Marijuana Rescheduling Odds: Will It Happen Before 2027?

Updated October 3, 2026 · by Jake Hari

Kalshi's crowd thinks marijuana leaves Schedule I under this administration, and has all but given up on it happening fast. The contract that pays if a broad rescheduling takes legal effect before January 1, 2027 was quoted at a 6-cent bid and a 9.3-cent ask on the morning of October 3, a midpoint under 8 cents and about one chance in thirteen, the same chance it has carried since Tuesday, September 29, the day the judge who holds the record stayed the case. It was one in five on September 27 and one in three at the start of September, and most of the drop printed in two hours that Tuesday afternoon.

Seven AI models read the closed hearing record without seeing that price and put the same deadline at 11 percent, about one chance in nine. For the second stamp in a row, the market sits below them on the near rung. On the two longer deadlines, before 2028 and before the end of the current presidential term, the market is still above the models, by 7 points on 2028 and 8 on 2029. The 2028 gap was 12.5 on Wednesday; one order at noon on Thursday started the slide and two more sellers on Friday and early Saturday finished it. Hold the 2029 number loosely: its book is twelve cents wide and it has barely traded in three days. The disagreement is still about the calendar, and the calendar belongs to one man: DEA Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek Julius, who has a 2,533-page record on his desk, no deadline to rule on it, and, since September 29, a stayed docket with no end date.

The near rung has now given back the whole late-August spike and most of what sat under it. It printed a 40-cent high on August 28, three days after the corrected transcript published, and sits under 8 cents on October 3, after sellers walked it from 18 cents to 4.4 on the afternoon of September 29 and three sessions since have left the midpoint where that afternoon put it. The rest of this page is about why the models thought buyers at 40 cents were paying for a speed the process does not have, why the near rung spent a month walking toward them and then fell through them on the docket's first pause, and about a rescheduling that already happened once this year and paid this contract nothing.

Kalshi requires traders to be 18+. Prices on this page carry an "as of" stamp and get re-read when the story moves.

The Board

Seven models were shown the settlement rules, the Federal Register record and the procedural history below, and were not shown the price. Each priced all three deadlines at once, then read the others' reasoning anonymously and was invited to revise. The panel number is the median of the seven.

Deadline	What has to be true by then	Market	Panel
Before Jan 1, 2027	A broad rule in legal effect, about three months from today	7.7¢	11%
Before Jan 1, 2028	Same, with all of calendar 2027 to get there	67¢	60%
Before Jan 20, 2029	Same, by the end of the current presidential term	82¢	74%

Market column is the midpoint of the bid and the ask at 8:50 AM ET on October 3, 2026: 6.0 bid and 9.3 ask on the 2027 rung, 65 and 69 on 2028, 76 and 88 on 2029. The near rung's book is about three cents wide on a contract worth about eight, so read that midpoint as a range; the 2029 rung's book is twelve cents wide and its last print, 77, came on the night of October 2, so read that one as a wider range still. Panel column is the seat median after the revision round, run August 28 and not re-run for this update.

What Has Moved Since September 30

Not the docket. Since this page last read the board, stamped the morning of Wednesday, September 30, nothing new has been filed in the case Judge Julius stayed on September 29 while he decides whether the September 23 Government Accountability Office report comes into the record. The government's answer is still due October 13, the stay still has no end date, and no outlet has reported the calls to Attorney General Blanche and Administrator Cole that a senior adviser told The Marijuana Herald the president would make. Four days of quiet is what a stayed docket looks like.

The near rung priced that quiet as a range, not a number. Since Wednesday it has traded between 6 and 10 cents and nowhere else, and on Friday it touched both ends: a buyer paid 10 in the afternoon, and by evening one seller had pushed the bid to the floor of the range at 6, where it still sits, with nobody willing to lift the offer above it. The midpoint held, 7.8 to 7.7 cents, only because the offer did not move. Still about one chance in thirteen, still three points under the models, and still a contract whose two sides cannot agree on the spread, let alone the answer.

The before-2028 rung is where the price actually moved. At noon on Thursday one order sold 3,085 contracts and took it from 72 to 69 cents, with no story on the docket or in the trade press that hour, and two more sellers, on Friday afternoon and in the small hours of Saturday, carried it down to 65. The midpoint is 67, down from 72.5 on Wednesday and below the 70 it held at the start of September. The models have 2028 at 60; the market has closed nearly half the gap to them in three sessions without a single filing.

