After their decision to keep marijuana’s classification as a unsafe drug, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is receiving massive criticism from cannabis advocates, including Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
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As the Washington Post reports, the FDA has never approved whole-plant marijuana as a drug, and it may never do so, since most drugs the FDA approves of are individual chemical compounds, not plants.
Twenty-five states have sanctioned some forms of marijuana use for medical purposes. Medical marijuana has been legal in Nevada since 2000, but the first dispensaries didn’t open until 2015, a decade and a half later.
Currently, the University of MS is the only institution authorized to grow the drug for use in medical studies.
In a letter to the petitioners, the DEA said it had asked the Department of Health and Human Services for a scientific and medical evaluation.
In a letter dated August 11, Chuck Rosenberg, the Acting Administrator for the DEA, responded to petitions submitted by Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, and Bryan Krumm, who asked that marijuana be rescheduled and therefore removed from the Schedule I list of illegal drugs, which also includes heroin and LSD.
“HHS concluded that marijuana has a high potential for abuse, has no accepted medical use in the United States, and lacks an acceptable level of safety for use even under medical supervision”, the letter said.
Advocates for both medical marijuana and the outright legalization of the herb were dealt a blow yesterday when the Drug Enforcement Administration rejected a bid to reconsider how it treats marijuana under federal drug control laws.
The position of the US government on marijuana has impacts for states that have legalized its recreational or medical use. If passed, they will join four other states and D.C.in allowing recreational use.
Bill Clinton famously said, “I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and didn’t like it”.
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Additionally, the DEA said yesterday that private companies working on new drug development would be able to apply to grow marijuana, meaning that, for the first time in generations, for-profit companies could develop marijuana-based medicines in the U.S. with the federal government’s approval.
