{"id":5934,"date":"2016-04-27T22:19:10","date_gmt":"2016-04-27T22:19:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.420magazine.com\/?p=4743"},"modified":"2016-04-27T22:19:10","modified_gmt":"2016-04-27T22:19:10","slug":"the-science-behind-the-deas-long-war-on-marijuana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/the-science-behind-the-deas-long-war-on-marijuana\/","title":{"rendered":"The Science Behind The DEA\u2019s Long War On Marijuana"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"wp_fb_like_button\" style=\"margin:5px 0 5px 5px;float:right;height:100px;\"><script src=\"http:\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/all.js#xfbml=1\"><\/script><fb:like href=\"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/the-science-behind-the-deas-long-war-on-marijuana\/\" send=\"true\" layout=\"standard\" width=\"450\" show_faces=\"false\" font=\"arial\" action=\"like\" colorscheme=\"light\"><\/fb:like><\/div><p>Experts say listing cannabis among the world\u2019s deadliest drugs ignores decades of scientific and medical data. But attempts to delist it have met with decades of bureaucratic inertia and political distortion.<\/p>\n<p>Speculation is growing about the possibility that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) will review by summer its \u201cSchedule I\u201d designation of marijuana as equal to heroin among the world\u2019s most dangerous drugs. Very few Americans know of or understand the DEA\u2019s drug-ranking process, and a review of cannabis\u2019s history as a Schedule I drug shows that the label is highly controversial and dubious.<\/p>\n<p>Disgraced Attorney General John Mitchell of the Nixon administration placed marijuana in this category in 1972 as part of the ranking or \u201cscheduling\u201d of all drugs under the 1970 Controlled Substances Act. Schedule I drugs are deemed to have no medical use and a high potential for abuse. Cannabis has been there ever since. \u201cAs of today, marijuana has never been determined to be medicine,\u201d says Russ Baer, staff coordinator in the Office of Congressional and Public Affairs at the DEA. \u201cThere\u2019s no safe, effective medical use, and a high abuse potential, and it can\u2019t be used in medical settings.\u201d This determination has come to be insulated by a byzantine, Kafkaesque bureaucratic process now impervious to the opinion of the majority of U.S. doctors\u2014and to a vast body of scientific knowledge\u2014many experts say.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOf course cannabis has medical uses,\u201d says University of California, San Francisco integrative oncologist Donald Abrams, one of the few researchers who have been able to obtain extremely limited, government-approved supplies of research cannabis for human trials. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty clear from anthropological and archaeological evidence that cannabis has been used as a medicine for thousands of years\u2014and it was a medicine in the U.S. until 1942,\u201d Abrams adds. \u201cI\u2019m an oncologist and I say all the time, not a day goes by when I\u2019m not recommending cannabis to patients for nausea, loss of appetite, pains, insomnia and depression\u2014it works.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Marijuana\u2019s placement in Schedule I did not happen in a vacuum, historians note. Overt racism, combined with New Deal reforms and bureaucratic self-interest are often blamed for the first round of federal cannabis prohibition under the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which restricted possession to those who paid a steep tax for a limited set of medical and industrial applications. (Cannabis was removed from the official U.S. Pharmacopeia in 1942.) \u201cIn segregated America newspapers were saying, \u2018this stuff makes white women and black men have sex,\u2019\u201d notes historian Martin Lee, author of Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana.<\/p>\n<p>The American Medical Association initially opposed prohibition. Cannabis was medically useful, says William Woodward, association counsel. \u201cCongress being what it was at the time, you could ram things through just by bullshitting,\u201d Lee adds. \u201cWho\u2019s going to be stepping up to the plate [in 1937] to defend a drug that blacks, Latinos and jazz musicians use?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Tax Act passed amid New Deal reforms, and the first marijuana peddlers were arrested and jailed that year. Science reared its head within a decade, though. In 1944 the La Guardia Committee report from the New York Academy of Medicine was the first in a long line of official bodies to question the prohibition. The committee found marijuana not physically addictive, not a gateway drug and that it did not lead to crime. But Harry Anslinger, head of the then\u2013Federal Bureau of Narcotics, labeled the report unscientific and prohibition rolled on. \u201cEvery 10 years since then\u2014although we\u2019re a bit off schedule\u2014some august governing body has reviewed the data and come up with the same finding [against prohibition],\u201d Abrams says.<\/p>\n<p>The Tax Act\u2019s mode of federal cannabis prohibition became illegal in 1969 with the case Leary v. United States, which found that purchasing a marijuana tax stamp amounted to self-incrimination. The verdict spurred Congress to repeal the Tax Act and replace it with the more comprehensive Controlled Substances Act of 1970.<\/p>\n<p>Marijuana was placed in Schedule I in 1971 provisionally, until the science could be assessed. But Pres. Richard Nixon saw pot prohibition as a way to destroy the antiwar left, according to clandestine recordings made by Nixon in the White House as well as statements from his staff to the press. Nixon convened The National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse (what became known as the Shafer Commission) to engineer scientific support for cannabis\u2019s Schedule I placement. \u201cI want a goddamn strong statement on marijuana,\u201d Nixon said in tapes from 1971. \u201cCan I get that out of this sonofabitching, uh, domestic council? \u2026 I mean one on marijuana that just tears the ass out of them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Shafer Commission found in 1972 that cannabis was as safe as alcohol, and recommended ending prohibition in favor of a public health approach. But by then the Federal Bureau of Narcotics had been removed from the Treasury Department and merged into the U.S. Department of Justice\u2014where Nixon\u2019s ally, Attorney General John Mitchell, placed cannabis in Schedule I in 1972; that same year he resigned to head Nixon\u2019s re-election committee. (He later stood trial in 1974 over the Watergate scandal and served 19 months of a prison sentence for conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice.] \u201cYou want to know what this was really all about?