Smart Approaches to Marijuana concluded its case-in-chief in the federal rescheduling hearing Tuesday by calling one of the DEA’s own pharmacologists and drawing out testimony that marijuana is not a drug, has no currently accepted medical use, and fails every scientific test the agency uses to prove otherwise.
The witness was Dr. Luli Akinfiresoye, a scientist in the DEA’s Drug and Chemical Evaluation Section and an author of the agency’s own December 2024 scientific review of marijuana. John McNichols of Torridon Law, representing SAM, spent much of the day holding her to what that document actually says.
He began with the test itself. To have a currently accepted medical use, a drug must satisfy all five factors of the DEA’s analysis, and failing even one is disqualifying. Akinfiresoye agreed. Then she agreed, factor by factor, that marijuana fails everyone. On chemistry, she testified that marijuana is not a single, consistent substance and cannot be reduced to a standardized dose. On safety, efficacy, acceptance by qualified experts, and the weight of the available evidence, she gave the same answer. It does not pass.
The most striking moment was not in the document at all. Asked for her own scientific opinion, Akinfiresoye said plainly that marijuana is not a drug and not a single molecular entity. It is a plant, she explained, that the review treated as if it were a medicine. That concession, from a DEA scientist, runs counter to the entire premise of the government’s proposal.
She also confirmed that the DEA deliberately applied its more rigorous five-factor test rather than the shorter two-factor test the Office of Legal Counsel had said was available. Asked whether that two-factor test made sense to her as a pharmacologist, she answered, scientifically, no.
From there, McNichols moved to the harms, and the witness confirmed them one after another. Recreational use, she agreed, is abuse, and roughly 86 percent of people using marijuana for medical reasons are also using it recreationally. The advice patients receive at dispensary counters, she testified, is not medical advice and amounts to a safety hazard because staff cannot account for dosing, drug interactions, or a patient’s medical history. State marijuana programs, she said, are a significant source of diversion into the illicit market.
She went further on mental health. Millions of Americans now suffer from cannabis use disorder, a rate she said ranks among the highest of any drug. She called it a scientific fact that marijuana can cause and worsen psychosis, with the strongest established link to schizophrenia, and she confirmed that emergency room visits for marijuana-induced psychosis have climbed sharply, more than doubling in one study, as looser state laws take hold.
A recurring theme was what the federal health agencies left out. The diversion findings, the dispensary studies, and the psychosis data all appeared in the DEA review but were absent from the HHS analysis that launched the rescheduling effort, even though the underlying studies were publicly available before HHS published. As McNichols put it to the witness, if HHS left that out, it left out something important. She agreed.
Akinfiresoye’s testimony left the record with a plain contradiction at its center. The government’s own scientist says marijuana is not a drug and has no accepted medical use, while the government’s rescheduling proposal insists the opposite. The hearing continues this week ahead of its scheduled conclusion.