Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C.
Circuit heard
oral arguments in a case challenging the Drug Enforcement
Administration’s
refusal to reclassify marijuana so it can be legally used as a
medicine. Since 1970, when Congress passed the Controlled
Substances Act, marijuana has remained on Schedule I, a category
supposedly reserved for drugs with a high abuse potential and no
accepted medical value that cannot be used safely even under a
doctor’s supervision. The National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws (NORML) first challenged marijuana’s legal status in
1972, eventually winning the support of an administrative law
judge, Francis Young, who in 1991 declared it
"abundantly clear" that the drug has "a currently accepted
medical use." Young, who called marijuana "one of the safest
therapeutically active substances known to man," was overruled by
DEA Administrator John Lawn. In 1995 former NORML Executive
Director Jon Gettman filed a second rescheduling petition, focusing
on marijuana’s abuse potential, which the DEA rejected in 2001. The
latest petition,
filed a year later by a coalition of activists, cited state laws
allowing patients to use marijuana as well as recent research
confirming its therapeutic value. As usual, the DEA dragged its
feet, finally rejecting the petition last year. Now Americans for
Safe Access is appealing
that decision.
This is the first time in nearly two decades that a federal
appeals court has heard arguments about marijuana’s Schedule I
status, which a group of researchers at the University of
California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research politely
called "untenable" in a recent review of the literature.
Perhaps more than any other policy, the Obama administration’s
continued defense of this classification, which puts marijuana in a
more restrictive category than cocaine, morphine, or
methamphetamine, belies the president’s
avowed commitment to sound, unpoliticized science. California
NORML coordinator Dale Gieringer notes that the DEA "summarily
discounted substantial scientific evidence showing that cannabis
has medical efficacy." He says the agency insists that "only
expensive, ‘Phase 3’ FDA efficacy studies are acceptable, while at
the same making such studies impossible by blocking approval of the
necessary research facilities." Although other Schedule I drugs are
produced by private, DEA-licensed labs, when it comes to marijuana
the agency has refused
to allow competition with the National Institute on Drug Abuse,
researchers’ only legal source of the drug. That policy is also the
target of federal
litigation.
