Marijuana is not, and never has been, heroin.
It’s not physically addictive and can’t kill you in an overdose.
And yet, for generations, weed has been federally declared a Schedule I drug, just like heroin and LSD — which isn’t addictive and can’t produce lethal overdoses, either — a subject for another day. (As is the efficacy of treating opiates as a legal rather than medical issue, but — baby steps.)
But the good news is that, after a study instigated by President Joe Biden, his administration’s Department of Health and Human Services last week recommended that the Drug Enforcement Administration significantly lower restrictions on marijuana, saying it wants pot moved from Schedule I to Schedule III under the CSA. Politico called it “potentially the biggest change in federal drug policy in decades.”
So two cheers for democracy and all that. Because the HHS did not advise that reefer be entirely removed from the Controlled Substances Act, as it should be.
But after all these years of absurd, dangerous, life-wrecking prohibition, the feds are finally on the right course.
Californians might shrug at the move, as marijuana has been legal here for years now, and we can walk into corner shops — so long as a city’s pols have been properly paid off — that are, just like liquor stores, by turns scuzzy or fancy, and have some tattooed youngster in a white lab coat sell some very pricey, highly taxed sinsemilla that at least has the advantage of being tested to show it was grown organically, and thus not filled with pesticides like that ‘70s-era paraquat.
But the demotion to Schedule III still does offer significant advantages to the retail-sales situation even in states that have already legalized the devil weed within their own borders.
That’s because the federal criminalization of marijuana has continued to make it very difficult for retailers even in states where pot is legal to be able to engage in normal banking and to accept credit cards for purchase.
Not only that — as Politico reports, “But because cannabis businesses are not federally legal, they are subject to a federal tax code that prohibits narcotics traffickers from taking typical tax exemptions for business expenses like salaries and benefits. That code does not apply to Schedule III, so if the DEA approved HHS’ recommendation, cannabis businesses around the country would immediately be paying much less in federal taxes.”
“It’s giant,” said Charlie Bachtell, CEO of Cresco Labs, one of the country’s largest cannabis companies, told Politico in an interview. “I think you would see a healthier cannabis industry a year from now.”
There would also be a significant side effect that would help in the academic study of how marijuana affects health, which has long been hindered by a weird federal regulation: researchers have for decades only been able to obtain cannabis from a single pot farm at the University of Mississippi. The stuff they grow there has scant resemblance to the high-THC marijuana California consumers can legally buy.
So it’s all good, right? “President Biden is effectively declaring an end to Nixon’s failed war on cannabis and placing the nation on a trajectory to end prohibition,” Edward Conklin, executive director of the US Cannabis Council, said in a statement.
Well, no. The move would go nowhere toward addressing the erasure of past criminal records of Americans wrongly imprisoned over many decades for mere marijuana possession, cultivation and sales, which has disproportionately affected so many Black, Brown and poor people. That needs to change.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
