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DEA to the Fourth Circuit: Nobody Has Standing to Fight the HHC Listing
Two hemp companies are challenging the DEA's Schedule I drug code for HHC. The agency leads with standing: the rule, it says, was too inconsequential for anyone to be injured by it — which is also the answer to where HHC stands today.
Two hemp companies are trying to knock down the DEA’s HHC rule in two federal appeals courts. The agency’s answer, filed this month, leads with something other than the merits: the rule, it says, is too inconsequential for anyone to have been injured by it. The merits sit behind that, in the alternative.
What the rule actually did
On 4 May 2026 the DEA published a final rule giving hexahydrocannabinol its own listing and drug code in Schedule I, docket DEA-1632. The rule’s framing is the one it is using in court now: HHC was already controlled as a tetrahydrocannabinol under drug code 7370, and the rule, in its own words, “simply” amends the hallucinogens list to name it separately. DEA issued it without notice and comment, finding good cause on the reasoning that HHC is already scheduled and the change is “a minor or merely technical amendment in which the public is not particularly interested.” A second good-cause finding — that no additional requirements were being imposed — made it effective on publication.
The text also restates the boundary that matters most here. Only tetrahydrocannabinols in or derived from the cannabis plant are excluded from control, it says — not synthetic ones — and tetrahydrocannabinols produced through chemical conversion are “considered synthetically produced for purposes of the CSA” even when hemp derived. That sentence reaches a long way past HHC, and it rhymes with the synthesis question left open by the federal hemp redefinition.
The challenges, and the standing argument
Per reporting by Marijuana Moment, Bluestar Operations LLC petitioned the Fourth Circuit and IHC Investments Inc. brought a separate, similar case in the Ninth; the Fourth Circuit denied Bluestar’s stay request in June. On 11 August, per that reporting, the DEA filed its opposition in the Fourth Circuit, arguing Bluestar lacks standing because the rule “imposes no new obligations or liabilities” and is “a technical change that has no substantive effect on HHC’s status as a schedule I substance.” Even if a court struck the listing, the agency argues, “HHC still would be a schedule I substance as a THC.” The same brief argues the challenge would fail on the merits anyway. Those are the quotes as reported — we have not read the filing itself.
Reading the map
The counter-intuitive part is that the DEA is defending its rule by insisting the rule accomplished nothing. On the agency’s own account, HHC’s federal position was identical before and after publication, and would stay identical if the petitioners won outright. We are not going to guess how either circuit rules on that.
The cases do not redraw the second map. Federal scheduling and state law are separate instruments on separate schedules, so the reflex holds: check your state, and read the effective dates rather than the headlines. Nothing in this category has been evaluated by the FDA, nothing we publish is health guidance, and none of it is for readers under 21.