The New Boss: Terry Cole, the DEA's Long War on Cannabis, and Why Rescheduling Still Isn't Moving

Nine months after Terry Cole was sworn in as the 12th Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the cannabis rescheduling process he promised would be "one of my first priorities" is still sitting exactly where his predecessor left it: nowhere. As of the DEA's most recent joint status filing in early April, the interlocutory appeal that stalled the Schedule III rulemaking in January 2025 "remains pending" before the Administrator. That's the fifth such filing in a row saying the same thing. No briefing schedule. No movement. No date.

President Trump's December 18, 2025 executive order told the Attorney General to finalize Schedule III "in the most expeditious manner." Four months later, the most expeditious manner appears to be: not at all.

So who is the man holding the process hostage? And what does his history tell us about whether the plant ever actually gets off Schedule I?

Who Is Terry Cole

Terrance Christopher Cole, 56, grew up in Corning, New York, graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology with a B.A. in criminal justice, and spent 22 of the next 31 years in federal law enforcement — almost all of it inside the DEA. His tours read like a greatest-hits of the drug war: Special Agent postings in Oklahoma, New York, Dallas, and Washington, assignments to the Special Operations Division and the National Security Council, and foreign deployments to Colombia, Afghanistan, Mexico, and the Middle East. When he retired from federal service in 2020, he was the DEA's Acting Regional Director for Mexico, Canada, and Central America.

After a brief private-sector stop as a senior VP at Aperia Solutions, Governor Glenn Youngkin tapped him in May 2023 to run Virginia's Public Safety and Homeland Security portfolio — 11 agencies, 19,000 employees. That role put him, notably, in oversight of Virginia's Cannabis Control Authority. Trump nominated him on February 11, 2025, and the Senate confirmed him 50–47 on a party-line vote on July 22, 2025. He was sworn in the next day.

Cole is the third name Trump put forward for the post. Hillsborough County (FL) Sheriff Chad Chronister withdrew early over COVID-enforcement blowback; a second unnamed pick also bailed. Cole was the survivor.

The Paper Trail

The rescheduling industry has been squinting at Cole since the nomination, looking for any tea leaf. There are several, and none of them are friendly.

In February 2024, after visiting the Virginia Cannabis Control Authority offices, Cole posted on LinkedIn: "Everybody knows my stance on marijuana after 30 plus years in law enforcement, so don't even ask!" He followed the statement with hashtags including #justsayno, #disorders, #notlegal4distribution, #healthissues, and #thinblueline. That same month he shared an article on X about cannabis and suicide risk in high schoolers ("Concerned about our youth?") and promoted a separate DEA article claiming cannabis is "four times more dangerous" than it was three decades ago — citing THC potency data from Ole Miss's federally contracted monitoring program.

At his April 30, 2025 Senate Judiciary confirmation hearing, Cole tried to thread a needle. He told the committee that reviewing rescheduling would be "one of my first priorities" and that "it's time to move forward" — then refused to commit to the Schedule III rule itself when pressed by Senators Alex Padilla and Cory Booker. In written follow-ups, Padilla asked him point-blank whether cannabis has "currently accepted medical use" — the legal linchpin of the entire rescheduling question. Cole dodged, saying he needed to "familiarize" himself with the process.

Then came the tell. On July 25, 2025 — two days after he was sworn in — the DEA published Cole's eight strategic priorities. Cannabis rescheduling was not on the list. Cartels, fentanyl, synthetic drugs, border enforcement — all there. The process he had sworn was a first-order priority had quietly slipped off the agenda before his coffee got cold.

The Milgram Playbook

Anne Milgram, Biden's DEA Administrator from June 2021 to January 2025, is the cautionary tale Cole seems to be studying. She inherited a White House directive to review cannabis scheduling, an HHS scientific review recommending Schedule III, and broad public support. She produced four years of carefully choreographed inertia.

The timeline: HHS delivered its Schedule III recommendation in August 2023. The DEA sat on it for nine months. When the rule finally moved in May 2024, it wasn't Milgram's signature on the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking — it was Attorney General Merrick Garland's, with the DEA conspicuously declining to state its own position on the appropriate schedule. Prohibitionist groups reported that Milgram herself had refused to sign.

