Reagan Education Secretary William Bennett breaks with Trump on cannabis

Former Reagan-era Education Secretary William Bennett has sided with Trump on most of the administration’s agenda, but he draws a firm line on it. Marijuana policy – Arguing that the White House should not move to reschedule cannabis at the federal level.

“I love Donald Trump,” Bennett said during a phone call with Fox News Digital. “I like almost everything he does, but I don’t like this.”

Bennett spoke to Fox News Digital Friday in response to Trump signing an executive order in December 2025 directing the Department of Justice to expedite the move of marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act. Schedule III essentially treats marijuana as a regulated drug, but it would not make hemp legal nationwide.

“This reclassification order will make it much easier to conduct medical research related to marijuana, allowing us to study potential benefits, risks, and future treatments,” Trump said in the Oval Office of the executive order. “It will have a tremendous positive impact.”

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Reagan’s former education secretary, William Bennett, stands with President Donald Trump on much of the administration’s agenda, but draws a hard line on marijuana policy. (Stephanie Kuykendall/Getty Images)

Bennett served as President Ronald Reagan Education Secretary From 1985 to 1988, after leading the National Endowment for the Humanities earlier in the Reagan era.

He later became the first director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy—a role known as the nation’s “drug czar”—under the administration of President George H. W. Bush, where he advocated a “war on drugs,” including strengthening the National Drug Control Administration’s strategy that focused on drug prevention and enforcement of laws against drug abuse.

He told Fox News Digital that he supports the majority of Trump’s policies, but he cannot support rescheduling marijuana, citing its effects on students and serving as a “gateway drug” to addiction and crime.

The former Reagan official told Fox News Digital that marijuana use among youth is overwhelmingly unchecked, as the current culture encourages and accepts cannabis use at the expense of youth health.

“Marijuana blocks focus and attention, which is something you obviously should have if you’re going to school,” he said. “So it blocks that, it interferes with that, it blocks that. It’s also a gateway drug. It leads to the use of other drugs. Almost anyone who uses so-called ‘riskier’ drugs than marijuana comes through a gateway drug called marijuana.”

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President Ronald with Reagan, center, announce the selection of Lauro Cavazos, right, to replace William J. Bennett, left, as Education Minister. (Dirk Halstead/Getty Images)

“You can acknowledge the fact that marijuana can have some positive effects, and at the same time understand that it is generally negative,” he added, arguing that cannabis can relieve pain for some while being “significantly destructive to attention and concentration among young people.”

Bennett said widespread marijuana use among youth has exacerbated dropout and truancy rates in recent years.

In the post-pandemic education landscape, U.S. schools continue to battle absenteeism, with the nationwide rate of students missing 10% or more learning standing at about 28% in the 2022-2023 school year, a decline from the pandemic high of 31% in 2021-2022, according to Education Department data.

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“If you combine the dropout rate, the fact that school attendance is declining and marijuana use among youth, this is just another bad thing happening to kids,” Bennett told Fox News Digital.

When asked about the rollback of the rescheduling effort, White House spokesman Kush Desai told Fox News Digital that it was part of the president’s “pledge to expand medical research to include marijuana and hemp applications through the marijuana rescheduling.”

“The President’s historic action has paved the way for the development of promising new treatments for American patients, especially veterans — and the presence of so many leaders from law enforcement and veterans groups at the Oval Office signing demonstrates how President Trump “We continue to do our best to support our nation’s heroes,” Desai said.

The culture surrounding marijuana has changed in recent years, in part because marijuana and the fast-growing hemp lobby helped launch marijuana into the “mainstream,” according to Bennett, pushing public opinion from narrow support for medical use to a broader culture that treats the drug as “generally acceptable.”

Fox News Digital also spoke with Elaine Bennett, the wife of the former education secretary, who is the founder and president of a nonprofit focused on promoting “self-esteem through self-control” for school students, called the Best Buddies Foundation.

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Eileen Bennett works directly within schools, including… Washington, DCHe said the culture has shifted to the point where students are unaware of the effects of marijuana and other drugs.

She pointed to a Best Friends interview with one of her students, a 14-year-old boy, who reported that he had never been told that habitual marijuana use before the age of 18 could knock eight points off a person’s IQ as an adult. Research has found.

“It hit me like a ton of bricks,” she said. “I mean, are you kidding me? This is crazy. No one says, ‘Stop, don’t.’

Elaine Bennett worked with former First Lady Nancy Reagan to promote abstinence from drug use, and called on the Trump administration to “reinvigorate the famous ‘Say No’ campaign of the 1980s and 1990s.”

“Nancy Reagan, just say no. Reiterate that drugs hurt you. Drugs kill,” she said.

President Ronald W. Reagan, with his wife Nancy at his side, speaks before members of the Cabinet, including Donald T. Reagan, William J. Bennett, Richard E. Laing, Elizabeth Dole, and John S. Herrington, Samuel R. Pierce, Jr., William E. Simon, Donald B. Hodel, Malcolm Baldrige, and George B. Schultz. (Cynthia Johnson/Getty Images)

The former education secretary noted that Trump himself abstains from drugs and alcohol, while calling for this mentality to be applied more broadly.

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“America has always been a self-correcting society. We do a lot of stupid things and bad things, but then we correct, and we can correct this,” he said.