Currently, cannabis is illegal in all circumstances in the United States.
It's a Schedule I substance and according to the feds, uh, using it, selling it, producing
it, processing it, is against the law.
We have a kind of split system at the moment, where various states have taken action at
the state level that the federal government declined to prosecute.
Various congresspeople from various states, oftentimes Oregon, Washington, and Colorado,
have over the years proposed that the federal restrictions should be eliminated.
Cannabis should be rescheduled.
Uh, that has not met with overall approval, however, but that doesn't stop them from trying.
A substance is deemed a Schedule I substance if it meets a three-part test.
That is, first: uh, it has no medical use at all.
Second: it is not approved to be, to be used safely in any medical procedure or for any
medical purpose in the United States.
And it is deemed to have a high potential for abuse or misuse.
If a substance meets these criteria, um, FDA and DEA are to inform the attorney general
that that substance should be a Schedule I substance.
Now, we come to cannabis.
The abuse potential is actually quite high.
It's, uh, it's surprisingly dependent-producing, or addictive-producing, for the individual
who takes it.
And most consequential for cannabis is there is as yet no known therapeutic value where
it has been adjudged by the Food and Drug Administration, through careful clinical trials,
to have a known effect that is therapeutic and beneficial that might outweigh these other
risks.
So, it fails on those criteria and as such, is appropriately placed in Schedule I.
This is a substance that is used by millions of Americans every day.
Uh, this is a substance that doctors see as having medical benefits for their patients
for a variety of conditions.
These are real conditions and these are relationships between doctors and patients, uh, that are
telling doctors that the benefits are real.
It is important then to get government out of the business of blocking that type of medical
research and blocking patients from getting the relief that they need.
Very often the argument is, "Well, the government has suppressed research and not enabled people
to get access to cannabis because they make it so difficult to get control."
This is not an altogether fair argument.
As a matter of fact, it's somewhat of a misleading argument.
The government has currently 300 and some cannabis trials going on under NIDA, the National
Institute of Drug Abuse.
What we don't have, however, is gold standard medical research around the question of what
types of conditions cannabis can help treat, what doses of cannabis, what types of cannabis
products can help alleviate the symptoms or help cure certain diseases, and so individuals
throughout the United States are self-medicating.
The difficulty isn't that the government doesn't want you to do that and therefore withholds
the cannabis, it's that the research on the clinical value, therapeutic benefit, of cannabis
is extremely, devilishly challenging to pull off.
You can't do a placebo-controlled double-blind because people darn well know, being cannabis-experienced,
whether they're getting THC intoxicant or not.
There is no legitimate basis for believing that cannabis should be left as a Schedule
I substance.
Schedule I substances include heroin and ecstasy.
Schedule II substances include things like opioids and cocaine.
Why?
Because opioids and cocaine have medical benefits.
Uh, we know that cannabis-derived substances, uh, can have medical benefits.
FDA has already approved a cannabis-based medicine.
The only thing that leaving cannabis as a Schedule I substance does, is makes it harder
for researchers to get to the answers that they want and that the public wants.
A lot of misleading information and claims and promises have been made about the purported
medical value of cannabis or the value to society of liberating us from outdated and
oppressive drug control laws.
Basically, it's the science of what we know at the moment.
That is, until it demonstrates and is demonstrable to medical evaluation that the three criteria
of safety, therapeutic value, and low abuse potential have been addressed,
you're not gonna reschedule a drug from the condition of I to any other schedule until
it meets those criteria.
A lot of individuals in the United States believe that, uh, cannabis should be descheduled
entirely.
They say that, uh, there is a freedom that exists in this country for individuals to
make choices over the substances that they put in their own bodies.
I think one of the most convincing reasons to deschedule cannabis and set up a federal
regulatory system in its place, um, is that there is a reality in the United States that
cannabis is moving in the direction of legality.
The federal government is best positioned and really the only institution positioned
to create that consistency at the state level, and they can only really do that through de-scheduling.
How, for instance, would you abide by the international controls?
The, the signatories to the treaties, the 1961, uh, uh, treaty that we have with the
United Nations.
How would we stop cannabis from coming across the border from Canada or Mexico if it were
descheduled and completely uncontrolled outside the federal system?
My impression is that rescheduling cannabis is down to a simple calculation of, uh, cost
and benefit, and any serious appraisal of the genuine costs to public health, criminal
justice, international security, versus the purported benefits, is so overwhelmingly loaded
for the cost of rescheduling that they should, should occasion in us enormous caution.