Marijuana Rescheduling Worth a Billion Dollars in Forgiven Taxes To MSO’s Plus More Than Two Billion Annual Tax Savings

“The Justice Department says the parties challenging marijuana rescheduling are protecting their revenue and have “pocketbook interest”. The numbers on the other side of the docket tell a different story-one measured in billions, not thousands said Duane Boise CEO MMJ International Holdings.

WASHINGTON, D.C. / ACCESS Newswire / July 10, 2026 / On July 2, the Justice Department told the D.C. Circuit that the two parties seeking a stay of the Marijuana Rescheduling Order-a drug-testing association and MMJ International Holdings-“invoke pocketbook interests.” The accusation deserves a serious answer, because the government has the ledger pointed in the wrong direction. If the court wants to know who has a financial stake in the outcome of this case, it should look at the parties the order benefits, not the parties challenging it. Those numbers are not speculative. They are on the beneficiaries’ own balance sheets, in their own securities filings, and in Federal Election Commission records.

The Windfall Nobody Is Talking About

Start with Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code, which denies ordinary business deductions to businesses trafficking in Schedule I or Schedule II substances. According to Whitney Economics, state-licensed cannabis operators incurred an estimated $2.24 billion in excess 280E-related federal taxes in 2025 alone, and roughly $15 billion in excess 280E taxes since 2018. Rescheduling to Schedule III erases that liability going forward. That is not a side effect of the Order. For the industry that lobbied for it, it is the point: a permanent, recurring tax benefit measured in billions of dollars per year.

The retroactive picture is starker. For years, major multistate operators simply stopped paying their full 280E taxes while rescheduling was pending-a strategy the trade press itself calls the “rescheduling gambit.” By early 2026, the accrued, unpaid 280E liabilities of the publicly traded operators had grown to approximately $1.6 billion, including roughly $445 million at Trulieve, $378 million at Verano, and $171 million at Cresco Labs. Trulieve went further, filing amended returns and collecting $113 million in refunds of 280E taxes it had already paid-refunds the IRS has said taxpayers are “not entitled” to receive and that the Justice Department is now suing another operator, TerrAscend, to claw back.

If the Rescheduling Order stands, those liabilities do not merely shrink; the Order itself encourages the Treasury Department “to consider providing retrospective relief from Section 280E liability” for state-licensed medical operators. Read those documents together and the stakes are plain: for a handful of state licensed companies, this single administrative order is worth on the order of a billion dollars in forgiven back taxes and refund claims, plus more than two billion dollars in annual tax savings going forward. That is the pocketbook interest in this case. It belongs to the Order’s beneficiaries.

The Money That Preceded the Order

The Order did not arrive in a vacuum. Federal election records show that marijuana companies donated at least $1 million to the President’s inaugural fund, including $750,000 from Trulieve, which also gave $250,000 to the MAGA Inc. super PAC. A cannabis industry PAC funded by Green Thumb Industries, Verano, Curaleaf, Cresco Labs, Trulieve, and the United States Cannabis Council directed another $1 million to the same super PAC. Reporting by CNBC, Forbes, and the Washington Examiner has documented millions more in industry lobbying in the months before the December 2025 executive order that set rescheduling in motion, including personal advocacy by Trulieve’s chief executive at high-dollar fundraisers and pre-inauguration events. None of this is alleged misconduct, and we do not claim it is. But when the loudest voices in this debate ask whose money is moving federal drug policy, the disclosed record answers the question.

Years of Tolerated Illegality

There is a deeper asymmetry. The companies now receiving Schedule III treatment built their market positions by selling a Schedule I controlled substance in violation of federal law, while federal enforcement stood down-first under the 2013 Cole Memorandum, then under the Rohrabacher-Farr appropriations rider that has barred the Justice Department from spending funds against state medical marijuana programs every year since 2014. During those same years, MMJ took the path Congress actually wrote into law: DEA registration, an FDA Investigational New Drug program for Huntington’s disease and multiple sclerosis, GMP formulation and stability work, and analytical testing-eight years and more than $10 million, with no revenue, because federal law says a cannabinoid medicine must be proven safe and effective before it is sold. The Rescheduling Order hands the compliance dividend to the companies that never sought FDA review, never ran a clinical trial, and never obtained the registrations the statute requires.

What “Pocketbook Interest” Actually Means Here

The government’s brief argues that the Controlled Substances Act was not enacted to protect “market opportunities” for cannabinoid drug developers. Respectfully, that gets the statute backwards. Congress enacted the CSA precisely to channel drugs with medical potential through federal registration, research, and approval-the system MMJ has spent nearly a decade complying with. A company whose entire business model is built on the CSA’s research-and-approval pathway sits at the center of the statute’s zone of interests, not outside it. What the CSA was certainly never written to do is confer Schedule III status-and a multibillion-dollar tax amnesty-on businesses whose products have never passed through any federal review at all.

MMJ has no product on the market. That is true. It is also the whole point: we have no revenue because we followed the law, and the Order transfers the value of that compliance to companies that did not. The D.C. Circuit will weigh the legal standards for a stay in the coming weeks. But on the question the Justice Department chose to raise-who is guarding a commercial interest-the disclosed numbers are not close. A thousand dollars per employer on one side of the ledger. Billions in tax forgiveness, refunds, and political spending on the other. Follow the money. It does not lead to MMJ.

CONTACT:
Madison Hisey
MHisey@mmjih.com
203-231-8583

SOURCE: MMJ International Holdings

View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire