Cannabis, commonly known as marijuana, pot, reefer, and grass, is a
preparation of the cannabis plant that is used as a psychoactive drug
or medicine.

The earliest recorded uses date from the 3rd millennium
BC.  Despite its long
history of use as a natural medicine, since the early 20th century
cannabis has been subject to legal restrictions. Possession, use, and
sale of cannabis preparations containing psychoactive cannabinoids
are currently illegal in many parts of the world.

Despite the U.S. government’s prohibition of the plant, scientists
have continued to study it, and people have continued to use it for
both recreational and medicinal purposes.

So far, scientific study of cannabis has identified more than 80 unique, biologically active
cannabinoids. A recent meta-analysis of these compounds shows well
over a dozen therapeutic properties attributable to cannabinoids,
including neuroprotective, anti-cancer, anti-bacterial, and anti-diabetic properties.

A review of several hundred papers assessing cannabis’s therapeutic
properties is available on the National Organization for the Reform
of Marijuana Laws (NORML) website: Recent Research on Medical Marijuana

Support for marijuana use and medical marijuana continues to increase. More than half of Americans say it
should be legal.  Nearly 9 in 10 think doctors should be allowed to
prescribe marijuana for patients.

This year alone there have already been more than 50 legislative initiatives
around the country aimed at legalizing or decriminalizing medical or
recreational marijuana.

States that currently allow marijuana for medical use include Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado,
Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland,
Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire,
New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island,
Vermont, and Washington – as well as the District of Columbia.

Four states have legalized cannabis for recreational
use: Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. Several
others, including Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Nevada, and
Vermont, will soon decide whether to legalize recreational marijuana.

Despite a growing number of states legalizing use of the plant, under
federal law, marijuana is not legal in any form – including for
medical purposes. It is, in fact, against federal law to grow, sell,
or use cannabis for any purpose. Possession and use can lead to fines
and jail time.

But, a majority of Americans don’t think this is a matter that should
involve the federal government. Six in 10 think legalizing marijuana
should be left up to each state government to decide rather than be
decided by the federal government.

And, there are many who think it is none of the government’s business
at the state or federal level. After all, why should other
people (especially politicians) decide how we treat health ailments
and what we can put in our bodies?

Marijuana is currently listed under the Controlled Substances Act as
a Schedule 1 drug, meaning that for the purposes of
federal law, the drug has “no medical use and a high potential for
abuse” and is one of “the most dangerous drugs of all the drug
schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical
dependence.”

The plant shares Schedule 1 status with heroin, LSD, and methaqualone
(Quaalude) and it is more strictly regulated than the powerful
prescription painkillers that have killed more than 165,000 people since 1999.

To put the absurdity of marijuana being classified as Schedule I in
perspective, take a look at the list of drugs that are under the
less-restrictive Schedule II: oxycodone, methamphetamine,
methadone, fentanyl, Adderall, Ritalin, Dexedrine, and…cocaine. The
following drugs are listed under Schedule III: Tylenol with
codeine, ketamine, and anabolic steroids.

A total of 17,465 people died from overdosing on illicit drugs like
heroin and cocaine in 2014, while 25,760 people died from overdosing
on prescription drugs, including painkillers and tranquilizers like
Valium, according to CDC figures.

To date, no one has ever died of a marijuana overdose.

So why is cannabis still illegal in many states, and why won’t the
federal government legalize it (or at least decriminalize it)? It is
safer than other drugs – including pharmaceuticals – and shows a lot
of promise for the treatment and management of many health
conditions.

America’s First Drug Czar, Propaganda, and Reefer
Madness

Harry Jacob Anslinger was a US government official
who served as the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), a predecessor agency
of the DEA that was formed in 1930.

He was America’s first drug czar.

