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The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is considering whether it will reclassify marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recommended last August. This week a dozen Democratic senators recommended that the DEA go further by completely removing marijuana from the CSA’s schedules. Their argument is sound as a matter of policy but legally shaky because the CSA incorporates international treaty obligations in a way that bars the DEA from taking that step.

Since 1970, marijuana has been listed in Schedule I of the CSA, a category supposedly reserved for substances with “a high potential for abuse” that have “no currently accepted medical use” and cannot be used safely even under a doctor’s supervision. The DEA has consistently rejected petitions asking it to reclassify marijuana, citing advice from HHS. But last August, in response to an October 2022 directive from President Joe Biden, who said marijuana’s Schedule I status “makes no sense,” HHS reversed its longstanding position.

Departing from the DEA’s usual approach, HHS took into account clinical experience with marijuana in the 38 states that allow medical use, scientific evidence in support of certain therapeutic applications, and the relative hazards of marijuana compared to “other drugs of abuse.” It noted that “the vast majority of individuals who use marijuana are doing so in a manner that does not lead to dangerous outcomes to themselves or others.” HHS concluded that the DEA should move marijuana to Schedule III, which includes prescription drugs such as ketamine, Tylenol with codeine, and anabolic steroids.

For good reason, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (DMass.), Sen. John Fetterman (DPa.), and 10 of their colleagues, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (DN.Y.), think that change does not go far enough. Rescheduling marijuana, they say in a letter they sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland and DEA Administrator Anne Milgram on Monday, “would mark a significant step forward” but “would not resolve the worst harms of the current system.” They urge the DEA to “deschedule marijuana altogether,” noting that its prohibition “has had a devastating impact on our communities and is increasingly out of step with state law and public opinion.”

Unsurprisingly, that recommendation was welcomed by drug policy reformers. But it goes beyond what the CSA authorizes the DEA to do.

Generally speaking, the CSA gives the attorney general the authority to schedule, reschedule, and deschedule drugs in consultation with HHS. The attorney general historically has delegated that function to the DEA, which is part of the Justice Department. But the CSA includes an explicit limitation on the executive branch’s discretion that complicates any attempt to unilaterally deregulate marijuana.

“If control [of a subtance] is required by United States obligations under international treaties, conventions, or protocols in effect on October 27, 1970,” Section 811(d)(1) of the CSA says, “the Attorney General shall issue an order controlling such drug under the schedule he deems most appropriate to carry out such obligations” (emphasis added). In that situation, the decision to place or keep a drug in one of the CSA’s schedules is mandatory, and it is to be made “without regard” to the “findings” and “procedures” ordinarily required to schedule a substance.

The United States is a signatory to the U.N. Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961, which requires strict control of cannabis. “If a Party permits the cultivation of the cannabis plant for the production of cannabis or cannabis resin,” it says, “it shall apply thereto the system of controls” specified for “the control of the opium poppy.” The treaty does not apply to “the cultivation of the cannabis plant exclusively for industrial purposes,” and it allows regulated medical use, as with opiates. But the obligations it imposes, which restrict the DEA’s scheduling decisions under the CSA, are inconsistent with decontrolling marijuana and treating it like alcohol and nicotine.

Warren et al. acknowledge the problem raised by the interaction between the CSA and the Single Convention. In 2016, they note, “the DEA considered its international treaty obligations a bar to rescheduling marijuana to anything less restrictive than Schedule II.” But since then, they say, “cannabis has been rescheduled under international lawa change that the United States and the World Health Organization supported, in light of ‘the legitimate medical use’ of certain cannabis products.”

In 2020, the senators note, cannabis was removed from the Single Convention’s “most restrictive schedule” (confusingly, Schedule IV). It remains in a category (also confusingly, Schedule I) that “requires countries to limit the drug’s use to only ‘medical and scientific purposes.'” But “deschedul[ing] marijuana altogether,” as the senators are urging the DEA to do, would flout that requirement. In addition to “cannabis and cannabis resin,” the Single Convention’s Schedule I includes drugs such as opium, heroin, fentanyl, morphine, hydrocodone, oxycodone, and cocaine, all of which are listed in the CSA’s Schedule I or Schedule II.

In support of their argument that treaty obligations are not an obstacle to administrative descheduling of marijuana, the senators cite a September 2023 legal analysis by the Boston-based law firm Foley Hoag. But that analysis actually undermines Warren et al.’s argument.