\u201d Nixon aid John Ehrlichman told journalist Dan Baum in 1994, according to an article published in Harper\u2019s Magazine in 2016. \u201cThe Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I\u2019m saying? We knew we couldn\u2019t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Anyone can petition the DEA to reschedule any drug, Baer says. The DEA takes advice from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Department of Health and Human Services, the DEA\u2019s administrative law judges, along with others, but \u201cthe buck stops here. We have final scheduling authority,\u201d he says. \u201cReally it comes down to science. That\u2019s the foundation of the argument. We\u2019re bound by that scientific and medical evaluation.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Many would disagree. Decades ago the DEA\u2019s own administrative law judge, Francis Young, recommended unscheduling cannabis in response to a petition from activist groups. Young ruled in 1988 that \u201cmarijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By any measure of rational analysis marijuana can be safely used within a supervised routine of medical care.\u201d The DEA denied the petition anyway.<\/p>\n<p>In 1999, in response to California medical legalization, the Institute of Medicine found that marijuana had medical uses and a relatively low potential for abuse, leading to another round of petitioning. The DEA denied a petition again in 2011, citing a lack of available research specifically on smoked marijuana in the U.S.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers say this represents a classic catch-22, as the paucity of research is the direct result of a federal blockade on such research by the DEA and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). \u201cThe reason we don\u2019t have more data is because it\u2019s quite difficult to study. The only legal source of cannabis is NIDA, which has a Congressional mandate to only study its harms,\u201d Abrams says. Researchers also note that about two dozen countries including Israel, Canada and the Netherlands as well as several legalization states such as California and Colorado, have reams of scientific data on the safety and efficacy of smoked cannabis as well as other formulations.<\/p>\n<p>Many physicians are also frustrated by the DEA\u2019s apparent intransigence in the face of mounting evidence and interest. In 2009 the American Medical Association recommended the DEA review marijuana\u2019s Schedule I status. And a 2014 Medscape survey of roughly 1,500 doctors found 56 percent supported legalizing medical cannabis nationally, with 82 percent support among responding oncologists. \u201cIf physicians are in support of cannabis as a medicine, why is it not medicine?\u201d Abrams asks.<\/p>\n<p>In 2014 lawmakers blasted DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart on the floor of Congress for failing to reply to questions about whether or not heroin was more or less dangerous than marijuana, which is also often used to treat pain. Both are Schedule I\u2014yet cannabis has no obtainable lethal overdose threshold whereas 19,000 Americans died from prescription opioid overdoses in 2014 alone. Earlier this year a researcher at The Brookings Institution called for emergency rescheduling of cannabis to save American lives. All 2016 presidential candidates have vowed to either honor state-level medical legalization, reschedule cannabis or unschedule it entirely. \u201cI think the federal government has forfeited any claim to credibility around cannabis,\u201d Smoke Signals author Lee says. For example, although cannabis is Schedule I, the synthetic and pure form of the plant\u2019s most hallucinatory ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, is in Schedule III alongside codeine under a pharmaceutical formulation called Marinol that can be legally prescribed for nausea and wasting. \u201cI\u2019ve taken [Marinol]. It\u2019s horrible,\u201d Lee says. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine how anyone in their right mind would think being on Marinol is safer than smoking weed. Marinol is like an edible\u2014you can\u2019t do anything.\u201d Baer contends that pure THC is a single molecule, and therefore considered safer than the plant cannabis, which contains more than 300 types of molecules.<\/p>\n<p>The FDA and Health and Human Services have given the DEA new rescheduling recommendations, but Baer would not say what they are. A potential change in scheduling could happen by summer, according to an interagency memo sent to eight lawmakers earlier this month. Marijuana\u2019s Schedule I status \u201creally is a national embarrassment,\u201d Lee says. \u201cIt gives new meaning to the phrase, \u2018the big lie\u2019. It\u2019s like saying, \u2018The moon is made of green cheese.\u2019 That this could remain until the present day is laughable only in that it keeps you from crying.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-4744\" src=\"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/the-science-behind-the-deas-long-war-on-marijuana.jpg\" alt=\"DEA\" width=\"737\" height=\"400\" \/>News Moderator: Robert Celt <a href=\"http:\/\/www.420magazine.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">420 MAGAZINE \u00ae<\/a><br \/>\nFull Article: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/the-science-behind-the-dea-s-long-war-on-marijuana\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Science Behind The DEA&#8217;s Long War On Marijuana<\/a><br \/>\nAuthor: David Downs<br \/>\nContact: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/page\/contact-us\/\" target=\"_blank\">Scientific American<\/a><br \/>\nPhoto Credit: Elaine Thompson<br \/>\nWebsite: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Scientific American<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Experts say listing cannabis among the world\u2019s deadliest drugs ignores decades of scientific and medical data. But attempts to delist&#8230; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.420magazine.com\/2016\/04\/science-behind-deas-long-war-marijuana\/\" class=\"read-more\">[Read More]<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2329,9,1,3],"tags":[4896],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5934"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5934\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}