Since as early as 2018, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) website has stated that security officers do not search for “marijuana or other illegal drugs.” But as of April 27, TSA updated that sentence to include just “illegal drugs.” The word marijuana was removed, part of a quiet update to TSA’s medical marijuana guidance page that spread quickly across social media, with many travelers concluding that the agency had newly permitted flying with cannabis.
The agency says that’s not the case.
“TSA’s policy on medical marijuana has not changed,” a TSA spokesperson told Afar. The agency’s screening procedures are focused on aviation security rather than drug enforcement, according to the website. If any illegal substance or evidence of criminal activity is discovered during screening, officers will refer the matter to local law enforcement.
The “What Can I Bring?” section of the TSA website currently lists medical marijuana as “Yes (Special Instructions)” for both carry-on and checked bags.
“The ‘Yes (Special Instructions)’ label that went viral this spring is not new,” Javier Hasse, veteran marijuana reporter for High Times magazine, told Afar. “The TSA has listed medical marijuana that way since at least 2019.”
However, the surrounding language did change this spring. According to the Wayback Machine, an internet archive, the medical marijuana page previously opened with a paragraph citing the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 and stating that marijuana “remain[s] illegal under federal law.” That paragraph is gone now, and the agency’s long-standing search disclaimer, which previously stated that officers do not search for “marijuana or other illegal drugs,” now reads only “illegal drugs.”
The page was updated days after the Justice Department took a step toward loosening federal cannabis restrictions. On April 22, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order reclassifying two narrow categories of cannabis (Food and Drug Administration–approved cannabis drugs and state-licensed cannabis medical products) from Schedule I, which the federal government reserves for substances with no accepted medical use, to Schedule III, a lower-restriction classification. Recreational cannabis is still classified as Schedule I, although a broader rescheduling hearing on June 29 may change that.
TSA hasn’t published any special instructions for traveling with marijuana, and there is no guidance on documentation, quantity limits, or traveling between states.
Cameron Clarke, cofounder and chief executive of Kanha, a California-licensed cannabis edibles company, said the documentation gap extends to the checkpoint itself.
“To be honest, no TSA person is going to have any idea of the difference between medical and recreational,” Clarke said in a statement to Afar.
Medical marijuana is legal in 41 states as well as three territories and the District of Columbia, and recreational cannabis is legal in 24. Because each state has different regulations, and no use of marijuana is legal federally, the absence of TSA guidance makes domestic travel particularly complicated. For example, California medical marijuana patients may carry a Medical Marijuana Identification Card issued by the California Department of Public Health, but that’s not the case for all 40 states, and TSA has not specified whether such documentation satisfies its unpublished Special Instructions.
For patients navigating the gap, Brandon Dorsky, a cannabis attorney who has practiced in the field since 2009, said a standard medical marijuana card may not be enough. Depending on the state, patients may also need to show they are registered with a state-operated database. Dorsky advises patients to carry their state-issued documentation and any physician recommendations and to keep cannabis in its medically issued packaging wherever possible.
What hasn’t changed is that a lack of clarity remains one of the biggest challenges when it comes to traveling with marijuana.
“If the federal government now formally recognizes that certain cannabis products have accepted medical use,” Hasse told Afar, “patients who rely on them as medicine deserve clear, written rules for traveling with them. We don’t make diabetics guess whether they can fly with insulin. Telling a patient their medicine is permitted ‘with special instructions’ and then leaving the instructions blank turns a basic act of traveling with your own medication into something stressful and uncertain.”