Foley Hoag notes that the Single Convention requires signatories to “tightly control cannabis, most similarly to the CSA’s Schedule I or Schedule II.” The main issue, it emphasizes, is not what the treaty demands but what the CSA allows.

“Several commentators have largely dismissed concerns regarding the Attorney General’s ability (via the DEA) to reschedule cannabis below Schedule II,” Foley Hoag notes. “After all, we’ve already violated it through our permissive approach to states’ rights to establish and regulate their own medical and adult-use markets. Moreover, several signatories to the UN Single Convention (including Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, Luxembourg, South Africa, Thailand, and others) have legalized adult use cannabis or have otherwise decriminalized possession and/or home cultivation in clear violation of the Single Convention. After all, the Single Convention seems to lack any enforcement mechanism. So, it’s no big deal, right? RIGHT?”

Wrong, Foley Hoag says: “Treaty compliance is not the issue. At least not theprimaryissue. The issue iscompliance with domestic law. The key question is whether the Attorney General, via the DEA, can or will be able to reschedule cannabis to Schedule III given that the UN Single Convention is effectively incorporated into the CSAa federal statute passed by Congress that the Executive Branch must follow.”

Back in 1977, Foley Hoag notes, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit emphasized that Section 811(d)(1) “circumscribes the Attorney General’s scheduling authority.” That provision “enables him to place a substance in a CSA schedulewithout regard to medical and scientific findingsonly to the extent that placement in that schedule is necessary to satisfy United States international obligations,” the appeals court said. “Had the provision been intended to grant him unlimited scheduling discretion with respect to internationally controlled substances, it would have authorized him to issue an order controlling such drug ‘under the schedule he deems most appropriate,'” full stop.

Note that Foley Hoag was addressing the issue of whether the DEA can legally move marijuana to Schedule III. The objections it raises apply with even more force to the question of whether the DEA can “deschedule marijuana altogether.”

In a 2020 brief asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to overrule the DEA’s position that marijuana belongs in Schedule I, attorneys Matthew Zorn and Shane Pennington argued that the CSA violates the constitutional separation of powers. The statute “transfers a quintessential legislative powerthe power to execute teatiesto the Attorney General,” they wrote. And in doing so, they said, it fails to provide an “intelligible principle to choose among schedules,” as required by the Supreme Court’s delegation precedents. “The Attorney General has no discretion to override the floor dictated by an unelected international body,” Zorn and Pennington noted. “But he has unfettered discretion to schedule above that point. Even if these two handoffs could stand independently, together they plainly violate established Separation of Powers norms.”

Even as they argued that the CSA is unconstitutional in these respects, Zorn and Pennington conceded that the attorney general “has no discretion” under the statute to ignore the Single Convention’s demands. In fact, their constitutional argument hinged on that point.

Zorn still does not see how the DEA can do what Warren et al. are asking without violating the CSA. “This is like asking the President to jump 20 feet in the air,” he says in an email.

The senators are right that moving marijuana to Schedule III would leave many problems unresolved. That step would facilitate medical research by removing regulatory requirements that are specific to Schedule I. It also would relieve a crippling tax burden on state-licensed marijuana businesses under Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code. But those businesses would remain criminal enterprises in the eyes of the federal government, subject to felony charges and civil forfeitureconsequences they currently avoid only thanks to prosecutorial discretion and an annually renewed congressional spending rider that is limited to medical marijuana. They would still have difficulty obtaining financial services from institutions that are keen to avoid the risk of civil, regulatory, and criminal penalties.

Placing marijuana in Schedule III would not even make it legally available as a prescription medicine, which would require approval of specific products that meet the Food and Drug Administration’s onerous requirements for proving safety and efficacy. Nor would it restore the Second Amendment rights of cannabis consumers, who would still be barred from possessing firearms as “unlawful user[s]” of a controlled substance. And as Warren et al. note, “non-citizens could still be denied naturalization and green cards, and even deported, based on most marijuana offenses.”

The only way to solve all of these problems is to repeal the federal ban on marijuanaa move that 70 percent of Americans favor, according to the latest Gallup poll. But the power to do that lies with Congress, not the DEA.

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Tech founders call on Sequoia Capital to denounce VC Shaun Maguire’s Mamdani comments

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Tech founders call on Sequoia Capital to denounce VC Shaun Maguire's Mamdani comments

Almost 600 people have signed an open letter to leaders at venture firm Sequoia Capital after one of its partners, Shaun Maguire, posted what the group described as a “deliberate, inflammatory attack” against the Muslim Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City.

