President Trump signed an executive order today reclassifying the federal status of marijuana,

categorizing it as a drug with less potential for harm and dependence.

It's a major shift in policy that could have wide-ranging effects on cannabis use and research.

William Brigham joins us now with more.

That's right. For many years, marijuana was a Schedule 1 drug in a category

with heroin and LSD, meaning the government considered it dangerous to use with no medical

benefits. Today's move will slide marijuana down into Schedule 3, with drugs like Tylenol

with codeine and testosterone.

While this doesn't legalize marijuana, this shift would allow for greater research about the drug,

which is something President Trump touted during his announcement today.

This reclassification order will make it far easier to conduct marijuana-related medical research allowing us to study

benefits, potential dangers, and future treatments. It's going to have a tremendously positive

impact, I believe. So for more on this policy shift, we are joined again by Bo Kilmer. He's with the

RAND Drug Policy Research Center.

Bo, thank you so much for being here again. Let's walk through some of the impacts of this shift.

The first one being research, we just heard the president say this is going to open up the floodgates for new scientific research.

Is that true? What kind of research will they be doing? What kind of questions might scientists be

asking? Yeah. Well, so you can do research on Schedule I drugs, but there's a lot of paperwork

and a lot of hoops you need to jump through. So traditionally, when you would move from a Schedule

one to a Schedule III drug, it would mean less bureaucracy to deal with, and it should increase

access to research.

However, the Congressional Research Service put out a report last year saying that because of a

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