DEA: 'Marijuana Has No Medical Value'

US Gov't Denies Evidence of Pot's Therapeutic Properties

The US Federal Government has ruled that marijuana has "no accepted medical properties". Note that this decision was made by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which has been at the forefront of a decades-long (and quixotic) "war on drugs".

The decision is a response to a bid to reclassify marijuana, which is currently a Schedule I narcotic; this means that weed is treated as seriously by law enforcement as heroin. The characteristics for Schedule I are that a drug has a high potential for abuse, no medicinal value, and "a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision".

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Leaving aside for the moment that ongoing medical use of marijuana for ailments like cancer and glaucoma gives that classification the lie, note that cocaine (including crack) is only a Schedule II drug, in that it has accepted medicinal value. Earnest Hemingway was prescribed cocaine on several occasions.

Drug scheduling, along with the "war on drugs", was ginned up by the Nixon administration; arguably, neither has been effective in managing drug use in America.

Medical-marijuana activists actually welcome the decision, since it can now be challenged in court. This is not good news for the DEA, since doctors around the world have touted the benefits of medical marijuana for quite some time. The DEA's decision was based on bureaucratic self-preservation: its budget must be used each year, or it gets reduced. 

This understandable from a certain point of view, one supposes, but at what point will the DEA realize that it's just covering its own ears and screaming, in order to avoid hearing what everyone else hears?

The petition has been lingering for nine years; now, if and when the decision is challenged,  marijuana's medical value can be discussed in court by grownups. That is actually a good thing.