Imagine if alcoholic beverages had not been discovered until right now. Now imagine the FDA reviewing ethyl alcohol from a pharmacological standpoint. They’d be hard-pressed to come up with a medical justification for its use.

Right now possession of anything over half an ounce is a felony. Under cat 3, it will be a misdemeaner no matter how much you have.

Many states used fed categories as the basis for their penalties, so it can impact state penalties as well.

There may be other implications, such as drug panel testing laws, depending on how they are written.

“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

— John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon

Source: https://www.vera.org/reimagining-prison-webumentary/the-past-is-never-dead/drug-war-confessional