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posted by cmn32480 on Friday August 12 2016, @01:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the legalize-it dept.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has once again rejected attempts to reschedule cannabis and allow medical cannabis federally:

The Obama administration has denied a bid by two Democratic governors to reconsider how it treats marijuana under federal drug control laws, keeping the drug for now, at least, in the most restrictive category for U.S. law enforcement purposes. Drug Enforcement Administration chief Chuck Rosenberg says the decision is rooted in science. Rosenberg gave "enormous weight" to conclusions by the Food and Drug Administration that marijuana has "no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States," and by some measures, it remains highly vulnerable to abuse as the most commonly used illicit drug across the nation.

"This decision isn't based on danger. This decision is based on whether marijuana, as determined by the FDA, is a safe and effective medicine," he said, "and it's not." Marijuana is considered a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act, alongside heroin and LSD, while other, highly addictive substances including oxycodone and methamphetamine are regulated differently under Schedule II of the law. But marijuana's designation has nothing to do with danger, Rosenberg said.

The Post article notes:

In the words of a 2015 Brookings Institution report, a move to Schedule II "would signal to the medical community that [the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health] are ready to take medical marijuana research seriously, and help overcome a government-sponsored chilling effect on research that manifests in direct and indirect ways."

However, the DEA will expand the number of locations federally licensed to grow cannabis for research from the current total of... 1: the University of Mississippi.

Related: Compassionate Investigational New Drug program


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @03:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @03:28PM (#387056)

    We should be looking at the natural molecules first...

    People already have and they still are, but the low-hanging fruit is already taken. Natural products also have the problem of often not being a single molecule, which complicates dosing and manufacture.

    As for side effects, evolution takes advantage of things that work well enough and do not select for something without pressure. Proteins are all made of the same building blocks and structure can be conserved even with divergent sequences, so perfect specificity at incredibly high concentrations (including metabolic break-down products) is not an easy problem to solve.

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  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Friday August 12 2016, @04:49PM

    by sjames (2882) on Friday August 12 2016, @04:49PM (#387088) Journal

    The dirty secret is that for drugs with a high therapeutic index, exact dosing is unimportant. As for manufacture, even people who are stoned most of the time manage to 'manufacture' marijuana successfully. That's the problem for the pharmaceutical industry. You can't charge a thousand dollars/script that way.