Arizona Republicans want to kill legal weed sales. Trump’s rescheduling move just made that a lot harder.
In the strange new politics of cannabis in 2026, the movement to roll back legalized marijuana in Arizona is running into a major federal curveball. The same GOP coalition pushing a ballot initiative to dismantle the state’s adult-use marketplace now has to contend with an unexpected force on the right: Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at accelerating the federal rescheduling of marijuana.
At the center of the controversy is a ballot measure that would end commercial adult-use cannabis sales in Arizona while leaving possession, home growing and the medical program intact. The idea has been divisive since it was filed late last year. But recent comments from two Republican members of Arizona’s U.S. House delegation have pushed it further into the spotlight.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) said he supports the repeal effort, but acknowledged that Trump’s rescheduling push could complicate the campaign’s momentum and message. “He’s got power,” Gosar told Marijuana Moment, referring to the president’s directive for the attorney general to move quickly on a rule that would shift marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act.
The irony is hard to miss. Anti-legalization activists have spent years arguing that legalization increases youth exposure and accelerates THC potency. Now one of their own allies is openly conceding that the most powerful Republican in the country has muddied that narrative by pushing cannabis toward a more medically recognized federal status.
Another Arizona Republican in Congress, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), struck a similar tone. Biggs argued for keeping marijuana under strict federal control, saying prohibition reduces taxpayer spending tied to what he described as cannabis-related consequences. But he also questioned how serious or consequential the rescheduling push really is.
That tension between national and state politics is why this Arizona fight matters beyond its borders. In 2020, voters approved adult-use legalization by nearly 60 percent. The repeal campaign would need to collect 255,949 valid signatures by early July to qualify for the November ballot. If voters pass it, the measure would take effect in January 2028.
Critics of the initiative argue it is a rollback disguised as regulation. By ending legal sales while preserving possession and home cultivation, the campaign can present itself as pro-personal freedom and pro-consumer protection. But the practical effect, opponents say, would be to push more demand back into unregulated markets and revive problems legalization was meant to reduce.
That strategy is not unique to Arizona. Similar efforts are moving in Maine and Massachusetts, part of a broader push by anti-cannabis activists to separate personal legality from commercial markets.
But Trump’s rescheduling directive complicates the story for prohibitionists. A president who once showed limited appetite for sweeping cannabis reform has now forced opponents to confront a political reality they did not plan for: even an incremental federal shift can make it harder to sell the idea that cannabis should be pushed back toward the margins.
Zoom out and the clash reveals a deeper tension in American cannabis politics. On one side are voters and patients who broadly support legalization, access and regulated commerce. On the other are political operators trying to reframe legalization as a public health correction, with the end goal of shrinking or removing the market. When national party leadership moves in the opposite direction, that strategy becomes harder to sustain.
Whether the Arizona campaign can gather enough signatures or persuade enough voters to dismantle the legal market remains an open question. But one thing is already clear: the old assumptions about how cannabis politics lines up at the state and federal level no longer hold. Trump’s rescheduling push is not full legalization, but it is already changing the terrain.
For supporters of legalization, the question now goes beyond survival. It is whether the next phase of reform will be shaped by voters and patients, or by political forces that want to keep cannabis legal in theory while making the market harder to access in practice.
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