Tag: marijuana

White House Promotes Biden’s Marijuana Moves As Part Of ‘Fight For Our Freedom’ Campaign To ‘Mobilize Young People’

The White House is promoting President Joe Biden’s mass marijuana pardon and scheduling review directive as part of a “Fight for Our Freedom” campaign meant to “mobilize young people” as next year’s election approaches.

A factsheet about the campaign that the administration published on Thursday contains a section dedicated to the president’s cannabis reform actions from late last year titled, “Addressing a Failed Approach to Marijuana.”

“The criminalization of marijuana possession has upended too many lives—for conduct that is now legal in many states,” it says. “While white, Black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, Black and brown people are more likely to be in jail for it.”

The youth outreach campaign will involve a college tour featuring Vice President Kamala Harris that begins at Hampton College on Thursday. The vice president will visit a total of seven colleges across the country over the next month, though its unclear if she will explicitly tout the administration’s cannabis reform actions on campuses.

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Three Met Police officers who strip-searched 15-year-old schoolgirl wrongly accused of possessing cannabis could be sacked as watchdog announces misconduct hearing over scandal

Three Metropolitan Police officers could be fired after allegations of gross misconduct by carrying out a strip search on a 15-year-old schoolgirl wrongly accused of cannabis possession.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) said on Thursday that the officers will face a misconduct hearing, and a fourth lesser misconduct meeting, over the treatment of Child Q.

The girl was strip-searched while on her period with no appropriate adult present, at a school in Hackney, east London in December 2020, after being accused of carrying drugs.

No drugs were found in her bags or outer clothing, and she was then strip-searched by two female officers with two male officers standing outside. Again no drugs were found.

Met bosses have been told by the IOPC that they should consider writing formal letters of apology to Child Q and her mother.

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Smell Of Marijuana Alone Does Not Justify Vehicle Search, Minnesota Supreme Court Rules

The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled that the odor of marijuana, on its own, does not establish probable cause for police officers to search a car.

The ruling came in the case of a 2021 traffic stop in Meeker County where Adam Torgerson was pulled over by Litchfield police for having too many auxiliary lights on his vehicle’s grill. The officer claimed he smelled marijuana coming out of the open vehicle window. Torgerson, who was driving with his wife and a child, denied there was weed in the car.

A second officer approached and said he, too, smelled weed. The officers ordered everyone out of the vehicle and searched it, finding a small amount of methamphetamine and some paraphernalia.

Torgerson was not driving erratically, nor was there any evidence of a crime in open view when the officers approached the car. They based their probable cause finding solely on the marijuana odor.

A district court subsequently ruled that the evidence obtained from the search was inadmissible. Even in 2021, there were certain circumstances in which possession of marijuana was legal. Medical marijuana patients could possess it, for instance, and industrial hemp (which looks and smells a lot like regular marijuana) was also legal. The possession of small quantities of pot had also been decriminalized by that point—still prohibited by statute, but not in itself a crime.

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Key House Committee Clears Psychedelics Amendments To Defense Bill For Floor Votes, But Blocks Marijuana Proposals

A powerful House committee has cleared two psychedelics amendments for floor consideration as part of a large-scale spending bill covering the Department of Defense (DOD). But it also blocked separate marijuana-related proposals from advancing.

Several bipartisan members filed drug policy reform proposals that they hope will be attached to the Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations legislation. And on Tuesday, the House Rules Committee made the two psychedelics measures in order, allowing them to advance to floor votes.

The DOD bill is one of four spending packages on the committee’s current agenda, and all three of the remaining measures contain at least one marijuana proposal that would prohibit various departments from testing federal job applicants for cannabis.

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14 GOP Congressional Lawmakers Tell DEA To Keep Marijuana In Schedule I And ‘Reject’ Top Health Agency’s Recommendation

A coalition of 14 Republican congressional lawmakers is urging the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to “reject” the top federal health agency’s recommendation to reschedule marijuana and instead keep it in the most restrictive category under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

In a letter sent to DEA Administrator Anne Milgram on Monday, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) and Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) led a dozen other colleagues in both chambers in arguing that any decision to reschedule cannabis “should be based on proven facts and science—not popular opinion, changes in state laws, or the preferred policy of an administration.”

