Clint Kellum, director of California’s Department of Cannabis Control, told the state’s Cannabis Advisory Committee in a recent meeting something that should concern every licensed operator in the country: DEA headquarters has not given California a single formal update on how it plans to implement medical marijuana rescheduling. Kellum said DCC has made repeated attempts, including coordinated outreach with regulators in other states, to get a clear picture of what DEA expects from state-licensed operators. Those attempts have gone nowhere.

Here’s the part that makes the situation stranger. While DEA stays quiet on implementation, the agency is actively requesting data from California about its medical cannabis program, including production and dispensing figures. California, the largest legal cannabis market in the country, is being asked to hand over information to an agency that won’t explain what it plans to do with it or how operators should prepare for what comes next.

This is what implementation looks like nine months after the DEA order took effect. The scheduling change happened on paper. The instructions for how licensed businesses actually operate under it have not shown up.

What Is the DEA Asking California For?

According to Kellum, California has received direct data requests from the DEA related to the state’s medical cannabis production and dispensing figures. On its surface, that sounds routine. A federal agency implementing a new regulatory framework needs numbers to work with.

The problem is context. California’s cannabis market blends medical and adult-use activity in ways that don’t map cleanly onto DEA’s request. Kellum explained that in California’s market, identifying as a medical patient carries little practical incentive, since adult-use products are widely available to anyone 21 and older. That means the state’s official medical-use figures don’t necessarily reflect the full scope of medical cannabis activity happening on the ground.

Kellum said DCC has asked DEA what the data will actually be used for and has offered to walk the agency through California’s licensing structure and incentive models before handing information over. So far, DEA hasn’t explained its intent. Without that context, California says it can’t confidently share data in the way DEA is asking for it.

That leaves a state with the largest number of licensed cannabis businesses in the country stuck between a federal agency requesting numbers and a federal agency that won’t say how those numbers will be interpreted or used.

What Are Registered Cannabis Operators Encountering?

Businesses that registered with DEA under the new Schedule III framework aren’t operating in a vacuum. Kellum told the advisory committee that other states are already seeing DEA inspections at marijuana businesses that applied for federal protections.

Two details stand out. First, DEA appears to be prioritizing states with clear-cut, standalone medical cannabis programs over states like California, where medical and adult-use licensing overlap. Kellum described California as a “mixed” state in this context, one that DEA seems to be treating differently, and possibly more slowly, than states with simpler regulatory structures.

Second, there’s regional variation in what inspectors are actually asking. Reporting from Marijuana Moment has found that DEA officials are posing different sets of follow-up questions to cannabis businesses depending on location, rather than applying one consistent national standard. That inconsistency means two businesses in two different states, both registered under the same federal framework, could face entirely different inspection experiences.

For operators, this is, shockingly, not the crystal-clear federal protection everyone was promised. Who could have possibly seen this coming? Registering with the DEA was supposed to bring order and legitimacy to the industry and sure, it has, if your idea of “order” is a patchwork of inconsistent inspections that vary depending on which regional DEA office happens to knock on your door.

What Is California Refusing to Guess About?

Kellum was direct about DCC’s strategy: the department will not act on assumptions about what DEA plans to do.

“The last thing what we want to do is try to be guessing what they’re going to be doing, and then trying to make changes that have widespread effects across our market, and then ultimately to find out that there’s some sort of different path or vision,” Kellum said, according to Marijuana Moment.

That means California is deliberately holding off on sweeping regulatory changes tied to federal rescheduling until it has something concrete to build on. DCC has made narrower moves, like adopting emergency rules in May that let cannabis businesses change license designations to qualify for federal benefits. But broader shifts to the state’s regulatory framework are on pause.

Kellum called this approach methodical rather than satisfying, acknowledging that operators waiting on clarity may not love the answer. The alternative, in his view, is worse: making significant changes based on guesswork, only to find out later that DEA had a different plan in mind all along.

DCC spokesperson Jordan Traverso echoed this in a statement to CRB Monitor, saying the department’s goal is to stay responsive “without getting in the way of, or projecting certainty onto, a process that remains outside state control.” In plain terms, California isn’t willing to pretend it knows something it doesn’t.

Which Federal Decisions Still Need to Be Made?

Kellum identified four specific developments California is tracking before it considers further material changes to state cannabis policy:

• Formal implementation guidance directly from DEA headquarters
  
• The outcome of DEA’s broader administrative hearing on rescheduling marijuana beyond just state-licensed medical cannabis
  
• Guidance from the Internal Revenue Service on how Section 280E tax relief applies to cannabis businesses with both medical and adult-use operations
  
• The results of pending litigation challenging the rescheduling order itself

Each of these carries real financial weight. The IRS question alone determines whether cannabis businesses operating in both medical and adult-use markets can access relief from Section 280E, the tax code provision that currently blocks standard business deductions for companies trafficking in Schedule I or II substances. The Treasury Department said back in April it would issue guidance on this, but as of this writing, operators are still waiting.

Congress is also feeling the pressure. In August, a bipartisan group of House members led by Rep. Dina Titus sent a letter to President Trump and three cabinet secretaries asking for clarity on worker protections, patient rights, insurance coverage, and how the new DEA registration system will actually function. They asked for answers by September 30.

Until these four items resolve, California says it isn’t in a position to build the state’s next regulatory phase around assumptions.

What This Means for Operators Right Now

The real exposure for businesses lies in the gap between rescheduling on paper and rescheduling in practice. A schedule change sounds like resolution. In reality, it opened a long list of open questions that federal agencies have been slow to answer, even for the country’s largest cannabis market.

Vermont Cannabis Control Board chair James Pepper put it plainly earlier this year: “None of us really can effectively advise our licensees, which is just incredibly frustrating, especially with a ticking clock.” If California, with its scale and staff, can’t get DEA on the phone, smaller state programs are unlikely to fare better.

There’s also a real tension worth sitting with. DEA wants operational data from California’s cannabis market while declining to explain its own implementation plans to that same market. That contradiction sums up where Schedule III stands right now: further along on paper than it is in practice.

This situation is still developing, and the four items Kellum flagged, DEA guidance, the broader rescheduling hearing, IRS action on 280E, and pending litigation, will likely shape the next phase of state-level policy. Operators and regulators alike are watching closely for movement on any of them.

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