SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Friday August 12 2016, @08:22PM
I design pharmaceutical compounds for a profession. We can design anything - we can synthesis much less. Hence, all compounds that make it to market are only optimised from libraries of stuff we *can* make to a) not kill you (quickly) b) do what they say c) be better than something already sold.
Sure, you can overdose on many and probably ANY natural compounds. But Biology is all carried out at the nanoscale - our bodies do not get 1mM of $COMPOUND by flooding the body. Many processes are exquisitely timed to make ONE copy, for ONE reaction.
This is, ironically, why cancer is so hard to kill - the cells continually evolve and so unless a drug is %100 effective, the next generation will just promote a mutation to avoid
If natural molecules were tested the same way as pharms are there might be less of a perverse incentive to "develop and sell whatever we can, for as much as we can". That's fine for a company selling widgets, not so much when your health may depend on it. /rant