Once a federal marijuana defendant facing a stacked sentence, Angelos now works the same levers that crushed him, arguing rescheduling could change who gets charged, how hard, and what happens next.
When President Trump began seriously entertaining the idea of moving marijuana to Schedule III, Weldon Angelos was not watching from the sidelines. He was on the phone.
Angelos describes Trump’s executive order from last December as the result of a coordinated campaign that unfolded across different rooms and registers at once — athletes, industry executives and personal appeals to the president. He says he urged Mike Tyson, who has maintained a longstanding relationship with Trump, to engage directly. Tyson didn’t hesitate. A letter signed by prominent athletes, including Allen Iverson and Kevin Durant, was delivered to the White House urging follow-through on campaign commitments. Behind the scenes, MAGA-leaning high-profile industry executives such as Truelieve’s Kim Rivers pressed the economic case just as hard.
The philosophy is “to move this thing forward,” Angelos told High Times, and he made a good point about it.
From where he sits, rescheduling is not symbolic, as it alters prosecutorial leverage, it narrows statutory ceilings and changes how federal cases are charged before a jury ever hears a word.
He is currently working on roughly 14 active clemency cases and collaborating with other groups on dozens more, including people serving 40, 60 years. Several are lifers. He believes the executive order will eventually translate into additional clemencies for people serving federal marijuana sentences — and says he’s already hearing signals from contacts inside the administration that the White House is moving in that direction, likely once rescheduling is formally finalized.
For Angelos, leverage is not theoretical. Two decades ago, it put an end to his life.
Before the West Wing
In 2004, Angelos was a 24-year-old music producer from Salt Lake City who had made it… or was about to. He had relocated to Los Angeles as a teenager, hustled his way into hip-hop, produced tracks with Snoop Dogg and artists from Tupac Shakur’s recording group, the Outlaws, and was closing in on what he describes as a multimillion-dollar record deal. He was getting $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 checks a month for the first time in his life, having grown up in poverty.
Then federal agents came to his door. He had been followed by the feds on a major case aiming to get some resounding bust in the hip hop industry.
The case against him turned on three small marijuana transactions, which he describes as a side hustle that led to him being able to generate income from what he wanted to have as his main activity, music producer. The three transactions totaling less than $1,000, with a former gang associate who had recently gotten out of prison. The man had shown up needing money, needing weed, needing something. Angelos got suspicious, gave weed to him three times to shut him up, he says, then cut him off when the guy started asking for pounds of meth and guns. He blocked his number. Told him to stop calling. The man got angry and threatened him.
Six months later, right before the agents knocked on Angelos’s door, his phone rang. It was the informant.
“You’re never going to be anybody,” the man told him. “You’re not going to make it in music. You’re going to be a nobody.” Then he hung up.
A moment later, they raided the house.
Federal investigators had been watching Angelos for months. In their view, the real prize wasn’t him. “They really wanted Snoop Dogg,” Angelos said. The theory, as he and his lawyers came to understand it, was that by threatening him with catastrophic sentencing exposure, they could pressure him into cooperating against higher-profile targets. Bringing his proximity to hip-hop culture into a Salt Lake City courtroom was part of the strategy, too.
“In my trial, the prosecutor focused on hip hop and gangster rap,” Angelos recalled. The prosecutor performed rap lyrics from an album Angelos had produced for Matt Dreay, a rap artist and friend who was murdered while Angelos was awaiting sentencing. He delivered the lyrics to the jury and told them that this was what the case was really about… that Angelos was living the life the music described.
Angelos refused to cooperate. “When we had the gall to say no,” he said, “they threw the book at me.”
They found a way to pressure him with insane years with an allegedly phony firearm charge. Angelos legally owned guns at home. According to him, the original surveillance reports made no mention of a weapon during the marijuana transactions. That changed after his arrest. One officer, he says — only one, the same one working to get his informant immunity — allegedly went back into the police reports and amended them, inserting a gun allegation and backdating the documents. The other officers never corroborated it. Angelos and his lawyers were able to obtain both versions of the reports.
“We showed the jury: all these other cops, including this one, never said anything about a gun until after I got arrested with a gun. Then one agent goes back and amends the reports, but only after they learned I owned the gun.”
The jury convicted him anyway. A juror later told Angelos they didn’t believe the informant, but they also couldn’t bring themselves to believe a law enforcement officer would fabricate evidence and they assumed that the punishment would be minor. A year, maybe.
“If they would have known I would have gotten 55 years,” Angelos recalled the juror saying, “we wouldn’t have convicted you.”
His judge, Paul G. Cassell, District Court judge in Utah, didn’t want to give him 55 years either. He tried to find a way out and couldn’t. The stacking provisions available at the time allowed prosecutors to convert the firearm allegations into mandatory consecutive sentences, a way to impose mandatory minimum sentences, locking the judge’s hands.
“His hands were tied,” Angelos said. “But the prosecutor and the case agent — the detective — he was corrupt. He was completely corrupt and he was just abusing his authority.”
