Orders involving the participation of three pro-rescheduling parties from the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) chief administrative law judge (ALJ) created a storyline that readers did not want to miss out on this month. ALJ John J. Mulrooney granted the Connecticut Office of the Cannabis Ombudsman and The Doc App’s withdrawals from the rescheduling hearing, leaving an already uneven playing field more uneven for the hearing. Mulrooney also granted a motion for Ellen Brown, a Massachusetts Cannabis Advisory Board appointee, to continue her quest to reconsolidate with another party. These orders come as the cannabis rescheduling hearing hangs in the balance of President Donald Trump’s new DEA leadership amid an interlocutory appeal that has delayed the process indefinitely. “While proceedings have been stayed, I have retained jurisdiction to resolve non-dispositive procedural issues to facilitate the resumption of proceedings should the [DEA] elect to return the case for additional hearing proceedings,” Mulrooney wrote in his Feb 11 order for Brown. Meanwhile, news of Trump’s nomination of Terrance C. Cole to be the next DEA administrator took the No. 2 spot in Cannabis Business Times’ most-read articles this month. Cole, a 22-year DEA veteran, indicated in 2024 that his views on cannabis align with Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign that took off during the 1980s as part of the country’s drug war. Also tied to rescheduling, the Doctors for Drug Policy Reform’s Feb. 17 brief filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit related to its exclusion from the hearing process took the No. 3 spot. The nonprofit group argued that the DEA and its former administrator, Anne Milgram, violated bedrock administrative law principles in their hearing participant selections and requested a redo. Other stories among the most-read articles this month were on a bicameral effort in the U.S. Congress to block cannabis companies from tax relief under Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code, even under rescheduling; climate change’s impact on cannabis crops; and Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s push to ban THC in the Lone Star State. Catch up on our Top 10 storiesfrom February. | 
