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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, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday August 12 2016, @04:30PM
I, for one, will be throwing a hissy fit at the ballot box this year and every year until cannabis is legal for recreational activity. As long as the D team seriously intends to explore the pathway towards legalization, they're worth voting for as far as I care. (May even yet have a change of heart and rethink my views about lizard people, but I remain a mammal supremacist for now.) This news does give me some pause, however. General advice to any reader who shares my sentiment is to remember to head over to NORML and check out how they rate your congress critters (can't give link since this is one site I do not go to at work). There are some R team who deserve a vote to further legalization and some D team that need to be voted out already (looking at Wasserman-Schultz at the moment, for a whole constellation of reasons including her position on the topic at hand).
Many (most?) people are immune to information (yeah, guilty as charged on certain things), which is a big reason I'm a libertarian. I don't think all the links in the world to the new research that's overturning the decades of cargo cult “science” would convince you that the federal bureaucracy is objectively wrong here, but libertarianism offers a convenient way to simply agree to disagree with various people about various things. Authoritarianism takes that possibility off the table.
Now, if you want a plant to ban, there's that jimson weed (datura) that AC was going on about a while back. Go ahead and ban that, seize the assets of anybody who has some, and exterminate it where it's found in the wild. Maybe it could be used for research into disassociative fugue? Robotripping is a better idea. I suppose I can't help myself at least giving yet another data point to underscore the absolute hypocrisy of the FDA and DEA, but take a gander over here [erowid.org]. It's not scheduled and is legal in all but a handful of states and the UK. I skimmed through the FAQ here [erowid.org] and perhaps I'm too harsh on datura based on the experience reports I've read (also on Erowid). I haven't experienced a hallucination I wasn't aware was simply a vivid daydream, but datura can apparently do that and can also make it impossible to tell the difference between waking reality and dreaming. That sounds fucking dangerous to me! (I would like to find an experienced lucid dreamer's take on that, though.)
A fun one politically is nutmeg (not a fun experience imo but some people swear by it). Most of us would probably throw a hissy fit if that were illegal with cries of “they can take my pumpkin pie from my cold, dead hands!“ Yet, eat enough of it at once and its psychoactive effects last somewhere around 72 hours. (Do not do this unless you have at least 4 consecutive days with absolutely no responsibilities.)
I also thought it was interesting that at one point everybody was having shit fits over yet another plant called salvia divinorum [wikipedia.org] and it was getting banned all over the place with people freaking the fuck out that it was turning their children to drugs and Satan and teenage rebellion and rock and roll probably too. (Gateway drug theory just will not die!) Salvia's length of experience is roughly 20 minutes tops but I never personally had any kind of reliable success with it (either immune or was doing it wrong).
There. Two plants that are illegal, cannabis and salvia, despite being harmless and having durations measured in hours and minutes respectively alongside two plants that are legal, nutmeg and datura, but have durations measured in days and can cause other potentially dangerous side effects such as dehydration with both and an inability to tell the difference between dreams and reality with datura. I don't know how any thinking person can be capable of failing to see the problem here, but I suppose I wouldn't be surprised if, in my exuberance, I inadvertently convince somebody that nutmeg must be banned.
As far as I go, I do just wanna get high. I would never be able to quantify exactly how it improves my life or why nothing else can do (or why psychologists and doctors can't fit me neatly into a diagnostic code or three). You'd need to have walked miles in my shoes to even begin to understand why or the underpinnings of my crazy.