A recent, extremely important Journal of the American Medical Association article revitalized the controversy over rescheduling marijuana, i.e. moving it from the federal Schedule I to Schedule III.
The authors show that the Biden Administration’s recommendation in 2023 to move pot from Schedule I to Schedule III was based far more on politics than on science.
But keeping marijuana on Schedule I is important for public health. Want to know more? Keep reading . . .
These federal schedules are about how “bad” drugs are, right?
Nope.
Drug schedules are a system for designating controlled substances used by the federal government. They are not an index of how “bad” a drug is.
That’s why people are often confused when they learn that marijuana and heroin are both on Schedule I: How can pot be as bad as the drug that can kill you right when you take it? All pot does is make you act sort of goofy.
Scheduling is based on a number of factors and tests, but they center around questions like:
Does the drug have a currently accepted medical use?
Does it have a high risk of abuse?
Does it pose a threat to overall public health?
Drugs that have no medical value plus a high potential for abuse get listed on Schedule I.
But marijuana does have a medical use!
That is a common misconception: There is no condition for which marijuana is recognized as a treatment by the relevant federal agencies. Yes, some medicines are derived from chemicals in marijuana. But the the drug itself has no recognized medical use.
So how come some states let doctors recommend it?
Because those states made political decisions to create medical programs around the drug—not scientific ones.
If tomorrow Colorado voted on a law claiming that turnips cure epilepsy, that wouldn’t make turnips into epilepsy medicine.
It’s just the same with pot.
Majority votes don’t change the scientific fact that while there have been a few studies purporting to show that it has medical benefits, the evidence they presented is weak.
A 2017 study validating pot as a treatment for chronic pain is commonly cited as a justification here, for example, but literally dozens of analyses since then have failed to endorse that finding.
And across the rest of the field the evidence is just as weak.
There’s no way pot poses a threat to public health, though, right?
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Pot is totally destructive of your personal physical and mental health. Study after study shows it causes heart damage, raises the risks of dementia, increases the chances of developing serious mental illness, and on and on and on.
If pot does all this, and the data say it does, then it’s de facto a threat to public health.
But you don’t have to take our word for it: A glance at the stats around the prevalence of the abuse of weed, especially among the young, vs. the total number of users shows that it’s more addictive than alcohol (which people who want rescheduling often compare it to).
Don’t forget drugged driving: Federal traffic safety data suggest pot impairment lasts five times as long as weed impairment. And almost 56% of drivers testing positive for drugs after serious or fatal crashes had marijuana in their systems.
Wait: I heard that rescheduling will make it waaaaay easier for scientists to research the drug—isn’t that a good thing?
Look, we all support science. But moving marijuana to Schedule III will almost certainly have zero real effect on research into it.
Then . . . why move it at all?
That is the big question. And it has two very clear, and very ugly, answers.
If pot moves to Schedule III, then people who sell it can take regular deductions from their taxes on business expenses related to growing and selling weed—including for advertising.
That means the people who dress up gummies as Stony Patch Kids can write those expenses off.
Which means in turn that the business as it exists will be supercharged—and primed for the same addiction profiteers who brought us Big Tobacco and Big Booze to step in and unleash their worst public health catastrophe yet.
Big Marijuana also wants the rescheduling because it will send a message: The dangerous, toxic, psychoactive drugs we want to get you hooked on are actually fine! See, the government said so!
Money and PR: That’s what the push to reschedule is about.
Not science. And certainly not public health.