Elizabeth Warren Tells DEA 'To Join The 21st Century' And Deschedule Cannabis: 'Guys… It's Not 1954'

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) urged the federal government to "join the 21st century" and deschedule marijuana during a Tuesday night appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. However, she declined to answer Colbert's playful query about her personal cannabis use.

Colbert asked the senator the difference between descheduling and legalization. And “Are you high right now?”

A longtime advocate for cannabis legalization, Warren took on Colbert’s first question and laughed at his second.

“The answer is legalization is what you could do if you had a functional Congress,” she said. “Well, that’s not the world we live in. So descheduling is something the administration could do without going to Congress.”

She criticized the Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) classification of marijuana as a Schedule I drug alongside heroin and meth arguing it hinders research and contradicts public opinion.

“And that means not only is it illegal, you can’t even do research on it...what we’re saying in this letter is, ‘Guys, get with it at the DEA.’ It’s not 1954. More than half of all states have legalized marijuana.”

The letter Warren referred to was led by herself and John Fetterman (D-Pa.) who, along with ten of their Democratic colleagues, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and DEA Administrator Anne Milgram urging them to remove marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

While praising the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) recommendation to reschedule marijuana to Schedule III, Warren pushed for complete descheduling. This would eliminate research barriers and allow state-licensed cannabis businesses to access tax deductions currently denied to them under the IRS code known as 280E.

“The idea is to say, at the federal level, instead of creating this conflict, which is causing all kinds of problems—we’ve got problems with banking laws and problems in tax laws—you just say deschedule,” Warren said. “Of course, let’s treat it like alcohol. We need to deschedule it, join the 21st century and let’s make marijuana legal. It shouldn’t be that hard.”

Photo: YouTube