Maguire, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, posted on X over the weekend that Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary last month, “comes from a culture that lies about everything” and is out to advance “his Islamist agenda.”

The post had 5.3 million views as of Monday afternoon. Maguire, whose investments include Elon Musk’s SpaceX and X as well as artificial intelligence startup Safe Superintelligence, also published a video on X explaining the remark.

Those signing the letter are asking Sequoia to condemn Maguire’s comments and apologize to Mamdani and Muslim founders. They also want the firm to authorize an independent investigation of Maguire’s behavior in the past two years and post “a zero-tolerance policy on hate speech and religious bigotry.”

They are asking the firm for a public response by July 14, or “we will proceed with broader public disclosure, media outreach and mobilizing our networks to ensure accountability,” the letter says.

Sequoia declined to comment. Maguire didn’t respond to a request for comment, but wrote in a post about the letter on Wednesday that, “You can try everything you want to silence me, but it will just embolden me.”

Among the signees are Mudassir Sheikha, CEO of ride-hailing service Careem, and Amr Awadallah, CEO of AI startup Vectara. Also on the list is Abubakar Abid, who works in machine learning Hugging Face, which is backed by Sequoia, and Ahmed Sabbah, CEO of Telda, a financial technology startup that Sequoia first invested in four years ago.

At least three founders of startups that have gone through startup accelerator program Y Combinator added their names to the letter.

Sequoia as a firm is no stranger to politics. Doug Leone, who led the firm until 2022 and remains a partner, is a longtime Republican donor, who supported Trump in the 2024 election. Following Trump’s victory in November, Leone posted on X, “To all Trump voters:  you no longer have to hide in the shadows…..you’re the majority!!”

By contrast, Leone’s predecessor, Mike Moritz, is a Democratic megadonor, who criticized Trump and, in August, slammed his colleagues in the tech industry for lining up behind the Republican nominee. In a Financial Times opinion piece, Moritz wrote Trump’s tech supporters were “making a big mistake.”

“I doubt whether any of them would want him as part of an investment syndicate that they organised,” wrote Moritz, who stepped down from Sequoia in 2023, over a decade after giving up a management role at the firm. “Why then do they dismiss his recent criminal conviction as nothing more than a politically inspired witch-hunt over a simple book-keeping error?”

Neither Leone nor Moritz returned messages seeking comment.

Roelof Botha, Sequoia’s current lead partner, has taken a more neutral stance. Botha said at an event last July that Sequoia as a partnership doesn’t “take a political point of view,” adding that he’s “not a registered member of either party.” Boelof said he’s “proud of the fact that we’ve enabled many of our partners to express their respected individual views along the way, and given them that freedom.”

Maguire has long been open with his political views. He said on X last year that he had “just donated $300k to President Trump.”

Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, has gained the ire of many people in tech and in the business community more broadly since defeating former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the June primary.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

WATCH: SpaceX valuation is maybe even conservative, says Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire

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Samsung expects second-quarter profits to more than halve as it struggles to capture AI demand

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Samsung expects second-quarter profits to more than halve as it struggles to capture AI demand

Samsung signage during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California, US, on Thursday, March 20, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics on Tuesday forecast a 56% fall in profits for the second as the company struggles to capture demand from artificial intelligence chip leader Nvidia. 

The memory chip and smartphone maker said in its guidance that operating profit for the quarter ending June was projected to be around 4.6 trillion won, down from 10.44 trillion Korean won year over year.

The figure is a deeper plunge compared to smart estimates from LSEG, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate.

According to the smart estimates, Samsung was expected to post an operating profit of 6.26 trillion won ($4.57 billion) for the quarter. Meanwhile, Samsung projected its revenue to hit 74 trillion won, falling short of LSEG smart estimates of 75.55 trillion won.

Samsung is a leading player in the global smartphone market and is also one of the world’s largest makers of memory chips, which are utilized in devices such as laptops and servers.

However, the company has been falling behind competitors like SK Hynix and Micron in high-bandwidth memory chips — an advanced type of memory that is being deployed in AI chips.

“The disappointing earnings are due to ongoing operating losses in the foundry business, while the upside in high-margin HBM business remains muted this quarter,” MS Hwang, Research Director at Counterpoint Research, said about the earnings guidance.

