Why Is Cannabis Illegal Under Federal Law? Part I
Channel: Inhale MD
Date: 2015-09-08

If you're living with a serious medical condition, medical Cannabis may be able to help provide additional relief in conjunction with traditional treatment.  To talk about whether medical marijuana could be right for your condition, call Dr. Tishler at (617) 477-8886.

www.InhaleMD.om

"Hi folks, thanks for tuning in. Today I want to talk a little bit about the current federal standing of marijuana. As you probably are not aware, marijuana became illegal in the United States in 1937 as an agricultural product, but it wasn’t until the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in 1970 that it got listed as an illegal substance for all medicinal purposes. It’s in a category with a whole bunch of medications or substances that are felt not to be medications, one of the stipulations is that they have no accepted medical use. Additionally, they are supposed to have high potential for abuse and a high potential for harm. Those are the three crucibles that land you in the category which is called class I (correction: schedule I) in the controlled substances list. It’s not clear to me or anyone else quite frankly how marijuana ended up on that list in the first place, because at no point as anybody been able to show that it meets those three criteria. And yet, every year, nearly every year, since 1970, there has been a petition or a bill introduced to reclassify it, and it has been an abysmal failure every time. Thankfully at the moment, both the house and the senate have bills in front of them to reclassify it from schedule I to schedule II. Well, schedule II is kind of an interesting choice also. The big problem with schedule I is that it means that there’s no use, and therefore there’s no point in researching it, and you’re just kind of like “nope, can’t go there.”  We all know that that’s not fair and it cuts off avenues for doing the kind of research that would convince people more widely whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. All of the preliminary informations seems to suggest that it’s pretty much a good thing. 
Schedule II contains other narcotic agents like oxycodone, which is in Percocet, and codeine (correction: codeine is actually schedule III), and a handful of others you’ve probably never heard of because you’ve never needed them, thank goodness. So, it would become freely prescribable under federal law if it were moved to schedule II, and research would move ahead in a less impeded fashion. So, I think that many of us the feeling at this point is that politically moving it from schedule I to schedule II would be a major victory. On the other hand, if you stop and actually look at the CSA, you find that marijuana doesn’t fit in schedule II either; it’s not clear that it belongs on any of the schedules -- There are five. Perhaps, if it has to be anywhere, it really ought to be in the Schedule V category, which is your routine rune of the mill over-the-counter agents. 
One of the most interesting studies that came out was about two years ago. There was a study done in the United Kingdom looking at their controlled substances law and ours, which are remarkably similar, and the interesting bit was that when they actually looked at the agents and reclassified them specifically without regard to political agenda, and simply by basis of harm and risk of abuse, what they found was that cannabis, LSD, and ecstasy all fall into a category of low risk low harm, and in fact, were significantly less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco, which at least in the United States and the United Kingdoms are sort of easily accessible to anyone who isn’t a minor."