The before-2029 rung did nothing and its number moved anyway. Its last trade was 77 cents on Friday night, but the offers between 80 and 88 that framed Wednesday's 78-80 book are gone: the best bid is 76 and nothing of any size is offered below 89. The midpoint reads 82, three points higher than Wednesday, on a book twelve cents wide that nobody is crossing. Read that column as a range, not a price.

One dated outside number arrived. On Friday The Marijuana Herald reported an ATB Cormark survey of 17 cannabis investors, taken September 21 through 29, that put a 65 percent chance on full Schedule III rescheduling within six months. Six months from the survey's last day is late March 2027, a window that contains the near rung's January 1 deadline, which the market has at about 8 cents, and ends nine months before the 2028 rung's, which it has at 67. The survey's field period closed the day the stay landed and the near rung lost two thirds of its price.

The rung to watch is 2028. Its gap to the models is 7 points, down from 12.5 on Wednesday and 15 on September 27, the closest the two curves have been on that rung since at least the start of September, when it was 10, and it got there without a single filing. The near rung is still 3.3 points under the panel for the second stamp in a row, and the 2029 gap of 8 is the empty offer side of a book, not a trade.

Every Seat's Number

Every model appears to the others as a randomly assigned letter in the revision round, so nobody defers to a brand. The letters in the quotes below are theirs.

Seat	Before 2027	Before 2028	Before Jan 20, 2029	Revised?
Claude Fable	9%	46%	65%	later rungs
Claude Opus	11%	60%	74%	yes
Claude Sonnet	6%	48%	68%	yes
GPT	12%	60%	76%	yes
Gemini	10%	78%	88%	yes
Kimi	20%	57%	74%	yes
Grok	14%	67%	81%	near rung
Seat Median	11%	60%	74%

Every seat on this panel is graded against real market settlements — records as of the August 28 run: Claude Fable 84% on 807 graded calls · Claude Opus 84% on 877 graded calls · Claude Sonnet 82% on 852 graded calls · GPT 84% on 6,460 graded calls · Gemini 86% on 5,151 graded calls · Kimi 82% on 2,576 graded calls · Grok 84% on 4,427 graded calls. The full scoreboard is public and recomputed daily.

Seven of the panel's nine seats ran this board; two were unavailable when it ran and are excluded rather than filled in. Every number on this page gets graded in public once the market settles, on the full graded scoreboard.

The near rung is where the seats argued. First-round answers ran from 5 to 23 percent; after reading each other, the seats pulled the median down to 11.

Grok cut from 23 to 14:

"Forecasters F and E correctly note that Julius's undated recommendation on a 2,533-page record plus the mandatory ~45-day post-report clock leave almost no room for an effective broad rule before Jan 1 2027; my 23% overweighted April-style same-day compression and conflicted with my own Mar–May 2027 modal, so I cut only that rung." — Grok

GPT went from 19 to 12 and named the settlement language as the reason:

"Forecaster E changed my mind modestly on the near rung by emphasizing that the settlement requires legal effect, not merely a signed or published order, so the ALJ recommendation, exceptions, certification, Administrator order, and effective-date window all have to fit into four months." — GPT

Claude Opus went the other way, raising from 6 to 11, and its reasoning is the sharpest case for the buyers:

"I called the post-report clock a physical bar, but only ~45 days of it is mandatory, leaving four months of slack from today — the real constraint is Julius's discretionary timing, not arithmetic, so the 2026 hazard is small-but-real rather than forbidden, and April's same-day-effective order proves the executive can compress everything downstream." — Claude Opus

[Editor's note: the regulations set the mandatory floor at 25 days from service of the report to certification, with the 20-day exceptions window running inside it. The direction of the point stands for both Opus and Grok above; the mandatory stretch is shorter than the 45 days they cite, and the "four months" in the Opus and GPT quotes is measured from the August 28 run, three months as of this update.]

