Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
Today, the Drug Enforcement Administration is expected to announce its response to a congressional petition calling on the agency to reschedule marijuana on the Federal Register. Currently, the plant is scheduled as a Class I drug on the Register, meaning it is highly addictive and has no medicinal qualities – yes, the government just routinely lies about everything and always has, that lie has been official government policy since 1970.
As the article in MarketWatch pointed out, any action the DEA takes would have massive implications for the white-market marijuana industry, which has attempted to operate in the states where it is legal outside of federal law. Naturally, the black-market marijuana industry would remain unaffected regardless of the DEA, as it always has.
The DEA has three options, one of which is highly likely, one of which is highly unlikely and the last is unlikely-and-worse-than-it-sounds.
The option the DEA is highly likely to take is that of doing nothing, leaving marijuana classified as a schedule I drug as doing so would be most advantageous to the agency. Leaving it scheduled as it is allows the agency to carry on using the strategies and tactics to “combat” the “problem” that it has for the better part of 40 years, violence, theft and kidnapping. Oh, sorry, raids, asset forfeiture and arrest. Leaving marijuana where it is allows state and local law enforcement agencies to rationalize bloated budgets to “fight” the problem. After all, it’s expensive to arrest, try and incarcerate someone who has never hurt anyone, so, after the government steals all the property it can from the person they arrest, the taxpayers end up footing the rest of the bill, to the tune of an average of $30,000 per year to keep someone in prison. This is good for law enforcement agencies as it boosts their budgets and makes them look useful and important, like they’re really out there keeping us all safe from a plant. The PR works on some people, believe it or not.
The highly unlikely option the DEA could take is to de-schedule marijuana altogether. This action would put cannabis sativa and cannabis indica on the same level, as far as the DEA is concerned, with solanum lycopersicum, aka a common tomato plant. This would do nothing to serve the agency’s or the government’s purposes. It denies avenues for asset forfeiture, so this change would be of no use to law enforcement. It would amount to government relinquishing an iota of the stranglehold on power they have over every aspect of the daily lives of the peasantry, and of course the most worshipful state has no interest in doing that. Plus, changing course now, 40 years on, would carry with it the implication that the government was wrong about something; which is, of course impossible since we’ve always been at war with Eurasia. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
The unlikely-and-worse-than-it-sounds option would be for the DEA to reschedule marijuana as something other than a Class I drug, and put it into the same class as prescription pharmaceuticals like OxyContin and Vicodin. While this would allow for federally-funded experimentation on marijuana to assess and concentrate its medicinal qualities (research the government shouldn’t be funding with taxpayer money anyway), it would also throw a massive wrench into the works already running in the 25 or so states that have legalized medicinal marijuana. In those states, a doctor “recommends” marijuana to a patient since Class I drugs can’t ever be prescribed. As such, there’s no DEA tracking of doctors who recommend marijuana as there is for doctors who write a suspiciously-high number of prescriptions for pain pills. If the DEA were to reschedule marijuana, it would force all those patients to return to their doctor to get a prescription for marijuana since the mere recommendation would no longer be legally sufficient. Faced with the scrutiny the DEA puts on any doctor prescribing drugs, it’s likely many of those medical marijuana patients would find themselves, once again, denied a legal source of marijuana – a side effect that would suit the state’s purposes just fine. By all means, return to the streets; there the state can arrest people seeking marijuana, and steal the property of those selling it.
While there really is no good news from a philosophical perspective about the impending ruling, MarketWatch, being a business news outlet above all else, did find a silver lining.
“A relaxing of regulations could bridge the divide between state and federal governments. It could also make the nearly $7 billion industry more attractive to established companies in the health care space.” Kathleen Burke concluded for MarketWatch.
She’s not wrong, and probably can’t be blamed for not knowing that the last thing pot smokers want is to have to get an actual prescription so they can get some weed produced by a faceless big pharma conglomerate that’s using their size and clout to cash in on an emerging market and crush its competition therein. Probably not a bad thing for shareholders in said big pharma company, but a bum deal for everyone else. Odd how so much government regulation works out that way, isn’t it?
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