DEA Blasted for Stonewalling Marijuana Research

The Drug Policy Alliance and Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) released a comprehensive sixteen page report entitled:

 “The DEA: Four Decades of Impending and Rejecting Science.”

The compilation hinges on a two-part argument based on the last 40 years of legislative and scientific studies.

First, the institutes claim the DEA has been refusing to declassify marijuana from the most serious and highest drug classification of Schedule I substances (that that are the most severely addicting and with no medicinal use to the user) without any legitimacy and contradictory authority.
Second, the agency has been curtailing research on medicinal marijuana in the form of derailing applications for clinical trials that aim to either support or validate its medicinal benefits.

The report suggests that there is an inherent conflict of interest for an agency such as the DEA to have the power to classify a controlled substance at the same time as having the power to investigate and enforce it.  The authors recommend taking the power of classification away from DEA and into the hands of health-based agencies.

One shocking bit of information from the report is that out of all controlled substances in the United States, marijuana is the only one that is not produced for research by an independent third party drug manufacturer.

For all other drugs that are classified as controlled substances, a researcher that has FDA approval obtains a license from the DEA and then purchases the drugs from another DEA licensed manufacturer.

The report states that the primary and sole provider of federally approved marijuana is NIDA: The National Institute on Drug Abuse.  Currently there are approximately thirty different studies sanctioned by NIDA.