Of course, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has repeatedly emphasized that its review into marijuana scheduling, directed by President Joe Biden late last year, was science-based. And after 11 months of investigation, it has recommended that marijuana be placed in Schedule III. Milgram has also made clear that DEA’s review will follow the science.

The eight GOP senators and six House members evidently distrust the motives behind the HHS recommendation, however, and they argued in the letter, first reported by The Washington Stand, that the current “research, science, and trends support the case that marijuana should remain a Schedule I drug.”

They pointed to National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) data on rates of cannabis use disorder and raised concerns about increased THC potency of marijuana products, stating that these “facts indicate that marijuana has a high potential for abuse and that the risk is only increasing.”  For what it’s worth, NIDA also reportedly signed off the HHS rescheduling recommendation before it was sent to DEA.

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Rescheduling Marijuana Would Leave Federal Prohibition Essentially Untouched

For half a century, reformers have been urging the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to reclassify marijuana, which since 1970 has been assigned to Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, the law’s most restrictive category. Although the DEA has always rejected that proposal, it could change course in light of a recent recommendation from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Last week, HHS recommended that the DEA move marijuana from Schedule I, which includes illegal drugs such as heroin, LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA, to Schedule III, which includes prescription medications such as anabolic steroids and Tylenol with codeine. Although that reclassification would facilitate medical research and indirectly benefit state-licensed marijuana businesses, it would leave federal prohibition essentially untouched.

Schedule I supposedly is reserved for drugs with “a high potential for abuse” that have no recognized medical applications and are so dangerous that they cannot be used safely even under a doctor’s supervision. Marijuana’s Schedule I status never made much sense, and the justification for that designation has become steadily weaker over the years.

Back in 1985, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Marinol—a synthetic version of THC, marijuana’s main active ingredient—as a treatment for nausea and vomiting caused by cancer chemotherapy. The FDA later extended that approval to AIDS wasting syndrome, and five years ago it approved Epidiolex, which contains cannabis-derived CBD, as a treatment for two forms of severe, drug-resistant epilepsy.

Research indicates that marijuana is effective at relieving various symptoms, including neuropathic pain and muscle spasms as well as nausea and epileptic seizures. Based on such findings, 38 states allow medical use of cannabis.

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What Rescheduling Marijuana Would and Wouldn’t Do

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.

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Rescheduling Won’t End The War On Cannabis, But Could Open A New Battlefront If We’re Not Careful

Contrary to decades of reefer madness propagated by our federal government, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) now admits that marijuana does have accepted medical use. However, reports of the death of cannabis prohibition are exaggerated. No doubt, the conclusion of FDA’s scientific review of marijuana’s current Schedule I status is a welcome milestone in federal cannabis policy.

But while the Department of Health and Human Services’s (HHS) August 29, 2023 recommendation to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to reschedule marijuana based on FDA’s review will finally bring relief from the federal gross receipts tax levied on struggling state-licensed cannabis businesses, it also underscores the urgent need to both (1) continue pressing forward on descheduling efforts before critical momentum evaporates and certain industry stakeholders effectively settle for rescheduling without full decriminalization, and (2) demand that marijuana be exempted from existing categories of FDA-regulated products to preserve state medical and adult use cannabis markets.

Before proceeding, it’s important to remember that rescheduling would not apply the federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) to marijuana for the first time—it applies right now, and like the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA), would continue to apply after rescheduling. But absent any statutory authority permitting FDA to do otherwise, the FDCA would continue to apply after descheduling too, just as it does to hemp products. I previously noted this in “Cannabis Cannibalism: How Federal Rescheduling Could Consume the State-Licensed Industry Without Safe Harbors Under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act,” available here.

However, moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III will shift enforcement priorities (and the incentives to vigorously pursue these priorities) at both DEA and FDA. Indeed this has been the experience after the CSA’s prohibitions on hemp were relaxed beginning with the 2014 Farm Bill, and then scrapped under the 2018 Farm Bill which descheduled hemp by carving it out of the federal CSA’s definitions of “marijuana” and “THC.” Soon after, purveyors of hemp CBD products began receiving FDA cease-and-desist letters citing prohibited product claims and numerous grounds under the FDCA for prohibiting the interstate commerce in such cannabis products.

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