Watching the Map Turn Green
Angelos served 13 years of the 55 before receiving clemency in 2016, in the final months of the Obama administration. a release that came only after sustained public pressure from US Senators like Cory Booker, Mike Lee, and Rand Paul, and celebrities including Alicia Keys and Snoop Dogg himself. It had taken years of fighting. Obama, he says, waited until the very end.
“I thought it was going to happen even sooner,” he said. “We were getting really close to not getting out.”
Inside, he had watched something unfold that was almost impossible to comprehend. Colorado and Washington went legal in 2012. Other states followed. Angelos tracked it with fellow inmate Luke Scarmazzo, who had operated a medical marijuana dispensary in Modesto, fully compliant with California law, and received 22 years for it.
“We watched the states start to legalize while he and I both are in jail for marijuana,” Angelos said.
“It was just even more ridiculous that I lost my life over a little bit of cannabis.”
What he had lost was substantial. His music career, gone. He missed his sons growing up. His family went back on welfare. He came home to a 13-year gap in his life — no memories of aging alongside his peers, no continuity. The whole process gave him PTSD.
“I got out,” Angelos said, “and (eventually) worked with the Trump administration to change the law that gave me 55 years.”
His case had become a useful talking point for conservative lawmakers frustrated with mandatory minimums, partly because of Judge Cassell — a member of the Federalist Society, the kind of jurist Trump was appointing — who had publicly called the sentence unjust and asked multiple presidents to commute it. That credibility opened doors on the right.
“A lot of Republicans that were pro criminal justice reform saw this as a huge opportunity to get more of their base on board by citing my judge,” Angelos said.
He then ended up working with the Trump administration on what became the First Step Act — legislation that reformed the very stacking provisions that had produced his sentence, and that got signed in 2018, after Trump mentioned Angelos’s case in the Oval Office. Scarmazzo was released in 2023 under a resentencing motion Angelos helped file, arguing that because of shifts in federal marijuana policy, he would never be prosecuted today.
Angelos was finally pardoned in 2020.
Why He Backs Schedule III
For years, Angelos argued that cannabis should be removed from the Controlled Substances Act entirely. He still believes that’s the right destination. But he’ll take Schedule III for now, and on legal penal grounds.
Unless you look really close, you might miss that Angelos was charged under 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1), a provision where the punishment ceiling rises and falls with the drug’s schedule.
Had cannabis been in Schedule III when prosecutors came for him, the statutory maximum attached to his marijuana count would have been much lower, meaning less leverage.
“My judge thought that the correct guideline was actually six and a half to eight years,” Angelos said. Under Schedule III, he believes that number would have looked more like two years.
He then rattled off the categories of cases that stand to benefit from this change in the way cannabis is listed, as if he was reading them from a handbook: distribution charges without a specified quantity, certain conspiracy cases where no actual marijuana was seized, attempt charges from undercover operations where no transaction ever occurred, possession with prior convictions.
“We’re already starting to see an impact in discretionary policy,” he said.
He names one recent federal case, in which a defendant was caught with a significant quantity of cannabis alongside cocaine. The prosecutors dropped all the cannabis charges and proceeded only on the cocaine.
What To Expect Next
The Biden years left a bitter taste.
Angelos had gone to the White House — literally, to the West Wing — with Jim Cole, the Obama-era deputy attorney general who designed Obama’s clemency program, carrying a detailed plan for how the president could pardon federal marijuana offenders and commute the most egregious sentences. They got the meeting. They got the assurances. When this is over, they were told — the war, COVID — we’re going to help these people.
What they got instead was a blanket pardon for federal misdemeanor marijuana possession — an offense, Angelos notes, for which essentially no one is actually in federal prison. It’s extremely rare for anyone to go to federal prison for using cannabis. Very few people serve time in the federal system for possessing user quantities.
“It was completely a way of appearing to keep his promise when in fact he had no plans of letting these people out of jail,” Angelos said. “It was a slap in the face to everybody incarcerated.”
He stopped short of placing all the blame on Biden personally. But he wasn’t generous either. Biden, he suspects, had been a drug warrior his whole career and didn’t change. He was cornered into the promise during the debates by Cory Booker and Tulsi Gabbard, and when the moment came to follow through, he found a way to do nothing.
Now Angelos says he’s hearing different signals. He won’t name names — he navigates this space carefully, staying off partisan labels, maintaining access across administrations. But Alice Johnson, Trump’s pardon advisor and a longtime friend, is someone he trusts, and she is, he says, a genuine advocate for marijuana clemency inside the administration.
He believes the White House is waiting for rescheduling to formally take effect before moving.
“I see how much pushback Trump is getting just with rescheduling to a three,” he said.
The man who once faced 55 years and a day under federal marijuana law now argues statutory interpretation in meetings with policymakers. He has seen firsthand — in the most personal way possible — how charging decisions and sentence enhancements can reshape a life. That experience informs every conversation he has about Schedule III.
“If the industry fails, so does all the people in social equity programs,” he said.
“The smaller companies, the Black and brown-owned businesses, the social equity licensees — they’ll be the first to fall if the regulated market collapses. And if it does collapse, the illicit market will fill the vacuum. And the people who were always against this will say they told you so”.
“The industry success is our own success,” he adds. “Cannabis must be normalized.”
