From High Times Magazine:
The Opponents Are Fighting the Test, Not the Plant
Unable to dispute that cannabis is used medically across more than 40 states, opponents spent day two attacking the yardstick. For years, the FDA used a five-part test to judge accepted medical use, one that demanded known, reproducible chemistry and large controlled trials. In 2023, the government switched to a two-part test that asks whether licensed providers widely use the substance under state law, and whether credible science supports at least one condition. Opponents call the switch proof that politics corrupted the process.
The problem is that the switch was neither secret nor cannabis-specific. In 2024, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel ruled the old five-part test “impermissibly narrow,” and the DEA has since used the two-part standard for other substances. Schwartz told the court the legality of the test was already settled and off the table for the hearing. When NDASA attorney David Evans pressed Chiapperino on why the agency abandoned the old test anyway, DEA lawyers objected and he withdrew the question.
There is a reason the old test failed cannabis, and it is not safety. As Vanderbilt law professor Robert Mikos has written, the five-part test amounted to a kind of tyranny: it demanded large-scale clinical trials to justify removing a drug from Schedule I, while Schedule I status blocked exactly those trials from happening. It is a test botanical cannabis, with many active compounds rather than a single molecule, could never pass. One attorney in the room described the opponents’ whole line of attack to Cultivated News as “ships passing in the night,” an argument about a test that is not material to the case actually before the judge.
Read the full article from High Times here: https://hightimes.com/analysis/dea-marijuana-rescheduling-hearing-inside-schedule-iii/
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