Since 1970, marijuana has been listed in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, a category considered reserved for drugs with a “high potential for abuse” that have no “currently accepted medical use” and Dr. Cannot be safely used under supervision.
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has repeatedly rejected requests to ask it to reclassify marijuana, citing advice from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). But HHS changed that advice in August 2023, and its rationale, outlined in a document released five months later, confirms that marijuana classification has always been a political question, not a medical one.
HHS was responding to President Joe Biden’s October 2022 directive, which directed the department and Attorney General Merrick Garland to “expedit the administrative process to review how marijuana is defined under federal law.” Biden noted That “we classify marijuana on the same level as heroin” and consider it “more serious than fentanyl,” which he said “makes no sense.” After its review, HHS recommended that the DEA move marijuana to Schedule III, which includes prescription drugs such as ketamine, codeine with Tylenol, and anabolic steroids.
As recently as 2016, HHS was still saying that marijuana should remain in Schedule I. It was not based on new scientific evidence. It was based on the reinterpretation of the Schedule I criteria which was to be implemented very soon.
The DEA has long maintained that a substance can have a “currently accepted medical use” only if there is sufficient evidence to meet the Food and Drug Administration’s requirements for prescription drug approval. HHS replaced that dubious understanding of the law with a two-part test that takes into account clinical experience with marijuana in the 38 states that have approved medical use and asks whether there is “credible scientific support” for one or more applications. ” is the. HHS provides such support for the treatment of pain, nausea and vomiting, and “anorexia associated with a medical condition.”
Regarding abuse potential and safety, HHS notes that marijuana compares favorably with “other drugs of abuse,” such as heroin (Schedule I), cocaine (Schedule II), benzodiazepines such as Valium and Xanax (Schedule IV). ), and alcohol (non-scheduled). “The vast majority of people who use marijuana,” it said, “do so in ways that do not result in dangerous consequences for themselves or others.”
Most Americans did not know this. Way back in 1988, the DEA’s chief administrative law judge concluded that marijuana did not meet the criteria for Schedule I, only to be rejected by the agency head. This time, given the late turnaround at HHS, the outcome is apt to be different.