It was big news last fall when President Joe Biden pardoned federal offenders who had been charged and convicted of federal cannabis possession.
For over 50 years, since President Richard Nixon signed the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, cannabis has been a Schedule I federally controlled illegal drug, classified just like heroin and LSD. Yet, Biden’s pardon proclamation did not make cannabis federally legal. However, tucked into Biden’s 2022 executive order was something no president to date has done: Biden directed the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Attorney General to “review” the legal classification of cannabis.
No formal announcement on the status of that review has been made since then.
Just two months after issuing the 2022 pardon proclamation, Biden also ramped up cannabis research expansion by signing into law the 2022 Medical Marijuana and Cannabidiol Research Expansion Act. This legislation opened up even more federal research by finally streamlining the approval process for the federal scientific studies. For the first time in American history, there now exists a cannabis medical study law that requires the U.S. attorney general to review medical study proposals within a 60-day period or request that applicants provide additional information. As of yet, though, there’s no real sense of the impact this legislation has had on actual medical cannabis research.
Before these presidential moves, the medical research of cannabis’s health benefits was almost solely the province of the states. In fact, Pennsylvania, which legislatively legalized in 2016, was the first state to require medical cannabis research as part of its medical legalization regime. Since then, other states like California and Colorado have established state-sponsored research programs, but Pennsylvania remains the nation’s first to select and pair state universities with cannabis producers to collect data and study cannabis’s efficacy.
Hellbound and Down 