A staunch supporter of the criminalization of drugs, Ansligner played
a pivotal role in cannabis prohibition. He campaigned and lobbied for
passage of the Uniform State Narcotic Act in 1934, which was a
revenue-producing act. The purpose of the act was to make the law
uniform in various states with respect to controlling the sale, use,
and regulation of narcotic drugs throughout all of the states.

When only nine states agreed to adopt the act, Anslinger launched a
nationwide media campaign declaring that marijuana causes temporary
insanity. The advertisements featured young people smoking marijuana
and then behaving recklessly, committing crimes, killing themselves
and others, or dying from marijuana use. The propaganda campaign was
a success and all states signed on.

It is said that prior to the end of alcohol
prohibition, Anslinger claimed that cannabis was not a problem, did
not harm people, and “there is no more absurd fallacy” than the idea
it makes people violent. His critics argue he shifted not due to
objective evidence but due to the obsolescence of the Department of
Prohibition he headed when alcohol prohibition ceased – seeking a new
Prohibition. Of 30 leading scientists whose views he sought, 29 said
cannabis did no harm. However, Anslinger chose to pursue only the
views of the one who did.

In 1937, the Marihuana Tax Act was passed. It effectively made
possession or transfer of cannabis illegal throughout the U.S. under
federal law through imposition of an excise tax on all sales of hemp.
It restricted possession to those who paid a steep tax for a limited
set of medical and industrial uses.

Note: Although the spelling “marijuana” is more common in current
usage, the actual spelling used in the Marihuana Tax Act is
“marihuana.” It was the spelling most commonly used in Federal
Government documents at the time.

New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was the only authoritative voice
who opposed the act. In 1939, he organized the La Guardia Committee, which began the first in-depth
study into the effects of smoking marijuana.

The group’s findings systematically contradicted claims made by the
Anslinger that smoking marijuana resulted in insanity, deteriorates
physical and mental health, assists in criminal behavior and juvenile
delinquency, is physically addictive, and is a “gateway” drug to more
dangerous drugs. Released in 1944, the committee’s report stated that
“the practice of smoking marihuana does not lead to addiction in the
medical sense of the word.”

Anslinger was infuriated by the report, and he condemned it as
unscientific. He denounced Mayor LaGuardia, the New York Academy of
Medicine, and the doctors – who had worked on the research for more
than five years. Anslinger said that they should not conduct more experiments or
studies on cannabis without his personal permission.

The Marihuana Tax Act was overturned in 1969 in Leary v. United States, and was repealed by
Congress the next year.

But that was just the beginning of what we now call the War on Drugs.

Congress replaced the act with the more comprehensive Controlled
Substances Act of 1970.

Scientific American explains what happened next:

Marijuana was placed in Schedule I in 1971 provisionally, until the
science could be assessed. But President Richard Nixon saw pot
prohibition as a way to destroy the antiwar left, according to
clandestine recordings made by Nixon in the White House as well as
statements from his staff to the press. Nixon convened The National
Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse (what became known as the
Shafer Commission) to engineer scientific support for cannabis’s
Schedule I placement. “I want a goddamn strong statement on
marijuana,” Nixon said in tapes from 1971. “Can I get that out of
this sonofabitching, uh, domestic council? … I mean one on
marijuana that just tears the ass out of them.”

The Shafer Commission found in 1972 that cannabis was as safe as
alcohol, and recommended ending prohibition in favor of a public
health approach. But by then the Federal Bureau of Narcotics had
been removed from the Treasury Department and merged into the U.S.
Department of Justice—where Nixon’s ally, Attorney General John
Mitchell, placed cannabis in Schedule I in 1972; that same year he
resigned to head Nixon’s re-election committee. (He later stood
trial in 1974 over the Watergate scandal and served 19 months of a
prison sentence for conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of
justice.] “You want to know what this was really all about?” Nixon
aid John Ehrlichman told journalist Dan Baum in 1994, according to
an article published in Harper’s Magazine in 2016. “The Nixon
campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two
enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m
saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against
the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the
hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then
criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We
could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their
meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did
we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Consequences of Marijuana Prohibition

The war on cannabis has had serious and tragic ramifications,
including the imprisonment of thousands, high taxpayer burdens, loss
of jobs, ruined lives, and infringements on personal freedom.