SK Hynix, the leader in HBM, has secured a position as Nvidia’s key supplier. While Samsung has reportedly been working to get the latest version of its HBM chips certified by Nvidia, a report from a local outlet suggests these plans have been pushed back to at least September.

The company did not respond to a request for comment on the status of its deals with Nvidia.

Ray Wang, Research Director of Semiconductors, Supply Chain and Emerging Technology at Futurum Group told CNBC that it is clear that Samsung has yet to pass Nvidia’s qualification for its most advanced HBM.

“Given that Nvidia accounts for roughly 70% of global HBM demand, the delay meaningfully caps near-term upside,” Wang said. He noted that while Samsung has secured some HBM supply for AI processors from AMD, this win is unlikely to contribute to second-quarter results due to the timing of production ramps.

Meanwhile, Samsung’s chip foundry business continues to face weak orders and serious competition from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Wang added.

Reuters reported in September that Samsung had instructed its subsidiaries worldwide to cut 30% of staff in some divisions, citing sources familiar with the matter.

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Drones are sending ‘overwhelming amounts’ of drugs into prisons – and could help inmates escape, report warns

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Drones are sending 'overwhelming amounts' of drugs into prisons - and could help inmates escape, report warns

Sophisticated drones sending “overwhelming amounts” of drugs and weapons into prisons represent a threat to national security, according to an annual inspection report by the prisons watchdog.

HMP chief inspector of prisons Charlie Taylor has warned criminal gangs are targeting jails and making huge profits selling contraband to a “vulnerable and bored” prison population.

The watchdog boss reiterated his concerns about drones making regular deliveries to two Category A jails, HMP Long Lartin and HMP Manchester, which hold “the most dangerous men in the country”, including terrorists.

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Ex-convict: Prison is ‘birthing bigger criminals’

Mr Taylor said “the police and prison service have in effect ceded the airspace” above these two high-security prisons, which he said was compromising the “safety of staff, prisoners, and ultimately that of the public”.

“The possibility now whereby we’re seeing packages of up to 10kg brought in by serious organised crime means that in some prisons there is now a menu of drugs available,” he said. “Anything from steroids to cannabis, to things like spice and cocaine.”

“Drone technology is moving fast… there is a level of risk that’s posed by drones that I think is different from what we’ve seen in the past,” warned the chief inspector – who also said there’s a “theoretical risk” that a prisoner could escape by being carried out of a jail by a drone.

He urged the prison service to “get a grip” of the issue, stating: “We’d like to see the government, security services, coming together, using technology, using intelligence, so that this risk doesn’t materialise.”

The report highlights disrepair at prisons around the country
Image:
The report highlights disrepair at prisons around the country

The report makes clear that physical security – such as netting, windows and CCTV – is “inadequate” in some jails, including Manchester, with “inexperienced staff” being “manipulated”.

Mr Taylor said there are “basic” measures which could help prevent the use of drones, such as mowing the lawn, “so we don’t get packages disguised as things like astro turf”.

Responding to the report, the Prison Advice and Care Trust (PACT) said: “The ready access to drugs is deeply worrying and is undermining efforts to create places of rehabilitation.”

Mr Taylor’s report found that overcrowding continues to be what he described as a “major issue”, with increasing levels of violence against staff and between prisoners, combined with a lack of purposeful activity.

Some 20% of adult men responding to prisoner surveys said they felt unsafe at the time of the inspection, increasing to 30% in the high security estate.

Andrea Coomber, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “This report is a checklist for all the reasons the government must prioritise reducing prison numbers, urgently.

“Sentencing reform is essential, and sensible steps to reduce the prison population would save lives.”

Read more UK news:
The human impact of the Post Office scandal
Govt to ban ‘appalling’ NDAs that silence victims

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May: Male prison capacity running at 99%

The report comes after the government pledged to accept most of the recommendations proposed in the independent review of sentencing policy, with the aim of freeing up around 9,500 spaces.

Those measures won’t come into effect until spring 2026.

Prisons Minister Lord Timpson said Mr Taylor’s findings show “the scale of the crisis” the government “inherited”, with “prisons dangerously full, rife with drugs and violence”.

He said: “After just 500 prison places added in 14 years, we’re building 14,000 extra – with 2,400 already delivered – and reforming sentencing to ensure we never run out of space again.

“We’re also investing £40m to bolster security, alongside stepping up cooperation with police to combat drones and stop the contraband which fuels violence behind bars.”

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