Claude Sonnet held its near-rung number in single digits, with the clearest statement of why the panel is where it is:

"The higher A/B/D/G near-term numbers rest on confidence about executive-branch speed, not a new procedural fact." — Claude Sonnet

That is the whole disagreement in one sentence. The buyers are betting on speed. The panel is pricing the absence of a clock.

Why April's Order Paid Nothing

Kalshi's rule for every rung is one sentence: "If marijuana is rescheduled from Schedule I to a lower drug schedule under the Controlled Substances Act before [the deadline], then the market resolves to Yes." The exchange's clarification, dated December 12, 2025, is where the money is: "The Payout Criterion requires that marijuana is legally removed from Schedule I. The mere announcement or publication of a Final Rule in the Federal Register does not satisfy the Payout Criterion if the rule has not taken legal effect." A rule that moves "only certain cannabis derivatives or specific cannabinoids" without reclassifying marijuana as a whole does not count either.

Those sentences broke a contract this spring. On December 18, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14370, directing the Attorney General to complete the rulemaking "in the most expeditious manner in accordance with Federal law." Traders read it as a promise. The contract for before July 2026 held a 78-cent close that day, and the before-2028 rung traded as high as 97 cents.

What arrived four months later was narrower. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order dated April 22 that published April 28 as a final rule, effective the same day. It moved marijuana to Schedule III only "to the extent that any of these are included in an FDA-approved drug product or are subject to a state-issued license to manufacture, distribute, and/or dispense marijuana or products containing marijuana for medical purposes." Everything outside those two boxes stayed in Schedule I.

Traders needed about a day to work out that a partial rescheduling is not this contract's rescheduling. The before-July contract closed at 35 cents on April 22 and at 6.4 cents the next day, the heaviest session in the market's history, and it settled No on July 1.

The same Federal Register issue carried two more orders. One terminated the old proceeding; the other noticed a new hearing on the broad question, to begin June 29 and "conclude not later than July 15, 2026." That hearing is the one whose record just closed.

What The Hearing Left On The Judge's Desk

The hearing ran June 29 through July 15 before Judge Julius, 11 days of testimony, with closing arguments filed in writing by August 17.

The government's brief is the most important document on the docket, because the agency that runs the schedules is now arguing for the change. The DEA wrote that marijuana "no longer fits the statutory requirements for Schedule I because it has a currently accepted medical use within the United States and it has an accepted safety for its use under medical supervision," and that it "most appropriately belongs in Schedule III." Its case for accepted medical use, as reported from the transcript, leans on the scale of the state programs: more than 30,000 licensed practitioners across 43 jurisdictions and more than six million registered patients.

The other side filed too. Smart Approaches to Marijuana and the states of Idaho, Indiana and Nebraska wrote that "The Government now proposes to reschedule marijuana not based on the facts, but rather based on new and different standards—standards that are not found in the Controlled Substances Act." The National Drug and Alcohol Screening Association put its objection in commercial terms: "If the transfer of marijuana to Schedule III is finalized, the authority of the Federal government to test for it will end."

Then came the paperwork that appears to have moved the price. On August 20 Judge Julius ordered corrections to the transcript, some of which flipped meaning ("there's adulterants" became "there's no adulterants"), and the corrected version, all 2,533 pages, published August 25. His only forward guidance is in the record: "I will thoroughly consider and evaluate all the evidence presented at this hearing." No date, no range, no hint. The final decision belongs to DEA Administrator Terrance Cole; the judge's recommendation is advisory.

Two pieces of history explain why the panel prices a stall rather than a sprint. In January 2025 Julius's predecessor as Chief Administrative Law Judge, John J. Mulrooney II, cancelled the earlier hearing eight days before it was to start, after participants alleged improper private communications between DEA leadership and rescheduling opponents. The case then sat frozen for more than a year.

The April order is being fought as well. Petitions from Republican state attorneys general, a drug-testing trade group and a cannabis pharmaceutical company were consolidated in the D.C. Circuit, and the Justice Department told the court those petitioners "come nowhere near satisfying the demanding standard for that extraordinary relief" and invoke "pocketbook interests" served by keeping marijuana in Schedule I. Briefing on the stay motion closed July 17, and on September 9 the D.C. Circuit denied it, so the April order stays in effect while the merits challenge continues.

How Fast Can This Actually Move?

