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Comment by mbg721 | Hacker News Reader

People seem to forget that at a federal level, marijuana is still a Schedule I drug and is illegal to possess; if the feds decided suddenly to remember that, all hell could break loose at any moment. The guys guarding the border don't get their paychecks from Madison or St. Paul or Olympia or Albany, they get them from Washington, DC.

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That doesn't quite justify it. Even Schedule I drugs are still legal to possess with a proper prescription from a doctor. There's prescription methamphetamine (Desoxyn), for example.

As such, would the US object if I took THC under prescription in an in-patient medical context in another country, and then attempted to enter?

And if they wouldn't object, then why would they suddenly object if I didn't get prescribed the THC, but rather purchased it over the counter, under advisement of a doctor? (After all, this is how most legal, OTC medications work. Doctors in outpatient settings don't prescribe you e.g. aspirin; they just tell you to "take two aspirin and call me if it doesn't feel better." They assume you can get your own aspirin without their help.)

As the kids say, "Dude, this is America." Why would merely having a prescription and a reasonable excuse help you with the border patrol? Maybe you'd get a sympathetic guy that day and maybe you wouldn't.

Because I'm pretty sure you can bring pretty much any prescribed drug in its labelled dispensed container — even the Desoxyn! — with you over the border into the US. So it'd be weird if THC was an exception to that; and doubly weird if just having ever been prescribed THC was worse for you than literally carrying a pill bottle full of meth in your bag.

>you can bring pretty much any prescribed drug in its labelled dispensed container — even the Desoxyn! — with you over the border into the US.

>So it'd be weird if THC was an exception to that

As others in the thread have already mentioned, Desoxyn is schedule 2, while Cannabis is federally schedule 1 (with lower schedule number being more restricted).

So no, THC isn't an exception, it is a part of the same rule system. The one in which schedule 2 drugs have more legal privileges than schedule 1 drugs.

the active ingredient of desoxyn, methamphetamine is schedule 1.

Plenty of substances are dual scheduled, desoxyn is just most prominent example.

This doesn't appear to be true: https://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/schedules/orangebook/c_cs...

Are you sure you're not getting it mixed up with MDMA or something?

This is where you are wrong, methamphetamine is schedule 2 in the US[0][1].

0. https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs5/5049/5049p.pdf

1. https://www.goodrx.com/methamphetamine/what-is

Last I checked both meth and heroin were schedule II - which sort of has always been one of the craziest things about US drug policy. It’s almost entirely a political control thing

As I pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28466243, this doesn't appear to be true.

That's not correct under current federal law. Doctors can't write prescriptions for Schedule I drugs. They can only legally be used with special permission for research.

https://www.dea.gov/drug-information/drug-scheduling

(I don't agree with this, just explaining the law.)

Alright, so does that mean that if you’re a foreign citizen; and while you’re in the US, you volunteer to be a test subject for a pharmacological research program; and they give you a Schedule I drug as part of that research; then you can be deported for taking it?

No that wouldn't be grounds for a criminal conviction and thus wouldn't trigger deportation proceedings. Note that for clinical trials of controlled substances the researchers generally directly administer the drug in a secure facility. So legally the test subjects are never technically in possession of a controlled substance.

> Even Schedule I drugs are still legal to possess with a proper prescription from a doctor. There's prescription methamphetamine (Desoxyn), for example.

No they're not. Desoxyn is only legal with a prescription because methamphetamine is a schedule II drug, not a schedule I drug.

Primarily so soldiers and pilots can take it.

Nah, they just take regular dextroampehetamine - methamphetamine is particularly neurotoxic.

There probably is some shadowy special-forces division that gets the cool stuff but I gather that even amongst the USAF's endurance fighter squadrons you won't see much stimulant use: it's too much of a liability, and the services really don't want human-liabilities piloting hundred-million-dollar supersonic death-machines.

Fun-fact: the Nazis used meth, then known as "Pervatin" - but then they also mixed it with cocaine and oxycodone and called it "D-IX" - sounds like quite the party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-IX

Nobody is forgetting it; they think it's stupid and wrong.

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