In the Forbes article On 4/20, It’s High Time To Think About Taxes,
Revenues & Marijuana, Kelly Phillips Erb outlined some of
the impacts of drug laws. Here are a few points from her analysis:

• Legalizing marijuana (like nicotine and alcohol) means that it
  can be regulated. Regulations mean control. And control is directly
  linked to the almighty dollar.
• Taxpayers bear the burden of the costs (but not the revenue) to
  stop them. Each year, the “war on drugs” costs U.S. taxpayers
  $51,000,000,000.
• In 2014, there were 1,561,231 arrests for drug
  violations in the U.S.: 1,297,384 (83%) were for possession of
  drugs, not dealing or distribution. Roughly half of those arrested
  (619,809) for possession of drugs were arrested for possession of
  marijuana.
• The number of Americans incarcerated in 2014 in federal, state,
  and local prisons and jails was 2,224,400 (1 in every 111 adults),
  making it the highest incarceration rate in the world. Those prison
  stays are funded by tax dollars. In 2012, data indicated that a
  $200 transaction can cost society $100,000 for a
  three-year sentence.
• Possession of marijuana can result in felony charges in many
  states. A felony conviction can mean that you are not legally able to
  vote, own a gun, or enlist in the Armed Forces.
• A felony conviction on a drug charge bars you from claiming the American Opportunity
  Tax Credit. You can also lose eligibility for financial aid: in
  2014, more than 200,000 students lost federal financial aid
  eligibility because of a drug conviction.

The DEA’s Domestic Cannabis Eradication / Suppression
Program

The DEA runs a cannabis eradication program that
provides funding to 128 state and local law enforcement agencies. Its
purpose is to aggressively search for, seize, and destroy illegal
marijuana grows across the US. In 2015, federal spending on the
program was $18 million, consistent with levels seen in
previous years. That works out to a cost-per-plant of $4.42. Last
year, local, state, and federal authorities uprooted roughly 4.1
million cultivated marijuana plants in all 50 states.

Who pays for this? Americans do. Much of the money the DEA uses to
run their operation comes from the Justice Department’s asset forfeiture program, which is controversial
itself: under this program, police can seize your property without
charging you with a crime. In 2014, the government seized $4.5 billion from citizens – that’s more than the
total value of assets that were stolen by criminals the same year. In
other words, more assets were taken by law enforcement than by
thieves.

In 2014, via the DEA’s program, 4,300,833 plants were
seized, 6,310 arrests were made, and the value of assets
seized from “cultivators” totaled $27,342,950.59.

States that have legalized marijuana for recreational use were not
immune from eradication programs. Last year, they continued in Washington and Oregon. Full state
breakdowns have not been provided, but a DEA spokesman said that just
under 36,000 marijuana plants were destroyed in Washington last year
at a cost to federal taxpayers of about $950,000, or roughly $26 per
plant.

In many states, the eradication program money is used to fund aerial
operations involving helicopters searching for marijuana plants.
Sometimes, overzealous or untrained officers seize perfectly legal
plants, like okra, mistaking them for marijuana.

What incentive would the DEA have to move the plant to Schedule II or
III – or remove it from the Schedule entirely?

The agency’s website states: “Marijuana is the only major drug of
abuse grown within the U.S. borders.” According to the National Institutes of Health, it is the most commonly
used illicit drug in the country.

Legalizing or decriminalizing cannabis would result in a tremendous
financial loss for the DEA.

But the agency isn’t the only one who is at risk of substantial
financial losses if use of the plant is legalized.

