Last week, when the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) rejected two petitions asking it to reclassify marijuana, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith did not try to conceal his contempt. LSD, MDMA, a plant that grows in the yard – all one thing, he said sarcastically. The DEA announced today it will keep marijuana on the list of the most dangerous drugs in all the world, along with heroin, LSD, and MDMA .Thanks, DEA, youve really got a lot of credibility.
Smiths dismay was echoed by activists, scientists, commentators, and members of Congress from both major parties, who said the DEAs decision was at odds with what we know about marijuanas hazards and benefits. There is a lot of truth to that critique, and the DEA can reasonably be faulted for stubbornly refusing to remove marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), a category that is supposedly reserved for drugs with a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use, and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision.
But bureaucratic intransigence is only part of the story. The other part is the CSA itself, a legal morass that leaves crucial phrases undefined, gives the DEA wide discretion to decide where drugs belong, and establishes arbitrary, inconsistent rules that make it impossible to properly classify many drugs.
Since Schedule I is the CSAs most restrictive category, people tend to assume its supposed to be a list of the most dangerous drugs in all the world, as Shepard Smith put it. But Chuck Rosenberg, the DEAs acting administrator, says thats a misleading way of describing Schedule I. In fact, he says, the decision to keep marijuana in that category did not involve an assessment of its relative hazards. While the DEAs determination that marijuana belongs in Schedule I was widely interpreted to mean it thinks marijuana is about as dangerous as other drugs in that category and more dangerous than drugs in lower schedules, the head of the DEA insists that is not what the decision means.
Schedule I includes some substances that are exceptionally dangerous and some that are less dangerous (including marijuana, which is less dangerous than some substances in other schedules), Rosenberg writes in an August 11 letter to Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, whose predecessors filed one of the rescheduling petitions that the DEA rejected last week. That strikes some people as odd, but the criteria [sic] for inclusion in Schedule I is not relative danger .It is best not to think of drug scheduling as an escalating danger scale – rather, specific statutory criteria (based on medical and scientific evidence) determine into which schedule a substance is placed.
Rosenbergs concession that marijuana is less dangerous than some substances in other schedules stands in stark contrast with his predecessors refusal to say whether heroin is more dangerous than marijuana. A year ago, Rosenberg admitted that heroin is clearly more dangerous than marijuana, and now he is taking the further step of saying some drugs in lower schedules are also more dangerous. But he argues that such observations do not mean marijuana should be reclassified.
News Moderator: Katelyn Baker
Full Article: Congress And The DEA Share The Blame For Marijuana’s Mystifying Misclassification
Author: Jacob Sullum
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Photo Credit: Getty Images
Website: Forbes
