The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) is adding to its team a medical professional who has linked marijuana use to suicide, advocated against a Florida legalization measure and criticized health agencies’ move to reschedule cannabis.
She has also said it is an “insult” to refer to cannabis as “medical.”
Roneet Lev—an emergency medicine and addition physician who previously served as chief medical officer at ONDCP under the first Trump administration—announced on Monday that she’ll be rejoining the office for the chance to “save lives on a much bigger scale.”
While she didn’t mention marijuana in the announcement on her podcast “High Truths on Drugs and Addiction,” Lev has previously spoken extensively about her issues with cannabis—describing it as an understated public health risk and arguing that commercial interests are the driving force behind the legalization movement.
In one episode of her podcast from June 2024, she dedicated over an hour to a discussion with prohibitionist advocates about the marijuana rescheduling process that was initiated under the Biden administration, making clear she strongly disagrees with the top federal health agency’s recommendation to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).
She said that people who are accepting the scientific findings that led to the recommendation,”including some in the medical community,” are “drinking that same Kool Aid again” with marijuana as they did with prescription opioids. And she claimed that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) produced a flawed report on cannabis, with mistakes in “like every single sentence.”
“When it comes to marijuana, the harms are right in front of our eyes—but we ignore the data and follow the industry talking points just like we did in the oxycontin days,” Lev said during the segment, which featured prominent prohibitionists such as Bertha Madras, who also previously served as an ONDCP official.
The revised review process that HHS relied on to reach its Schedule III determination for marijuana posts a “threat to the entire way of approving medications and to the medical community at large,” Lev said, adding that her primary contention is the idea that cannabis possesses medical value.
Hellbound and Down 