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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: 1, Flamebait) by opinionated_science on Saturday August 13 2016, @06:30PM
Your post makes the assumption that "natural is always okay,"
To be clear I did NOT say "natural is safe". I pointed out that the natural molecules have a ~3 billion year adapted biochemical binding/transport/enzymatic/$biology characteristics - sometimes, it is well characterised enough we can make a functional analog. My point is safety is *not* an issue - the ability to patent a molecule IS.
Artificial molecules can have exquisitely precise function evaluated in the "lab", but ultimately the data collected from humans is vastly less precise. The assays used to evaluate pharmacological efficacy are very limited, because it is expensive. There are improving attempts to apply assays to whole cells and tissues, but this is very much research...
Hence, the same evolution that makes snake venom or mushrooms poisonous, there is the possibility that mutations might exist to survive such compounds - and that's what the data shows.
Survival of the fittest is often mis-interpreted , largely because when Darwin first published OTOOSANS the focus was explaining the focus record and the mechanism of adaption via descent and retention of beneficial traits.
"fittest" only means you won the race, after you ran it!!!! - not that it can be predicted in advance. Sure, many things appear to be correlated with reproductive fitness, often to quite extreme limits (see the finches Darwin studied...).
At the hear of my /rant, is that the movement to have ALL trials published, needs to get some traction - but the comparison with the amount of public funds used for the aggressive criminalisation of something you can grow in your garden is farce.