DEA Still Insists Marijuana Has No ‘Accepted Medical Use'

> I am reminded, from time to time, that one of my high school classmates is living out a 25-year federal sentence after being convicted on marijuana conspiracy charges.

There has to be more to this right? Trafficking tons of the stuff? Repeat offender? Violent history? enhancements?

see also: https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...

edit, since people clearly are against this comment: I'm not arguing that that the "more to this" justifies the 25 years, only that "25 years for a marijuana conspiracy" isn't the whole story and we'd all benefit if we were able to judge the whole story rather than some person's stylized version of the story.

What's worse is realizing that the majority of people in jail for selling even the smallest amount of weed are black, while the majority of people who own legal pot dispensaries churning out industrial levels of weed are white. Add in the famous Eichmann quote, and it really seems like this is a deliberate result of the system.

Reminds me of some NOFX lyrics.

    Jerry spent some time in Michigan
    A twenty year vacation, after all he had a dime
    A dime is worth a lot more in Detroit
    A dime in California, a twenty dollar fine

Note that "a dime" refers to a "dime-bag" of weed, or $10 worth of the stuff. 20 years in prison for personal possession in Michigan (at the time), while it was a $20 infraction in California for the same amount.

You took the words from my mouth. Isn't this obvious?

This. We should by default oppose all expansions of bureaucracy. Only when it is impossible to not expand should it happen.

As Upton Sinclair wrote:

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Organization, sure, but the question is better posed to the humans in that organization. So, why would DEA agents want to undermine their agency's funding?

Ethics. Morality. The desire to not be a horrible excuse for a human being inflicting needless pain and suffering and destroying the lives of the people their agency is ostensibly charged with serving. Not perpetuating the horrible status quo that's corrupted the spirit of their mission and accepting the will of the people.

I believe Marijuana can get quite dangerous by now that can induce psychosis in many people. Some say you need an inclination but to me it seems it can hit anyone. I knew some heavy users and may be biased because of this, but there are reports of similar cases.

Weed isn't the drug that your hippy parents smoked in the 60s anymore. Years of selective growing increased psychoactive substances to insane levels never found in the plant previously. It was also the logistical problem created by prohibition that made this process beneficial. Sure, people would have done this anyway for the drug to become more potent, but I believe free availability would have countered this development.

Of course even with its potency it is still one of the softer drug. Alcohol can be just as destructive.

Right. Here's another branch of the same government that holds a patent for "Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants" from 2003 (filed in '99).

Abstract: Cannabinoids have been found to have antioxidant properties, unrelated to NMDA receptor antagonism. This new found property makes cannabinoids useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and HIV dementia. Nonpsychoactive cannabinoids, such as cannabidoil, are particularly advantageous to use because they avoid toxicity that is encountered with psychoactive cannabinoids at high doses useful in the method of the present invention. A particular disclosed class of cannabinoids useful as neuroprotective antioxidants is formula (I) wherein the R group is independently selected from the group consisting of H, CH 3 , and COCH 3.

https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/patent/US-6630507-B1

Patent showing medical value in one hand, "no accepted medical use" in the other.

Not sure I'd call it "incompetent". Maybe something more like diabolical? Overt government disinformation, giving federal "authorities" the right to raid and plunder any person or organization involved in harboring plant material.

>The fact that it remains in the modern era speaks to how incompetent the US has become

More racist than incompetent. The Nixon era war on weed was driven by hatred of blacks.

The term is regulatory capture. There are a number of financial motives behind blocking legalization: drug and booze makers protecting their turf, religious wingnuts seeking moral relevance, law enforcement and DEA contractors. At some point the weed industry will grow large enough to have its own lobbyist army.

The exoteric explanation seems incompetent because it's veiled in racism and xenophobia to protect and promote corporate and national interests. You can see this just in the terminology used in the laws, like using the term "Marihuana" to invoke anti-Mexican sentiment for heavily taxing the use of hemp fibers in 1937 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marihuana_Tax_Act_of_1937

Luckily for us DuPont introduced a wonderful petroleum-based "man-made organic textile fiber" (Nylon) in 1938, featuring it heavily in the 1939 New York World's Fair and 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon#Early_marketing_strategi...

Point of order: it's not JUST the US, it is most of the world.

Not even five bucks, just the old saying “it takes one to know one”

> Hard to think of a government agency with less credibility than the DEA

Ah, then allow me to introduce you to the ATF..

You mean "Congrats to Drugs", right? (You put "The War on Drugs" twice, which doesn't make sense)

Do you find (or know) that the THC is contributing to this effect on top of the CBD?

Would you mind sharing the brand/product name?

Placebo effect. CBD and THC are not well absorbed topically and there's no data on transdermal bioavailability, so the effective dosage would be unscientific and unknown. The majority of CBD creams fall within the category of snake oil to dupe consumers into spending money just as they do on beauty products. THC absorption by the skin is very low.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12100860/

I think both the Trump admin and the Biden admin have revealed how the White House is not as powerful an influence over the unelected bureaucracy as we have hitherto imagined. Many, many influences and vested interests at work in the executive branch that watch presidents come and go.