Profits for Big Pharma, Police, and Private Prisons

So far, research on the therapeutic benefits of cannabis shows a lot
of promise. If marijuana replaces widely used prescription drugs,
pharmaceutical companies stand to lose a lot of money.  The medical
properties of cannabis make it a direct competitor with some of their
best-selling drugs, including opioid painkillers like Vicodin and
Oxycontin.

Recent research suggests that marijuana allows people to
treat their pain with lower doses of opioids and that providing
access to marijuana reduces the prevalence of opioid use.

Perhaps decriminalizing marijuana would help resolve the “opioid epidemic” that is plaguing the nation.

The number of prescriptions for opioids doubled over a 15 year period
from 105 million in 1998 to 207 million in 2013. As a result, the
number of fatal overdoses from the drugs soared almost five-fold,
from 4,000 deaths a year in 1999 to nearly 19,000 in 2014. That
includes people who illicitly used prescription opioids and those who
overdosed on pills prescribed for them, reports PBS News Hour.

The American Society for Addiction Medicine’s Opioid Addiction 2016 Facts & Figures
report reveals some tragic statistics:

• Four in five new heroin users started out misusing prescription
  painkillers. As a consequence, the rate of heroin overdose deaths
  nearly quadrupled from 2000 to 2013.
• 94% of respondents in a 2014 survey of people in treatment for
  opioid addiction said they chose to use heroin because prescription
  opioids were “far more expensive and harder to obtain.”
• In 2014, there were 10,574 overdose deaths related to heroin.
• Of the 21.5 million Americans 12 or older that had a substance
  use disorder in 2014, 1.9 million had a substance use disorder
  involving prescription pain relievers and 586,000 had a substance use
  disorder involving heroin.
• In 2012, 259 million prescriptions were written for opioids,
  which is more than enough to give every American adult their own
  bottle of pills.

Additionally, marijuana cannot be patented, making it difficult
for drug companies to profit off its sale. After all, the plant can
be grown in backyards and living rooms.

Maybe that’s why pharmaceutical companies donate millions to politicians year after year. And
maybe that’s why most of their donations go to politicians who are
against marijuana legalization.

Pharmaceutical and health product companies injected $51 million into
the 2012 federal elections and nearly $32 million into the 2014
elections, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). The
industry has already spent nearly $10 million on the 2016 elections
and is expected to spend more.

In 2014, drug companies and their lobbying groups spent $229 million influencing lawmakers, legislation,
and politicians.

Big Pharma isn’t the only industry that lobbies to maintain marijuana
prohibition. Police unions, private prisons, and prison guard unions
do too, because they also profit from the war on drugs.

The Drug Policy Alliance explains how police
departments profit from the drug war:

Funding schemes and asset forfeiture laws have given law
enforcement agencies strong financial incentives to continue the
drug war. Because funding for drug task forces is often based on
the number of arrests made and the amount of property seized in
drug busts, the easiest way for local police to up their numbers
and boost their careers is to target low-level drug offenders. To
create arrest opportunities, police routinely rely on untrustworthy
informants, conduct dangerous home invasions on flimsy evidence,
frame suspects and commit perjury.

Asset forfeiture laws allow law enforcement agencies to seize
property with minimal proof, putting the burden instead on suspects
to prove their own innocence. Because these assets often go
straight into the coffers of the enforcement agency, these laws
have created financial incentives for property seizures that
encourage corruption.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison
corporation, which employs eight lobbyists and have waged multi-million
dollar efforts to influence laws and politics. CCA owns or runs 67
prisons and detention centers nationwide and made a profit of $195 million in 2014.

One of the worst things about marijuana prohibition and the
plant’s Schedule I categorization is this: the federal government
heavily restricts research on drugs in that category.  The DEA listed
the plant under Schedule I under the claim that it has “no medical
use” but there haven’t been many clinical trials because it is very
difficult to get permission to conduct them…because cannabis is
listed under Schedule I.

