Gupta was also quick to call out the Administration’s hipocrisy on handling marijuana’s absurd classification.
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The U.S. government will announce on Thursday that it will allow more research into marijuana but has rejected requests to relax the classification of the substance as a unsafe, highly addictive drug with no medical use, sources with direct knowledge of the matter said.
However, if ballot Question #2 is approved, it would legalize up to an ounce of recreational marijuana. Medical marijuana has been legal in Nevada since 2000, but the first dispensaries didn’t open until 2015, a decade and a half later.
“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.
“It’s well past time for us to take marijuana off the federal government’s list of outlawed drugs”, Sanders wrote in a follow-up tweet August 11. “It’s not right or fair”.
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”. The DEA’s announcement wasn’t a total bust for advocates of decriminalizing marijuana on a federal level: In a separate move, the agency ordered a policy change to facilitate research into marijuana’s chemical composition and its effects on the human body by increasing the number of marijuana growers and manufacturers registered under the Controlled Substances Act.
“That ought to give the federal government the evidence it needs to reduce barriers to the potential medical benefits of marijuana”, he said.
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Editor’s note: A previous version of this story misstated which Washington governor asked the DEA to reclassify the drug.