If I understand correctly, the answer is "they probably did need to, but didn't bother".

You'll sometimes see articles say "these states have legalized marijuana, but it remains illegal at the federal level". If the DEA did choose to try and enforce marijuana prohibition in one of these states, the state would be able to sue, making the argument that the US constitution does not give this power to the federal government. The federal government would probably argue that it did have this power under the Commerce Clause.

My understanding is that the DEA has avoided putting itself in a position where this could be litigated.

People have become complacent and accepted the ballooning power of the federal government.

As someone who rides a bike in a state where Pot is legal, there are a fair number of people who are smoking and driving, many more than before legalization. And the homeless population seems to have embraced pot as well.

The sky hasn't fallen, but when riding I give a wide berth.

There is a lot of inconsistency, but the lines between "drug" and "Recreational substance" are certainly blurred, be it for Opiates or Pot. On one hand our food and drug administration couldn't figure out why in some places they're distributing more opioids than there are people, and voters went from "pot is a medicine" to "pot is recreational". Regulation of anything was a total failure so maybe another plan.. So legalize and pay for treatment.

that's actually a really good idea. if people want to defund systematic racism. defund the dea.

That seems fair, certainly the "it's natural, it cures everything" kind of arguments are tissue-paper thin, but you'd think there'd be some acknowledgement of its common use for pain-management, and there are even FDA-approved medications derived from cannabis[1].

1: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr...

If you are counting THC and CBD extracts as part of it's medical benefits, they are fairly wide.

It's better for certain types of pain management than opioids (and way less risky than them), seems to be at least fairly effective as an anti-anxiety drug (look into stats on the percentage of Americans who are on prescription anti-anxiety meds—it's probably more than you expect), and, from my own experience, is vastly better than any of the prescription or OTC sleep aids I've tried, with less-scary common side effects as a bonus on top of the greater efficacy and better results the next morning (zero extra grogginess/hangover, provided I get the dose right).

[EDIT] I may be understating the sleep-aid thing—just knowing that I've got a bag of gummies and that if I pop one a couple hours before bed I will fall asleep quickly that night, with minimal ill effects, does wonders for my state of mind throughout the day. Even having prescription pills for it before didn't, both because their effects felt more like "being drugged", so, seemed scarier/more-harmful, and because I knew I'd wake up the next morning feeling like shit, even if I got a full night's sleep.

Actually, here's another thing: it's almost certainly less harmful to your health to get high semi-regularly than to get drunk semi-regularly. Even if all cannabis did was replace a measurable percentage of alcohol use, I'd be very surprised if that didn't improve population-wide health markers, and that's just from its recreational use. Not a medicinal use, but still an improvement to population health.

My take is that marijuana's medical benefits are small, but greater than alcohol's. I can't think of a single metric by which marijuana is worse for a person than alcohol, so if we allow alcohol, there's no reason we shouldn't also allow marijuana.

Even more: there's basically zero medical benefit to tobacco, and if there are 1 or 2 areas where it's slightly beneficial, there are a thousand where it's vastly worse. If tobacco isn't a schedule 1 drug, there's no way in hell marijuana should be.

I don't use marijuana and have no personal stake in this. If it were federally legalized today, my own personal life wouldn't change a bit. I just think it's ridiculous that we're clutching pearls about whether marijuana is good for you when other things that are objectively much worse for you are perfectly legal.

It's not enough to be right, you also have to be effective.

My take too. It has not followed anywhere near a normal process for a medically safe/effective drug to be approved. I'm for it being completely legalized but the medical aspect is very weird.

The DEA has not helped this at all but MJ is basically legal at the state level(s) because activists successfully argued against the war on drugs and via political will. Not because MJ treatments have been proven scientifically safe & effective.

The thing I am most skeptical of is the safety of delivering the drug via smoking raw Marijuana. This is completely off the reservation compared to most medical drugs.

Activists swear that it's safe to inhale MJ smoke into your lungs and you won't get cancer but it's extremely hard for me to believe with a straight face. Almost any type of smoke you inhale into your lungs has very bad side effects over time. We can make it legal but then we might discover it does increase lung cancer rates like tobacco once you daily smoke for 30 years. It's possible no one has really been able to smoke it at that level due to it being so criminalized.

I agree this doesn't matter for a terminal cancer patient cause they are dying but so much of medical MJ has seemed like a political foot in the door to get it legalized for recreational use.

I don't know enough to have an opinion on marijuana's medical benefits, but in principle at least I agree. Unfortunately, "we live in a society, man," and that society requires that you find some way to transform I want into I have no choice before it'll let you do something it feels icky about. There are numerous examples of this that I won't list here because I don't want to digress into other hot-button topics, but I bet you can think of at least two right off the top of your head.

With that in mind I think starting with medicalization was a smart strategic move. The only other options were to make a lot of Americans less controlling, or to convince them that they're wrong, and, well... good luck with either of those.