I don’t know why I write things that encourage people to take my job. I’ll add that to the list for my next therapy session.

Back in 2022, I wrote “So You Want to Be a Cannabis Lawyer?” In it, I said that being a cannabis lawyer had been the most fun and most rewarding phase of my career, and that the only way to succeed at it was to become comfortable being uncomfortable.

That’s still true, but for different reasons.

In the original post, I laid out four things you needed to do: (1) become a subject matter expert; (2) get comfortable with discomfort; (3) learn to tell the serious clients from the rest; and (4) learn to think like clients who are wired to take risks you’ve been trained to avoid.

Nearly everything I wrote then still holds. But the ground underneath one of those points has shifted in a way big enough that the whole piece is worth revisiting — because the federal order moving DEA-approved medications and state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III has changed the calculation.

There’s a line in The Godfather Part II I keep coming back to. Hyman Roth, asked to account for a death he had every reason to be bitter about, refuses to complain. He doesn’t ask who gave the order, but says, “This is the business we’ve chosen.” That posture — owning the hard parts instead of treating them as somebody else’s fault — is exactly what I was getting at in 2022, and it’s exactly what rescheduling demands now. The order didn’t make this an easy business to choose. It changed what’s hard about it. So let me walk back through the original four points and tell you what’s the same and what isn’t.

1. Become a subject matter expert — and the body of law just got bigger, not smaller. In 2022 I called this a good news/bad news situation: Cannabis is a novel area with a finite amount of law to know, but it’s constantly evolving. Rescheduling is the clearest proof of that I’ve ever seen. Overnight, a single order radiated into tax, banking, capital markets, advertising, intellectual property, clinical research, patient access, employment, interstate commerce, hemp, and psychedelics. We wrote 13 separate posts on it in Budding Trends and barely scratched the surface. If you were hoping the law would hold still long enough to master it, this is your answer: There is more to know now, not less, and staying abreast of the changing news and its implications for your clients matters more than it ever did.
2. Get comfortable being uncomfortable — the discomfort just moved. I said in 2022 that cannabis law is riddled with contradictions and gray areas, and that the only honest way through was to tell the truth and the whole truth, explaining every risk against the client’s proposed benefit. That hasn’t changed — it’s just relocated. The old discomfort was advising clients operating in flat defiance of federal law. The new discomfort is subtler and easier to get wrong: explaining that the relief is real but conditional. The end of Section 280E for state-licensed medical operators may be the most consequential thing in the order, but the benefits aren’t self-executing; there’s a DEA registration pathway with a clock on it and specific requirements that don’t take care of themselves. Telling a client “Yes, this is genuinely good for you, and here is everything you still have to do and everything that could still go wrong” is its own kind of uncomfortable. Get comfortable with it or get busy doing something else. There’s no shame in not wanting to navigate these waters.
3. Recognize the serious clients from the non-serious ones — and brace for more calls. In 2022 I warned that a niche practice draws a high volume of calls, many from people who aren’t serious, and that telling them apart takes judgment and experience. Rescheduling pours gasoline on that. Every favorable headline — 280E relief, easier banking, open doors at the trademark office — brings a wave of callers who heard “it’s legal now” and stopped reading. Your job is to use your expertise to figure out what’s actually being asked (the order helps medical operators in specific ways, but it has done nothing yet for adult use) and your judgment to decide whose name you want next to yours. The learning curve I described then is steeper now, because the gap between what people think the order did and what it actually did is wide.
4. Think like your clients — but update your opening line. This is the point that has changed the most, and I want to be precise about it. In 2022 I wrote that the middle ground started with stating, clearly and unequivocally, that marijuana is a Schedule I narcotic under the federal Controlled Substances Act. For DEA-approved medications and state-licensed medical marijuana, that opening line is no longer accurate; those categories now sit in Schedule III, and a lawyer who still recites the old script will mislead a client about the law as it stands. But the underlying discipline survives intact. You still state the federal posture clearly and unequivocally — you just have to know which posture applies to which category. For adult-use operators, the Schedule I analysis hasn’t gone anywhere. Their status is still being fought over in an administrative process that won’t resolve on anyone’s preferred timeline. Thinking like your clients now means tracking which side of that line each one is on.

So here’s where rescheduling leaves a young lawyer weighing this path. The order didn’t end the frontier I described in 2022 — it moved it. The interesting, unresolved questions are still everywhere: What happens to the Dormant Commerce Clause now that medical marijuana is a federally lawful article of commerce for the first time? What does Schedule III mean inside an exam room? Does, after years of federal signals that flattered to deceive, the order finally justify optimism on psychedelics or is it just déjà vu in a new suit? If you need certainty to feel like a competent lawyer, the gap between what rescheduling promised and what it delivers will wear on you. If you can tell a client “Here’s what the order does, here’s what it doesn’t do, and here’s when we’ll know more” without flinching, there has never been a better time to come.

Being a cannabis lawyer is still not for everyone; in fact, it’s still not for most people. Rescheduling didn’t change that. But if you’re one of the few and the proud, the responsibilities that come with the job are richer now than they were when I first wrote this and so are the rewards. Nobody will make you choose this. That’s the whole point of Roth’s line. This is the business we’ve chosen — but it doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun doing it.

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