The federal marijuana rescheduling hearing turned Tuesday morning to the drug’s toll on young people. An emergency-medicine physician testified, drawing largely on patients she had treated herself, that marijuana is a hallucinogen capable of derailing a young life and that rescheduling would only deepen a false sense of safety that has arisen from the drug’s normalization.
The witness was Dr. Karen Randall, an emergency-medicine physician based in Pueblo, Colorado, who holds a certificate in cannabis science. She began by clearing away the medical claims made for the drug: marijuana, she testified, is useless or counterproductive for the conditions often invoked to justify it, among them seizures, Alzheimer’s, glaucoma, sleep apnea, and nausea.
Rescheduling, she warned, would change how the public sees the drug, redoubling a false sense of safety that has built over the past 35 years. That false confidence is not abstract. It already stops parents, she said, from bringing children to the emergency room after they have raided a parent’s marijuana stash.
Randall described marijuana as a hallucinogen with the power to derail a young person for life. The consequences she laid out ran long: academic collapse, anxiety, depression, cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, cannabis use disorder, permanent changes to the brain’s pathways, psychosis, schizophrenia, and suicide. And help is hard to find. Treatment beds are in such short supply, she testified, that young people struggle to get care for cannabis addiction — especially those also suffering from psychosis or schizophrenia.
Yet exposure is routine. She pointed to the normalization of marijuana use, to candy-like edibles that are high in THC and marketed to appeal to children, to easy internet access, and to accidental ingestion as the paths that keep bringing the young into contact with the drug.
Randall also flagged a blind spot in the medical system itself. Marijuana does not appear in prescription drug monitoring programs, so a treating physician cannot tell whether a patient is using, what strain, or how much. And the budtenders who fill doctors’ marijuana “recommendations,” she noted, do not screen for interactions the way a pharmacist would.
The hearing continues and is scheduled to conclude Wednesday.