“People can argue about the pluses and minuses of marijuana, but everyone knows it’s not a killer drug like heroin”, Sanders tweeted August 11, the same day news broke that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) would not be reclassifying marijuana.
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Gupta was also quick to call out the Administration’s hipocrisy on handling marijuana’s absurd classification.
However, if ballot Question #2 is approved, it would legalize up to an ounce of recreational marijuana.
But the agency did agree to expand the number of manufactures registered to supply marijuana for research 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.
Last year, Sanders introduced legislation that would de-schedule marijuana and remove it from the Controlled Substances Act, which would decriminalize the drug at the federal level, The Huffington Post reports.
“I’m surprised because they made such a big deal that they were going to do this re-evaluation, and it seems like if they really looked at the current state of the law, and what’s going on in the country, they would have recognized that there is definitely a medical use for marijuana”, Segerblom said. “This shows that the federal government is flexible on legitimate research but is nowhere near wanting to legalize marijuana”.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said the DEA’s ruling “makes it more hard for states that have legalized marijuana use, or who are poised to, to proceed lawfully and safely”.
Oregon. Sen. Ron Wyden agreed, calling the DEA’s decision to expand research opportunities into marijuana “the one little bit of sunlight here”.
“That ought to give the federal government the evidence it needs to reduce barriers to the potential medical benefits of marijuana”, he said. DEA said it will allow universities and even private companies to apply to grow marijuana for scientific research.
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Editor’s note: A previous version of this story misstated which Washington governor asked the DEA to reclassify the drug.
