Researchers demand higher quality cannabis. The DEA promised a few years ago it would let more people grow cannabis for research purposes, but it wasn’t until late last month — as the country locked down under safer-at-home orders to combat the coronavirus pandemic — that the agency unveiled a plan for how it would do that. Under the DEA’s newly proposed rules, the agency would allow more scientists and companies to grow cannabis for research, but they would have to turn it over to the DEA, who would then distribute to scientists.
No One Expected Such Difficulty For Cannabis Research
Most researchers never envisioned that a legitimate attempt to study cannabis’s potential benefits would become a decade-long quest involving fights with universities and the federal government, and attempts to uncover confidential legal documents. Yet this is the complicated maze scientists studying cannabis have been navigating for years. The DEA still classifies cannabis as a Schedule I drug — a restrictive category reserved for substances believed to have no medical value and highly susceptible to abuse.
Researchers Want Access to Dispensary Quality Cannabis
The DEA has repeatedly said it won’t support reclassifying cannabis because there aren’t well-controlled studies or scientific evidence approved by the Food and Drug Administration to show medical benefits. Yet scientists say that if evidence of those benefits is ever going to exist, they need to put real-world cannabis — not what’s made available from the University of Mississippi — through these studies. The menu from the Ole Miss farm — which is largely confined to smokeable flower and THC extract — excludes high-potency products like edibles, shatter or wax.
You can read the continued discussion between cannabis researchers and the DEA. 💚 🌱
