Here’s one I truly didn’t see coming: the Trump administration just made the most scientifically meaningful shift in U.S. marijuana policy in years.

No, weed isn’t suddenly legal everywhere. But moving marijuana from Schedule I — alongside heroin — to Schedule III is a very big deal. That single bureaucratic change cracks open something that’s been locked shut for half a century: real research.

For years, I’ve covered the strange absurdities of marijuana science in America. If you were a federally funded researcher — which almost every serious scientist is — you weren’t allowed to study the weed people actually use. Instead, you had to rely on a single government-approved grow operation producing products that didn’t resemble what’s sold in dispensaries. As a result, commercialization raced ahead while our understanding lagged far behind.

That’s how we ended up with confident opinions, big business, and weak data. We know marijuana can trigger severe psychological effects in a meaningful number of people. We know it can cause real physical distress for others. What we don’t know — because we’ve blocked ourselves from knowing — is who’s at risk, why, and how to use it safely at scale.

Meanwhile, the argument that weed belongs in the same category as drugs linked to violence and mass death has always collapsed under scrutiny. Alcohol, linked to more than 178,000 deaths per year in the United States alone, does far more damage, both socially and physically, yet sits comfortably in legal daylight.

If this reclassification sticks, the excuse phase is over. States making billions from legal cannabis now need to fund serious, independent research.

I didn’t expect this administration to make a science-forward move like this — but here we are. Here’s hoping we can finish the job and finally understand what we’ve been pretending to regulate for decades.

Covering earlier regulatory changes for Al Jazeera in 2016...