The American Trucking Association has a good amount of sway in this administration, and they’re chiming in on the possibility of changing marijuana to fall under Schedule III in the Controlled Substances Act.
Dan Horvath, chief operation officer at the ATA, sent a letter to Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy that lays out his concerns about Schedule III.
“In congressional testimony, then-Secretary Pete Buttigieg stated that DOT believed testing for regulated safety-sensitive transportation workers would not be affected by rescheduling. However, ATA never received a response to our correspondence explaining the basis for this position or detailing how DOT intended to address any impacts to the program.”
Horvath says marijuana accounts for 60% of positive drug tests since 2020, and he goes so far to list out deadly crashes in which marijuana was part of the equation.
So the ATA’s concern lies mainly in the testing, and the lack of transparency coming from the government in terms of how that will be addressed if marijuana becomes more readily and legally available. It’s a fair stance to take, especially for an organization that has a history with related fatal crashes.
At this point, no one knows what Schedule III marijuana would look like. If this did occur, I would imagine at least a year of working out kinks, so hopefully better testing can be a part of that discussion.
Read the original at Ganjapreneur.
