Cannabis Rescheduling Goes to Congress: A Father's Plea to Unlock Research for Dying Children

The House Small Business Committee doesn't typically make headlines in the cannabis world. Its hearings tend toward the technical — supply chain vulnerabilities, intellectual property theft, foreign investment risks. The committee's work is important, but it rarely produces moments that pierce the policy bubble and reach the general public.

The April 2026 hearing was different.

Sean Murphy, founder of Kompassion — a nonprofit organization focused on palliative care and rare diseases afflicting children — sat before the committee and delivered testimony that reframed the cannabis rescheduling debate in the most human terms possible. His argument wasn't about tax policy, industry economics, or state versus federal authority. It was about dying children and the research that might save them.

"Marijuana rescheduling could unlock research and healing," Murphy told the committee, "especially for rare diseases."

The Man Behind the Testimony

Sean Murphy isn't a cannabis industry executive or a professional lobbyist. He's a father whose personal experience raising a child with a severe health condition led him to advocacy work that he never anticipated and wouldn't have chosen.

Murphy's journey began in hospital corridors and support groups, where he encountered other families facing terminal diagnoses for their children — diagnoses that had exhausted every conventional treatment option. Through Kompassion, he began working with families navigating the palliative care system and volunteering in veterans' hospice facilities.

What he observed across both populations was consistent: patients and families frequently asked about cannabis-based treatments, and physicians frequently had to tell them that the research didn't exist — not because the science was unpromising, but because federal restrictions made it nearly impossible to study.

Cannabis's Schedule I classification — which categorizes it alongside heroin as having "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse" — creates enormous bureaucratic barriers for researchers. Getting approval to study a Schedule I substance requires DEA licensing, additional institutional review, and access to a limited supply of research-grade cannabis that historically came from a single federally authorized growing facility at the University of Mississippi.

The result is a research bottleneck that has persisted for decades. While observational data and international studies suggest that cannabinoids may have therapeutic applications for conditions ranging from epilepsy (Epidiolex is already FDA-approved) to chronic pain, nausea, and certain neurological conditions, the kind of large-scale clinical trials needed to develop new treatments has been severely constrained.

For families like those Murphy works with — families whose children have rare diseases with no approved treatments — the research gap isn't an academic concern. It's the difference between hope and hopelessness.

What Rescheduling Would Change

Murphy's testimony focused on a specific ask: reclassifying cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III, as the current rescheduling process proposes.

Schedule III substances — which include ketamine, anabolic steroids, and Tylenol with codeine — are recognized as having accepted medical uses and a lower potential for abuse than Schedule I or II drugs. The practical implications of rescheduling for research are significant:

Reduced regulatory burden. Researchers studying Schedule III substances face substantially fewer bureaucratic hurdles than those studying Schedule I drugs. The DEA licensing requirements are less stringent, institutional review processes are faster, and the overall timeline from research proposal to approved study shrinks dramatically.

Expanded supply. Schedule I research has historically been limited by the supply of federally approved cannabis, which researchers have criticized as low-quality and unrepresentative of the products patients actually use. Schedule III classification would open new supply channels and allow researchers to study commercial-grade products.

Federal funding access. While federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) technically can fund Schedule I research, the additional regulatory complexity discourages applications and slows grant cycles. Rescheduling would normalize cannabis research within federal funding frameworks, making it more attractive to the academic researchers and medical centers that drive pharmaceutical innovation.

Private sector investment. Pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to invest in cannabis-based drug development as long as the substance remains Schedule I. Rescheduling signals federal legitimacy and reduces the legal and reputational risks that have kept major pharmaceutical players on the sidelines.

Murphy specifically recommended that Congress consider targeted funding for cannabinoid research through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), with a dedicated allocation to support "new therapeutic pathways made possible by marijuana's rescheduling from Schedule I to Schedule III."

The Rare Disease Connection

Murphy's focus on rare diseases gave his testimony a dimension that policy-focused rescheduling arguments often lack.

There are approximately 7,000 known rare diseases affecting an estimated 30 million Americans. By definition, rare diseases each affect fewer than 200,000 people, which means the patient population for any individual disease is too small to attract the commercial pharmaceutical investment that funds treatment development for common conditions.

For these patients, the most promising research pathways often involve repurposing existing compounds — including cannabinoids — for new therapeutic applications. Preliminary research has suggested that various cannabinoids may have anti-inflammatory, neuroprotective, anti-seizure, and palliative properties that could benefit patients with conditions ranging from rare forms of epilepsy to mitochondrial diseases to certain pediatric cancers.

