The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) this week recommended that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) move marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, the most restrictive category, to Schedule III, where it would join medications such as Tylenol with codeine, buprenorphine, and anabolic steroids. The DEA has the final say on rescheduling decisions, and it is not clear whether it will agree with HHS, especially given its longstanding opposition to reclassifying marijuana, or how long it might take to decide. But if cannabis is eventually moved to Schedule III, that change would signal a new understanding of the drug’s risks and benefits. It also would facilitate cannabis research, and it would have important tax implications for state-licensed marijuana businesses. At the same time, it would leave federal marijuana prohibition essentially untouched.
The HHS recommendation is a product of the regulatory review that President Joe Biden ordered last October, when he also announced a mass pardon for people convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law. At the time, Biden said “it makes no sense” to “classify marijuana at the same level as heroin,” and HHS evidently agrees. That category, which also includes psychoactive substances such as LSD, psilocybin, peyote, MDMA, and methaqualone, supposedly is reserved for drugs with a “high potential for abuse” that have no recognized medical use and cannot be used safely even under a doctor’s supervision.
Abuse potential is in the eye of the beholder. As the DEA tautologically sees it, any use of a prohibited drug is “abuse” by definition. But the notion that marijuana is so dangerous that it cannot be safely used “under medical supervision” is pretty perplexing, given that its side effects compare favorably to those of many prescription drugs. The idea that marijuana has “no currently accepted medical use in the United States” likewise is hard to reconcile with reality.
Hellbound and Down 