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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: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday August 12 2016, @03:43PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Friday August 12 2016, @03:43PM (#387060) Journal

    Let's not forget that the federal government has done much to suppress research on medical uses of marijuana, so calls for more research are a little disingenuous.

    Indeed. I don't think many people realize that the criminalization of marijuana at the federal level was mostly the work of the overbearing Harry Anslinger [wikipedia.org], who deliberately sought to distort public perception, medical studies, and just about anything that stood in his way in his quest against "the reefer." After J. Edgar Hoover, Anslinger probably deserves a prize as being one of the most overbearing thugs at the head of a government agency during the expansion of federal government power in the mid-1900s.

    As the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics [wikipedia.org] (then part of the Treasury Department), for some reason he chose marijuana as the way to "make his name" for the new bureau. (He had been involved in stings under alcohol prohibition, but with alcohol prohibition repealed, he needed a "new problem to solve," and he went after marijuana. Previously, he had not considered marijuana use to be a significant issue.) There are some conspiracy theories that say this all was driven by wealthy folks pressuring him and others in the government, e.g., paper producers who were worried that hemp fiber might become a cheap new competitor, clothing manufacturers, etc. I don't put a lot of stock in all that, though maybe it had some influence.

    Anyhow, back to the medical stuff -- it's really crazy if you look at the history of how this stuff became criminalized. Back then, the federal government didn't yet have authority under the enumerated powers to regulate drugs (hence the Constitutional amendment to prohibit alcohol), so they instead sought to tax drugs and use other methods to suppress their use. Anslinger's first attack was with the organization of the Uniform State Narcotic Drug Act [wikipedia.org] of 1934. (For those unfamiliar with earlier Constitutional history, "uniform acts" were Congressional acts passed with the intent of establishing consistent policies across all states -- the federal government couldn't force adoption, but the hope was that all the state legislatures would pass the same laws.)

    But the Uniform Act was a disaster. Only 9 states actually adopted it. People really didn't care about marijuana. It was not a major issue. And despite the fact the American Medical Association repeatedly recommended further study in the drafting of the legislation, the Uniform Act was passed without any scientific findings whatsoever. (In fact, at one point in the drafting process, the AMA recommended that marijuana be downgraded from the list of "habit forming drugs," due to lack of evidence.)

    So, Anslinger was stuck -- states didn't adopt the Uniform Act, and the AMA didn't seem to think marijuana was a problem. So he decided to make his case to the public in the form of completely bogus propaganda -- William Randolph Hearst (the newspaper mogul who was a big supporter of Anslinger) waged a huge media campaign implying that marijuana was this gateway drug to perdition, creating addicts who would commit murder, rape, and sometimes die of overdose. All of this was completely unsubstantiated in the scientific literature. (The campy film Reefer Madness [wikipedia.org] is a classic example of similar propaganda created by this hysteria.) A lot of this propaganda was fundamentally racist, implying that blacks and hispanics who used marijuana would do things like rape white people and spread STDs.

    In the wake of this hysteria, Anslinger lobbied hard for the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 [wikipedia.org] to beef up federal regulations specifically on the drug. Once again, physicians were not consulted, and in fact the legislative counsel for the AMA said that many doctors were caught off-guard by this bill (which had been drafted without the AMA), since the term "marijuana" (or "marihuana" as in the title of the act) was not yet common, and many doctors didn't even realize that cannabis was being targeted.

    Subsequently, the LaGuardia Comittee [wikipedia.org] headed by the well-known New York mayor actually examined the existing science of the time. It concluded (in 1944!) that there was no evidence of marijuana being a gateway drug to worse narcotics nor that it caused the kind of addiction noted in other drugs. As in the 1930s, Anslinger's response was a report largely based on racism, noting that blacks who smoked the reefer apparently got upset about military segregation.

    Marijuana was put on Schedule I with the new Controlled Substances Act in 1970, whose passage followed soon after the overturning of the 1937 act in Leary v. United States [wikipedia.org]. The federal government obviously wanted to send a strong message on marijuana in replacing the old legislation (and also given the level of marijuana use among "hippies" and such at the time, who also could then be conveniently arrested if they created trouble as political dissidents), so it was placed on Schedule I, in accordance with the level of threat Anslinger had recommended decades before.

    Bottom line: The war on marijuana played a pivotal role in the establishment of federal drug policy, though it was never based substantively on medical evidence. Moving it out of Schedule I would require effectively admitting that the foundation of federal drug policy was basically created on a bunch of lies and propaganda -- not the mention the issue of what to do with the literally millions of people who have been arrested (and sometimes put in jail) over marijuana-related crimes. The ACLU estimates that half of all drug arrests in the US are related to marijuana. ANY weakness in marijuana policy would have MASSIVE implications.

    This has never been much about medical evidence.

    [Personal disclosure: I have NO interest in using marijuana or any other currently illegal drug.]

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  • (Score: 1) by cmdrklarg on Friday August 12 2016, @06:13PM

    by cmdrklarg (5048) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 12 2016, @06:13PM (#387113)
    Considering the multitude of people profiting mightily from The War On Freedom^H^H^H Drugs, I am not at all surprised. What would surprise me is if they would actually act upon this injustice.
    --
    The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @06:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @06:36PM (#387118)

    > After J. Edgar Hoover, Anslinger probably deserves a prize as being one of the most overbearing thugs at the head of a government agency during the expansion of federal government power in the mid-1900s.

    Pretty sure Allen "Operation Sunrise" Dulles deserves a shoutout here too.

  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday August 12 2016, @11:31PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday August 12 2016, @11:31PM (#387246)

    Or, to summarize: Some powerful men in government decided to boost their own careers by locking up non-white men and occasionally annoying left-wing types by the millions (and conveniently legalizing discrimination against them for life) and declaring it was all for their health. That's all the War on Drugs has ever been.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 2) by Whoever on Saturday August 13 2016, @02:07AM

    by Whoever (4524) on Saturday August 13 2016, @02:07AM (#387316) Journal

    I am still puzzled about how it took a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol, but the Controlled Substances Act merely required approval by Congress and the President.