But "preliminary research has suggested" is where most of these leads dead-end. Without the ability to conduct rigorous, large-scale clinical trials — trials that Schedule I classification makes extremely difficult — promising observations remain exactly that: observations, not treatments.

Murphy's testimony asked the committee to imagine what might be possible if the research barriers were lowered. Not certainty of cure, but the possibility of investigation. Not a promise of miracle drugs, but the removal of a bureaucratic obstacle that has prevented scientists from even asking the right questions.

"We're not asking anyone to say that cannabis is a cure for rare diseases," Murphy said in his prepared remarks. "We're asking for the research environment that allows scientists to find out whether it could help."

The Broader Rescheduling Landscape

Murphy's testimony landed at a pivotal moment in the rescheduling debate.

President Trump signed an executive order in January 2026 directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to "expedite completion" of the rescheduling process, which has been pending since the DEA signaled its intention to move forward in 2024. The House and Senate Appropriation committees removed language from a funding bill that would have blocked the DOJ from reclassifying cannabis — a significant signal that Congress is no longer actively trying to prevent rescheduling.

Yet the process remains stalled. The DEA said in a recent filing that the rescheduling appeal process "remains pending" despite the executive order directing expeditious completion. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) sent a letter pressing Attorney General Bondi and DEA Administrator Terrance Cole for an update three months after the executive order, reflecting growing congressional frustration with the pace of reform.

The stall has multiple causes. The DEA administrative hearing process is complex and procedurally demanding. Industry groups on both sides — those wanting rescheduling and those opposing it — have filed extensive comments. And the political calculus, while increasingly favorable, remains uncertain.

For advocates like Murphy, the delays are measured in human cost. Every month that rescheduling remains pending is a month in which research that could have been initiated remains on hold. For families facing terminal diagnoses, the timeline isn't academic — it's existential.

The Tax Relief Angle

While Murphy's testimony focused on research, the rescheduling debate extends into territory that's equally consequential for the cannabis industry: Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code.

Under current law, because cannabis is Schedule I, cannabis businesses cannot deduct ordinary business expenses on their federal tax returns. This means that dispensaries, cultivators, and manufacturers pay effective tax rates far exceeding those of comparable businesses in other industries — sometimes 70% or higher.

Rescheduling to Schedule III would eliminate the 280E burden, potentially saving the average dispensary an estimated $800,000 per year in additional taxes. For an industry operating on thin margins and facing competition from the illicit market, this tax relief could be transformative.

The tax angle has been the primary focus of most industry-side rescheduling advocacy. Murphy's testimony added a dimension that tax arguments lack: moral urgency. It's one thing to argue that dispensaries deserve the same tax treatment as liquor stores. It's another to argue that dying children deserve the research that might save their lives.

What Comes Next

The rescheduling process continues to grind through federal bureaucracy, with no firm timeline for completion. The DEA hearing process, while advancing, could take months or years to conclude. Congressional patience is thinning, but legislative alternatives to administrative rescheduling — such as bills to deschedule cannabis entirely — face their own political headwinds.

Murphy and Kompassion plan to continue advocacy, including direct engagement with ARPA-H on cannabinoid research funding and partnerships with academic medical centers positioned to begin clinical trials once regulatory barriers are lowered.

The hearing itself didn't produce immediate legislative action — few individual hearings do. But testimony like Murphy's serves a different function: it shifts the moral frame of the debate. Cannabis rescheduling isn't just about tax codes and regulatory frameworks. It's about whether the United States government will continue to obstruct research into a class of compounds that could — emphasis on could — alleviate suffering for some of the most vulnerable patients in the country.

The Fundamental Question

At its core, the rescheduling debate comes down to a question that Sean Murphy posed implicitly in his testimony: what are we protecting, and at what cost?

Schedule I classification was supposed to protect the public from a dangerous substance with no medical value. Fifty-six years later, the evidence overwhelmingly contradicts that classification. At least one cannabis-derived drug (Epidiolex) is FDA-approved. Thirty-eight states have medical cannabis programs. And the only thing preventing researchers from determining whether cannabinoids could help children with rare diseases is the same scheduling designation that was supposed to protect those children in the first place.

The irony isn't lost on Murphy, or on the families he works with.

"We have parents who are watching their children suffer," he told the committee. "And we have scientists who believe they might be able to help. The only thing standing between them is a bureaucratic classification from 1970."

Whether Congress will act on that framing, or whether the testimony will be remembered as one more voice in a debate that moves far too slowly for the families it affects most, remains to be seen. But if the cannabis rescheduling movement ever finds its moral center, it will sound a lot like what Sean Murphy said in that hearing room in April 2026.