There is really just one salient question when it comes to today's decision by the Drug Enforcement Administration to expand the number of growers of research-grade marijuana, while still not changing the scheduling of marijuana: Will this decision make it significantly easier for scientists to study the medical benefits of marijuana?
The answer sadly is: unlikely. And this is a missed opportunity that could further delay potential therapies to countless people.
Up until today, the University of Mississippi has been the only federally approved source of research-grade medical marijuana in the United States. In a bit of seemingly positive news today, the DEA also announced it will now allow other places to apply for permission to do the same. The hope is that marijuana available for scientific study could grow in both amount and diversity.
While this will be hailed as a victory for research, it will largely be symbolic, because no matter how much marijuana is available, if access is still difficult, it hardly matters.
Imagine a product that is in high demand but kept behind a locked door. In response to the demand for the product, someone makes a baffling decision to make more of it but still never unlocks the door.
Marijuana is that product, and its Schedule I designation is that locked door.
That is the predicament of medical marijuana.
Because marijuana is a Schedule I substance (meaning that by definition it has "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse"), there are significant hurdles to getting the door unlocked.
Potential researchers typically go to the DEA first, as it grants the license to begin scientific research. Even if a license is granted, to study a Schedule I substance, institutions must have heavy-duty safes and high-grade security systems installed, which can be expensive. There is also the more subjective consideration of getting approval from your academic institution to do the research on a Schedule I status substance in the first place. Even if individual faculty members want to do that research, the university leadership may not want the hassle or the potential fallout of bad press. This happened at the University of Arizona when Dr. Sue Sisley was let go after trying to pursue a medical marijuana trial.
Sisley eventually had to find private funding for her project, and just in April, seven years after the study was initially proposed, hers became the first DEA approved medical marijuana trial for post-traumatic stress in veterans.
Then, after years of those bureaucratic hurdles, it is the National Institute on Drug Abuse that has held the final key to the lock. Today, it is the biggest federal public funder of marijuana research and has been the sole supplier of the marijuana itself. Even if more medical marijuana will now be freed up for research, the institute will still have to approve any studies it funds.
The problem, however, is that last word in NIDA's name: "abuse."
Whether we realize it or not, we all accept a certain amount of hypocrisy in our daily lives. Maybe we don't always have the energy to call it out or we are too speechless and dumbfounded that no one else seems to have noticed.
With regard to the hypocrisy of federal medical marijuana policy, however, it is worth summoning the stamina to relentlessly present the facts. The lives of patients -- such as that of Charlotte Figi, whose seizures abated with the use of medical marijuana, and so many others -- depend on it.
That a plant could provide so much benefit and still remain behind these locked doors is worth speaking up about.
Source: http://edition.cnn.com/
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