After
President Obama admitted last year that he doesn’t think marijuana is more
dangerous than alcohol, he was pressed to reconcile this view with the federal
war on weed. Why won’t he once and for all declassify marijuana as a controlled
substance?
The president’s response, and that of his attorney general, is
that it’s a job for Congress. But that’s not true, says Brookings Institution
Senior Fellow John Hudak. According to a report authored by Hudak and Grace
Wallack, the federal Controlled Substances Act clearly details a process by
which the administration can take marijuana out of the drug schedules or, at the
least, lower its schedule so that medical research can proceed.
To the
feds, marijuana is a Schedule 1 substance, considered the most dangerous of the
five classes of drugs. Schedule 1 drugs are defined as having a “high potential
for abuse,” and are the only controlled substances the feds claim have “no
currently accepted medical use.”
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