy, the Drug Policy Alliance and NORML endorsed the bill. Sia Henry of MAPS said the proposal offers "an important opportunity to begin reimagining drug policy by grounding it in scientific evidence," and said she was especially encouraged by the removal of mandatory minimum sentences and by applying the sentencing changes retroactively.

Cohen's office did not include a bill number in the announcement, and the measure expands on a narrower bill he filed in June, the Controlled Substances Act Clarification in Sciences Act, H.R. 9186. No text for the new bill had appeared in Congress.gov search results by Friday morning, and neither the DEA nor HHS had commented on the proposal.

For patients and providers, the practical significance is not this Congress. It is that a comprehensive alternative now exists in legislative language, covering the ground from research registration to sentencing, and that the next Congress or the next administration will be able to pick it up. Readers tracking the scheduling debate can follow our coverage of the DEA's 7-OH threshold notice and of the FDA's request for comment on ibogaine trials, and can find treatment information through the buprenorphine and medication-assisted treatment pages.