What followed looked less like rulemaking and more like slow-walking:

• Milgram granted an ALJ hearing — after the preliminary approval, effectively guaranteeing no final rule before the 2024 election.
• She approved more than two dozen "designated participants" as witnesses, heavily weighted with prohibitionist voices, prompting pro-rescheduling parties to argue that DEA officials had engaged in ex parte communications with opponents. Judge John J. Mulrooney II called the conduct, if true, "a puzzling and grotesque lack of understanding and poor judgment from high-level officials."
• In her final days, Mulrooney granted the rare interlocutory appeal and kicked it upstairs — straight into her outbox on the way out the door.
• Separately, a DOJ Inspector General investigation was opened into no-bid contracts Milgram steered to former colleagues and associates during her tenure. MMJ BioPharma Cultivation, which has been trying to grow pharmaceutical cannabis for FDA-sanctioned research for seven years, sued her and other DEA officials over what it described as systematic obstruction.

Milgram's script was simple: talk the language of science and process, then let the process eat itself. Cole now holds her pen.

The DEA's Long War on the Plant

Schedule I for cannabis was never supposed to be permanent. When Nixon's Attorney General John Mitchell placed it there in 1972 under the new Controlled Substances Act, the designation was explicitly contingent on the findings of the Shafer Commission — which, months later, recommended decriminalization. Nixon shelved the report. Cannabis stayed.

The agency has now rejected or obstructed every meaningful attempt to move it for more than half a century:

• 1988: DEA Administrative Law Judge Francis Young ruled that "marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man" and recommended rescheduling. The DEA overruled its own judge.
• 1999: The Institute of Medicine found cannabis had legitimate medical uses and relatively low abuse potential. The DEA denied the resulting petition in 2001.
• 2011: Another denial, this time citing a lack of U.S. research on smoked cannabis — research the DEA itself had spent three decades blocking through its monopoly on federally approved cultivation at the University of Mississippi.
• 2016–2022: The "research expansion" the DEA publicly announced in 2016 took six more years to produce a second approved grower. MMJ BioPharma is still waiting.
• 2023–2025: HHS recommends Schedule III. DEA slow-walks. The Milgram-era hearing collapses. The process stalls.

The through-line is consistent across administrations, parties, and personalities: the DEA does not want to reschedule cannabis, and it has proven across five decades that it will use every procedural lever available to make sure it doesn't have to.

What Cole Might Actually Do

Three scenarios, ordered by probability as of this writing.

1. Slow-walk to heat death (most likely). Cole keeps filing 90-day status reports saying the appeal "remains pending." No briefing schedule. No decision. The rule quietly ages out, Trump loses interest, and the industry remains stuck with Section 280E, no banking, and Schedule I research barriers. This is the Milgram ending with a Republican cast. The fact that the DEA has had no administrative judges on staff since August 2025 makes this the path of least resistance.

2. Forced Schedule III via DOJ. If Trump's patience runs out — or if new Acting AG Todd Blanche (Pam Bondi was fired earlier this year) decides to finalize the rule over DEA objections, the same way Garland did with the NPRM — Cole becomes a bystander. The rule gets finalized, SAM and Bill Barr file the lawsuit they've already signaled is coming, and the fight moves to the D.C. Circuit. Schedule III ends 280E, unlocks research, and keeps cannabis federally illegal for adult use.

3. The wildcard — Schedule VI or descheduling. Roughly 69% of the 43,000+ public comments on the NPRM supported descheduling entirely. A smaller but growing coalition backs a new Schedule VI that would treat cannabis like alcohol. Neither outcome requires new legislation — both are within the Administrator's statutory power. Neither is remotely consistent with anything Cole has ever said.

Bottom Line

Terry Cole is a career drug warrior who spent 22 years inside the DEA's institutional anti-cannabis culture, came out publicly aligned with Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No," and quietly removed rescheduling from his own priority list the week he took the job. His predecessor ran out the clock and left under an IG cloud. His agency has obstructed every rescheduling attempt since the Nixon administration.

The only real pressure point is political — the President himself. Trump says rescheduling is "common sense." His DEA Administrator, by every signal that matters, disagrees. One of them is going to win that argument. So far, it's not the one who signed the executive order.