Under his watch, he said, he’d asked the agency “to focus their efforts and the resources of the DEA on the most important cases in their jurisdictions, and by and large what they are telling me is that the most important cases in their jurisdictions are opioids and heroin.”

As benign as those comments might first appear, it’s one of the first signs that DEA is responding to the rapidly shifting public attitudes about decriminalizing and even legalizing the personal use of marijuana in many localities.

Perhaps the clearest sign of marijuana’s inroads into Congress came in June with the narrow failure of an amendment to the House CJS appropriations bill sponsored by Tom McClintock, whose inner-California district includes the Sierra Nevada range, Yosemite and Lake Tahoe. The McClintock amendment would have protected all recreational marijuana programs in states like Colorado—a full step beyond Rohrabacher-Farr, which protects only medical marijuana programs. McClintock failed narrowly, 206-222.

In a telephone interview with Politico, McClintock referred to his amendment as “an affirmation of the architecture of federalism that respects the prerogative of any state citizens to make laws within their own boundaries, and for the rest of the states to profit from their experience.” For McClintock, like many Republicans joining the cannabis caucus, the issue is less about marijuana than about state rights.

For Riffle, the marijuana policy advocate, the narrow failure of the McClintock amendment actually represented “the biggest victory of the month.”

“It took us eight tries over 12 years to pass the Rohrabacher amendment,” Riffle explains. “But we started out with 206 on the McClintock amendment. So I don’t see it taking any more than a year before it passes.”

And it’s not just the lower house that’s landing punches against the War on Drugs; the Senate has begun to pull its weight too, to the surprise of many. The vote on marijuana banking was just the latest in a surprising string of victories in the upper house.

The progress started in March with the introduction of the CARERS Act, S.683, sponsored by Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Kristin Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and nine co-sponsors. If passed, the bill would reschedule marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II, which is a big deal by itself. Schedule I drugs currently include marijuana, heroin and LSD and have “no medical value” according to the Controlled Substances Act; Schedule II includes cocaine and an acknowledgement of medical value. To many advocates of marijuana law reform, the scheduling of marijuana as Schedule I is the biggest lie in the whole War on Drugs, and it’s seen as the keystone of marijuana prohibition.

Additionally, the CARERS Act would protect state-legal marijuana programs; redefine CBD oil as a separate substance; open up banking to marijuana businesses; authorize the VA to allow doctors to recommend medical marijuana to veterans; and remove key bureaucratic hurdles to marijuana research.

The CARERS Act faces an uncertain fate at the hands of Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But despite getting hung up in Judiciary, many of the items specified in the CARERS Act have come up for votes in the Senate independently.

On May 21, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed the Veterans Equal Access Amendment, sponsored by Sens. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), which will give VA doctors the ability to recommend medical marijuana to veterans. It passed 18-12 in the first pro-marijuana vote in the history of the Senate. Just a few weeks before, a similar amendment in the House was defeated by the narrowest of margins, 210-213.

On June 11, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted on an amendment sponsored by Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), which would protect state-legal medical marijuana programs, essentially identical to Rohrabacher-Farr in the House. It passed 21-9 with eight Republican votes in favor.

It turns out, the vote should have even been more lopsided, with nine Republican votes in favor: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) evidently attempted to change his no-by-proxy vote to a yes, but didn’t get the change to the clerk in time. Graham sent this note to the committee when requesting his vote be changed, but since his vote was recorded as a no, he gave it to Politico: “I would like to be recorded as voting in favor of Senator Barbara Mikulski’s amendment on medical marijuana. A no by proxy vote was cast in error. While the language in this amendment needs to be clarified to ensure that states are limited to purely medicinal uses of marijuana, I do believe that medical marijuana holds promise and support this amendment.”

Graham is hardly the only one of his Senate colleagues in 2016 presidential race coming out in favor of marijuana reform. Paul has been a leading voice on drug reform and strongly supports the right of states to install their own medical marijuana programs. “I would allow states to have medical marijuana, and make the decisions on medical marijuana within the state lines,” the Kentucky Republican told radio host Hugh Hewitt in an interview.

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For decades, DEA has blocked medical research of marijuana, but Congress and the administration now appear to be working in tandem to dismantle many of those restrictions—and members in the House and Senate appear willing to open up research into marijuana’s medical effects. This spring, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Nora Volkow, endured a withering barrage of questions from senators skeptical of NIDA’s monopoly on research-grade marijuana.

Under questioning from Booker, Volkow acknowledged that the NIDA monopoly existed only for marijuana and that there was “no scientific reason” for it.

That hearing was hardly an anomaly. If anything, marijuana reform appears to be accelerating on Capitol Hill. Earlier this month, a bipartisan coalition of senators introduced S.1726, a bill that would give recreational marijuana retailers access to the banking system, which federal law currently does not allow—a situation that has caused all sorts of problems for marijuana dispensaries forced to squirrel away mountains of cash despite complying with state law.

“Forcing businessmen and businesswomen who are operating legally under Oregon state law to shuttle around gym bags full of cash is an invitation to crime and malfeasance. That must end,” said co-sponsor Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) on the Senate floor. The 16-14 vote in the Senate Appropriations Committee for a similar measure on Thursday has signaled bipartisan support for the stand-alone bill, leaving its fate in the hands of Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala), chairman of the Banking Committee.

How congressional leadership, committee chairs, the administration and DEA navigate their way through this new terrain remains unclear—but, given the low regard in which DEA is held these days, reformers are almost hoping the agency will oppose them. “The more the DEA obstructs, the more it actually helps us in some respect,” says Bill Piper of the Drug Policy Alliance. “In a way, the DEA is our best ally. They act so bad, they turn people our way.”