John Hudak explains the dilemma in his report titled The Medical Marijuana Mess: A Prescription for Fixing
a Broken Policy:

Clinical research and observational studies have shown that medical
marijuana can make chemotherapy more tolerable, boost appetite,
reduce the eye pressure of glaucoma, relieve pain, stop muscle
spasms, treat depression or anxiety, alleviate PTSD, and help with
a whole host of other medical conditions. But these findings, some
of which have emerged from hospitals that are among the finest in
the world, are only the beginning of what we need to know about the
medical potential of marijuana. Any effort to learn more is
seriously hindered by the legal obstacles thrown up by the federal
government’s prohibition on marijuana, which makes it very
difficult for researchers to conduct clinical testing.

The result is that we cannot answer even some of the most basic
questions about how to make the best use of marijuana. We don’t
know every disorder marijuana can treat—and just as important, we
don’t know which ones it can’t. We don’t know the ideal way to get
cannabis into the body (smoking vs. vaping vs. edibles vs. creams
vs. oils). We know even less about dosing, potency, interactions,
and side effects.

More than 60 U.S. and international health organizations,
including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Epilepsy Foundation have called on the DEA to
change the drug’s scheduling status.

In a recent memo to Congress, the Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) said it hopes to decide whether to change the
federal status of marijuana “in the first half of 2016.”

The DEA’s regulations aren’t the only obstacle researchers face.
They must also follow federal regulations that require the marijuana
used in studies to come from a single source: the National Center for
Natural Products Research at the University of Mississippi. Between
2010 and 2015, the government provided marijuana for research
purposes to an average of nine researchers per year. Experts say that
level of support is nowhere near enough to keep up with research
demand.

“Because of this monopoly, research-grade drugs that meet
researchers’ specifications often take years to acquire, if they are
produced at all,” a Brookings Institution report stated last year.

Hudak said the small number of researchers working with marijuana in
any given year is due to an tedious, convoluted application process
– one that requires approval from multiple government agencies and
deters academics from even pursuing this type of research:

People just aren’t applying because of all the headaches involved.
It’s a huge disincentive for the academic community.

University of California, San Francisco integrative oncologist Donald
Abrams is one of the few researchers who have been able to obtain
extremely limited, government-approved supplies of research cannabis
for human trials. He told Scientific American:

Of course cannabis has medical uses. It’s pretty clear from
anthropological and archaeological evidence that cannabis has been
used as a medicine for thousands of years—and it was a medicine in
the U.S. until 1942.

I’m an oncologist and I say all the time, not a day goes by when
I’m not recommending cannabis to patients for nausea, loss of
appetite, pains, insomnia and depression—it works.

Researchers believe cannabis has great potential
in the treatment of major disorders including Alzheimer’s, cancer,
epilepsy, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and
autoimmune diseases.

Lester Grinspoon, an associate professor emeritus of psychiatry at
Harvard Medical School, who has been researching and writing about
marijuana since the 1960s and would prefer the DEA to de-list it
completely, said:

It’s not that we don’t have a lot of information. If you go to
PubMed you’ll find that there are 23,000 papers published on
cannabis. But [with rescheduling] we can open it up to large,
double-blind clinical studies.

Grinspoon added that allowing more freedom to research cannabis will
yield proof that it is the versatile, non-toxic, inexpensive medicine
he’s long believed it to be.

Will the DEA agree to reclassify marijuana this year? This isn’t the
first time the agency has responded to a petition asking it to remove the
plant from Schedule II. In fact – it is the fourth time it has
responded, and a fifth request is also still pending. The first three
petitions were rejected from six to 16  YEARS after they were filed.

While the DEA, the federal government, police departments, Big
Pharma, and the prison industry have a lot to lose if cannabis is
fully legalized, humanity has much to gain.

Hudak sums up the issue perfectly:

The U.S. government has funded research that helped cure some of
the world’s most devastating diseases. With medical marijuana, the
U.S. government’s prohibition doesn’t cure patients; it keeps them
sick. And it also keeps them in ignorance.

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