WaPo | Bertha Madras is a professor of
psychobiology at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School, with a
research focus on how drugs affect the brain. She is former deputy
director for demand reduction in the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy.
Data from 2015 indicate that 30 percent of current cannabis users harbor a use disorder — more Americans are dependent on cannabis
than on any other illicit drug. Yet marijuana advocates have
relentlessly pressured the federal government to shift marijuana from
Schedule I — the most restrictive category of drug — to another schedule
or to de-schedule it completely. Their rationale? “States have already
approved medical marijuana”; “rescheduling will open the floodgates for
research”; and “many people claim that marijuana alone alleviates their
symptoms.”
Yet unlike
drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration, “dispensary
marijuana” has no quality control, no standardized composition or dosage
for specific medical conditions. It has no prescribing information or
no high-quality studies of effectiveness or long-term safety. While the
FDA is not averse to approving cannabinoids as medicines and has
approved two cannabinoid medications, the decision to keep marijuana in
Schedule I was reaffirmed in a 2015 federal court ruling. That ruling was correct.
