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After more than 50 years as a Schedule I substance, marijuana is slated to get reclassified. In a historic shift, the Drug Enforcement Administration reportedly plans to modify the drug’s designation under the Controlled Substances Act from a category that includes drugs like heroin and meth to the less dangerous but still illegal Schedule III, alongside ketamine and anabolic steroids.

Schedule I drugs, as my colleague Julia Métraux reported last week, by definition have a “high potential” for abuse without any “currently accepted medical use.” With the change to Schedule III, explains Harvard neuroscientist Staci Gruber, who studies the effect of marijuana on our brains, “We’re no longer saying ‘no accepted medical value.’ That’s a big difference. It is an acknowledgment that there is some accepted medical value.”

It may also be a blessing for researchers like Gruber. Studying a Schedule I substance’s medical uses is no trivial task, often involving the kind of extra paperwork, additional security measures, and slower approvals that experts tell me make it burdensome to conduct vital research and make it harder for new scholars to break into the field. A Schedule III designation would ease many of those requirements. And with the cannabis industry growing like, well, a weed, scientists hope the new classification will also mean more quality medical cannabis studies on ailments from pain to nausea to PTSD.

Under the current scheduling regime, the research obstacles are frankly absurd. Consider how pharmacologist and professor Ziva Cooper, who directs UCLA’s Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoids, is required by the DEA to store the cannabis used in her studies: a 750-pound........

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