Five steps sit between the closed record and a payout, and only one carries a floor nobody can shorten. Judge Julius writes a recommended decision "as soon as practicable," with no deadline. The parties then get 20 days to file exceptions, and the record cannot be certified to the Administrator sooner than 25 days after the report is served. Administrator Cole, or the Attorney General directly as in April, issues a final order with no deadline. Then the rule has to take legal effect, and publication alone does not pay this contract.

So the calendar does not forbid a payout before January 1. What it does is hand two undated, discretionary steps to two people: a judge who took delivery of the full record in late August and stayed his own docket on September 29, and an Administrator who has never been bound to a date on this file. The last link is the one that matters most, because April proved this Attorney General can collapse signature, filing, publication and legal effect into six days when he wants to. A fast Julius plus an April-style effective date is the only path to the 2027 rung paying, and it needs both.

What Would Change The Panel's Mind

Four checkable events, each with a direction.

1. Judge Julius files his recommended decision. Every seat that named the update most likely to move its number named this one. As of September 29 the docket is stayed while he decides whether the GAO report comes into the record; the government's response is due October 13 and the stay has no end date, so a report before the back half of October is off the table, and any October filing needs him to deny the motion as soon as the responses land. One that slips past Thanksgiving leaves almost nothing, because the 25-day certification floor behind it cannot be shortened by the parties who want speed. A recommendation against Schedule III would hit every rung at once.
2. The D.C. Circuit rules on the pending stay. It did, on September 9: the stay was denied, which confirms what four seats moved toward in the revision round. The 2029 rung is still above where it sat before it, on the midpoint and not on a trade; the 2028 rung has now given all of that lift back and more, at 67 against 70 at the start of September. The version of this risk that remains is the merits ruling still to come. A decision vacating the April order would be the first sign courts will interrupt this docket rather than run alongside it, and would cut the long rungs.
3. Administrator Cole signals an effective date. April's order took effect the day it printed. If the broad rule is written the same way, the last link in the chain costs days instead of a month, which is worth several points on the near rung by itself.
4. Administrator Cole tips his hand on the recommendation. The judge advises; Cole decides, and nothing binds him to adopt what Julius sends up. A public signal that he will adopt it lifts every rung; a signal that he will reject or rework it hits the back half of the ladder hardest, because the front half already assumes a near-miracle of speed. The first pressure on him is now on the record: a senior adviser told The Marijuana Herald on September 29 that the president will call both Blanche and Cole about "speeding things up." Four days on, no call has been reported, and the near rung has traded between 6 and 10 cents since September 30.

The Bottom Line

The buyers are right about the shape of the story. The agency that runs the schedules has asked in writing for the change a presidential order demands, the record is closed, and the only rescheduling this administration has produced took effect the day it was published. If you believe that pattern repeats, the near rung is where the reward is, and at 7.7 cents it is priced under the models for the second stamp in a row; the 2029 rung is 8 points above where the models put it on a book twelve cents wide that has barely traded in three days, and 2028 sits 7 above them, down from 12.5, after three sessions of sellers led by one order at noon on Thursday.

The panel's answer is that the pattern now runs through the one office in the building nobody can hurry. Judge Julius has a record the length of three novels, a standard of "as soon as practicable," a docket that last sat frozen for more than a year, and, since September 29, a stay of his own with no end date. The president, by a senior adviser's account, is about to try to hurry it anyway, and four days later nothing public says he has. Both sides get graded on the one settlement date on this page that is fixed: January 1, 2027.

Prices are as of 8:50 AM ET, October 3, 2026; panel numbers are from the August 28 run. This page gets re-scored when the story moves. The next dated item on the docket is October 13, when the government's answer to the motion behind the stay is due; the report behind it still carries no date.

Event contracts carry real risk of loss, availability varies by state, and you must be 18+ to trade. Do your own work at whatever price you are actually offered.

Hero illustration: OddsShopper, in the house collage style. Donald Trump photo by Shealah Craighead, public domain as an official government portrait; photos cropped, toned, and composited.

More on this: Will the U.S. confirm aliens exist before 2027: the same deadline shape on another federal act · Government shutdown on October 1: the nearest federal-calendar contract on the exchange · Trump third term odds · How a prediction market turns a question into a price · The full graded scoreboard for every settled model call