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MARIJUANA MOMENT
GOP CONGRESSMAN CLAIMS TOP FEDERAL DRUG OFFICIAL ‘ADAMANTLY OPPOSES’ MARIJUANA
RESCHEDULING, BUT AGENCY ENDORSED FDA RECOMMENDATION
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POLITICS
GOP CONGRESSMAN CLAIMS TOP FEDERAL DRUG OFFICIAL ‘ADAMANTLY OPPOSES’ MARIJUANA
RESCHEDULING, BUT AGENCY ENDORSED FDA RECOMMENDATION
Published
5 seconds ago
on
April 18, 2024
By
Kyle Jaeger
A GOP congressman is claiming that the head of the National Institute on Drug
Abuse (NIDA) opposes marijuana rescheduling—despite the fact that her agency
officially concurred with a recommendation to implement the reform as well as
the director’s repeated public comments criticizing research barriers imposed by
cannabis’s current Schedule I status.
While Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) said during a House Appropriations Committee
hearing on Thursday that NIDA Director Nora Volkow is “adamantly opposed” to
rescheduling cannabis, the agency declined to substantiate that position in a
statement to Marijuana Moment—instead pointing to the director’s past remarks
and other materials describing how researchers face onerous obstacles in
conducting studies into cannabis due to its Schedule I status under the
Controlled Substances Act (CSA).
In response to a directive from President Joe Biden, the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services (HHS) carried out a review into marijuana scheduling
and ultimately advised the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to move it from
Schedule I to Schedule III. “NIDA concurs with this recommendation,” the letter
transmitting the matter to DEA said.
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Nonetheless, Harris told the head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
during Thursday’s hearing that Volkow herself is opposed to the
reclassification, as well as any move to make “marijuana more broadly
available.” The congressman asked FDA Commissioner Robert Califf whether he’d
discussed the issue with the NIDA director and then pressed him on whether he
was “aware” of her position.
“I’m aware of her opinions, yes,” Califf said, notably declining to push back on
the rescheduling claim.
For drug policy observers, that might raise eyebrows. Volkow has certainly
voiced concerns about the potential impacts of broader availability of marijuana
products, but she’s been nothing if not consistent about her position that the
Schedule I status of drugs—including marijuana and psychedelics, for
example—inhibits necessary research because it requires researchers to jump
through bureaucratic hoops. She’s said she personally hesitates to conduct
cannabis research for that reason.
NIDA didn’t directly contest the congressman’s characterization of the
director’s position on rescheduling in a statement after the hearing. Instead,
it reiterated that the “HHS recommendation to reschedule marijuana is currently
undergoing review with DEA,” adding that the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
that NIDA falls under “does not comment on pending decisions.”
However, the NIDA email to Marijuana Moment did cite Volkow’s 2020 comments
during a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health,
where she testified that “legal and regulatory barriers continue to present
challenges to advancing cannabis research,” including the Schedule I designation
of marijuana under the CSA.
“Obtaining or modifying a Schedule I registration involves significant
administrative challenges, and researchers report that obtaining a new
registration can take more than a year,” she said in the cited testimony. “It
would be useful to clarify aspects of the CSA that have been sources of
confusion and administrative burden for the research community.”
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The NIDA email also linked to a 2017 National Academies report titled “The
Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids: The Current State of Evidence and
Recommendations for Research,” which explained how the process of obtaining
registrations to study Schedule I drugs can be a “daunting experience for
researchers.”
“The substantial layers of bureaucracy that emerge from cannabis’s Schedule I
categorization is reported to have discouraged a number of cannabis researchers
from applying for grant funding or pursuing additional research efforts,” it
said.
“There are specific regulatory barriers, including the classification of
cannabis as a Schedule I substance, that impede the advancement of cannabis and
cannabinoid research,” one concluding point reads.
Again, NIDA didn’t explicitly dispute the idea that Volkow personally opposes
rescheduling as Harris suggested, and as Califf seemed to tentatively
acknowledge, but the director has made abundantly clear that the current system
needs to change in some capacity. A Schedule III reclassification wouldn’t
legalize marijuana or make it more broadly available as far as federal law goes,
but advocates have touted the reform as one means of reducing the administrative
burdens on researchers.
Harris, however, is a vociferous opponent of cannabis reform, and he told DEA
Administrator Anne Milgram in February that he believes FDA came to a “misguided
conclusion” to recommend rescheduling cannabis—challenging the health agency’s
scientific standards and imploring DEA to dismiss them as it prepares to make a
final determination.
He raised a similar point during Thursday’s hearing with the FDA commissioner,
stating that he thinks it’s “absolutely wrong” that the agency used a new
two-pronged review process to reach its rescheduling conclusion, as opposed to
the five-factor review it previously utilized. He said he understood the
decision, however, because marijuana—as a chemically complex botanical—could not
be determined to fit a different classification other than Schedule I under the
prior method.
“Well, obviously marijuana has chemistry that is not known and reproducible
because, if you go into a marijuana dispensary, there are about—I don’t know, I
haven’t been in one— but there are probably 50 different products, all with a
different THC concentration, CBD concentration,” he said. “Marijuana is not a
drug. It is a group of things.”
Harris previewed his line of questioning at the beginning of the hearing,
emphasizing that he has “serious concerns about the actions FDA took when
recommended” rescheduling. He said the two-factor review the agency used “lacks
both substances and data,” and FDA “ignored several factors,” including the
impacts of daily marijuana use and THC-related traffic fatalities.
“The American people deserve to know the effect that modern marijuana has on the
human body,” he said.
Califf was also pressed on the cannabis rescheduling issue during a separate
House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing last week, where he said
there’s “no reason” for DEA to “delay” making a scheduling decision.
He also said that, “as a child of the sixties,” it would “be nice if in my
lifetime we came up with a regulatory scheme” for cannabis.
The commissioner’s comments come as the Biden administration continues to tout
its role in issuing cannabis pardons and directing the marijuana scheduling
review, including in a presidential proclamation declaring April “Second Chance
Month.”
President Joe Biden also discussed the marijuana actions in a historic context
last month, during his State of the Union address.
Vice President Kamala Harris also urged DEA to finish its review and reschedule
marijuana “as quickly as possible” while meeting pardon recipients for a
roundtable event at the White House last month. Behind closed doors, she also
said “we need to legalize marijuana.”
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Monday that it’s now up
to the Justice Department to make a final decision on cannabis scheduling,
adding that the top federal health agency’s recommendation to reclassify
marijuana was “guided by the evidence.”
A DEA official recently said it sometimes takes up to six months for DEA to
complete its analysis of health officials’ scheduling recommendations—which is
just about how long it has now been since the agency began its current cannabis
assessment.
Meanwhile, last month, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra defended his agency’s
rescheduling recommendation during a Senate committee hearing and also told
cannabis lobbyist Don Murphy that he should pay DEA a visit and “knock on their
door” for answers about the timing of their decision.
Certain DEA officials are reportedly resisting the Biden administration’s
rescheduling push, disputing the HHS findings on marijuana’s safety profile and
medical potential, according to unnamed sources who spoke with The Wall Street
Journal.
> Americans Use Marijuana At Nearly The Same Rate In Legal And Non-Legal States,
> Suggesting Criminalization Doesn’t ‘Curtail’ Consumption, Gallup Poll Finds
Photo courtesy of Chris Wallis // Side Pocket Images.
Marijuana Moment is made possible with support from readers. If you rely on our
cannabis advocacy journalism to stay informed, please consider a monthly Patreon
pledge.
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