The above image was made by @amberjyang with Midjourney using the prompt 'the politics of cannabis.'
Cannabis has proven to be a miracle treatment for the incurable headache disorder I live with. Though this plant is legal to consume in dozens of US states including mine, it's still illegal at the federal level. This may be changing, but only a little. According to the Washington Post:
For more than five decades, marijuana has been classified as a Schedule I controlled substance with a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. Under the DEA's proposed change, marijuana would go to the less risky Schedule III — in the same tier as prescription drugs such as ketamine, anabolic steroids and testosterone.
Personally, I think it's ridiculous that cannabis was ever prohibited. But even if the feds wanted to legalize it outright today, there's at least one international treaty standing in their way. As a signatory to the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the US government is treaty-bound to treat cannabis as a dangerous narcotic. Specifically, under the treaty, the government is required to tightly regulate any US cannabis production in exactly the same way as it regulates the production of opium poppies.
In a sane world, the feds would abandon this treaty entirely, end prohibition once and for all, and adopt sweeping policy changes to help drug users get healthy instead of punishing them for victimless crimes. But ours isn't a sane world. And I can't help but suspect that the rescheduling of cannabis is just the first move in a larger strategy to rein in recreational cannabis states by putting their local cannabis industries under federal control.
Given the history of the war on drugs, I literally can't imagine a federal drug policy that would improve society. And there are powerful special interests staunchly allied against ending prohibition. Here's a Wikipedia list of some of them. An OpenSecrets report breaks down the key players fighting to keep marijuana illegal: police unions, private prison companies, prison guard unions, Big Pharma, and alcohol companies.
Notably, all of these groups profit from the misery created by prohibition. Pharma is the worst and Pharma owns Washington. This industry also largely created the opioid crisis, which cannabis can help mitigate. According to a 2021 BMJ study, access to legal cannabis sharply reduces opioid overdoses around dispensaries.
The rescheduling of marijuana appears to be a positive development, albeit a minor one. My sense is that the Biden administration has been pushing for progress here for PR reasons and this barely relevant move was the best they could do without upsetting their puppet masters too much. I wonder how long it would take our sprawling law enforcement bureaucracies to retool their operations away from marijuana. I'm guessing at least two presidential administrations.
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Marijuana is not as bad as people perceive it. Anyway, I’m glad they could find out that it is useful for something
Nice update!
For sure - thanks!
Going to be interesting to see how this plays out in the legal states. If I was giving the role to decide what happens with cannabis, I would say to outright decriminalize it, and have the government stay out of it 100%.
For sure. I too think it should be fully legal, though I'd settle for having it regulated like alcohol.
Thanks for your sobering analysis on this developing issue! If Kennedy becomes president, I wonder how he’ll navigate this.
For some reason, this reminds me of Marinol, the synthetic pharmaceutical cannabinoid that’s more expensive and less healing than natural marijuana: https://norml.org/marijuana/library/marinol-vs-natural-cannabis/
I think it’s ridiculous that we’re creating synthetic marijuana as opposed to normalizing the healing potential of marijuana by itself.
Pharma synthetics are definitely inferior to actual flowers. Inferior but potentially more profitable.