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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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

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 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

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?

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.

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