President Donald Trump announced on Feb. 11 that he nominated Terrance C. Cole to be the next Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) administrator.
Cole, who currently serves as Virginia’s secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security (PSHS), has 30 years of law enforcement experience, including 22 years with the DEA, including stints as a special agent/criminal investigator in Oklahoma, Colombia and Afghanistan early in his career. He also served as the federal agency’s chief of staff and executive officer in Washington, D.C., and as an assistant regional director in Mexico City.
During the past two years in his state-level position in Virginia, Cole led 11 public safety agencies with more than 19,000 employees in the commonwealth.
“Together, we will save lives, and MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN,” Trump wrote Tuesday on Truth Social while announcing Cole as his pick.
Trump selected Cole to head the DEA three weeks after he appointed Derek S. Maltz as the agency’s acting administrator and two months after he removed his original pick, Florida Sheriff Chad Chronister, for consideration in early December.
As Trump’s latest choice, Cole will likely take over the reins of the cannabis rescheduling hearing process, which is currently stalled amid an interlocutory appeal that DEA Chief Administrative Law Judge John J. Mulrooney granted and sent former DEA Administrator Anne Milgram five days before Trump was inaugurated.
Pro-rescheduling advocates may not be too enthusiastic about Cole taking over the hearing process.
Specifically, Cole’s stance on cannabis appears to align with late former first lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign that took off during the 1980s as part of the country’s drug war.
During a visit 10 months ago to the Virginia Cannabis Control Authority, which Cole helped oversee as the state’s secretary of PSHS, he made his position on cannabis somewhat clear when he included the hashtags #justsayno, #disorders, #notlegal4distribution and #healthissues on a LinkedIn post.
“Everybody knows my stance on marijuana after 30-plus years in law enforcement, so don’t even ask!” he wrote.
In February 2024, Cole posted on Facebook: “Spend enough time at parties or clubs? Please read this article from the Drug Enforcement Administration - DEA to learn the dangers of peer pressure and marijuana use,” linking to an article about cannabis being “four times more dangerous” than three decades ago.
Specifically, the article stated that delta-9 THC in DEA-seized cannabis spiked from 3.4% in 1993 to 15.3% in 2021, citing the University of Mississippi’s Potency Monitoring Project.
Also last February, Cole, a father of four, shared an article on X suggesting a link between cannabis and higher suicide rates among youth.
“Concerned about our youth?” Cole wrote. “Recent study shows higher suicide risks linked to marijuana and alcohol use in high school.”
Regardless of Cole’s stance on cannabis, it remains unclear if the current rescheduling process that was initiated by President Joe Biden’s administration will pick back up under the new president.
On his inauguration day, Trump issued a regulatory freeze on all executive departments and agencies, instructing them not to propose or issue “any rule in any manner, including by sending a rule to the Office of the Federal Register.”
While Biden’s Department of Justice proposed a rule that cannabis be reclassified to a Schedule III drug under the Controlled Substances Act—a proposal that drew some 43,000 comments—a final rule on the matter was pending the administrative law judge’s hearing process that Milgram granted.
Without a final rule issued/published in the Federal Register before Trump took office, the White House could scrap the proposed rule altogether should the president or one of his agencies choose to kill the Biden administration’s review of cannabis’s schedule.
However, Trump indicated along the campaign trail in September 2024 that he supported relisting cannabis to Schedule III.
“As president, we will continue to focus on research to unlock the medical uses of marijuana to a Schedule 3 drug,” he said.
