STOP BLOCKING MARIJUANA RESEARCH

The Agencies That Can Give Permission to Conduct Research into Medicinal Marijuana Are Most Hostile to That Research

Oregonians have made clear, in elections and in public opinion polling,
that they favor careful use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. They also
made clear, in the 1998 Ballot Measure 67 and the 2004 Ballot Measure 33,
that they are uninterested in going beyond current state law to legalize
marijuana for nonmedicinal purposes.

It will be hard for medicinal marijuana to be properly evaluated and
applied if legitimate researchers can't get legal supplies for human
studies to assess the health effects of the drug and unless versions of the
drug can be standardized for sale if recommended by doctors.

It is our strong impression that the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration is conducting a rear-guard action against useful research
efforts. This occurs despite two federal court actions in 2003 that, in
effect, affirm that the federal Controlled Substances Act doesn't trump
state medical marijuana laws or allow federal agents to revoke the licenses
of doctors who legally recommend marijuana.

The delay continues also despite U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen
Breyer's recent advice in Ashcroft v. Raich that patients seek Food and
Drug Administration approval for marijuana as a medicine. But for the FDA
to approve marijuana, researchers would need to test marijuana identical to
what would be sold to patients -- from the same source, the same genetic
strain and grown under the same conditions.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse is the only legal source for marijuana
for research, but NIDA's marijuana is available only for research, not for
distribution -- leaving scientists with no way to test the same product
that would be sold. An effort by the University of Massachusetts to solve
this problem by establishing a facility to grow marijuana specifically for
research aimed at developing it as a prescription drug was blocked by the
federal DEA on Dec. 10 (www.mpp.org/pdf/DEA.pdf).

The bottleneck for legitimate researchers is that the agencies that are
hostile to medicinal marijuana are the gatekeepers of its supply. Two
suggestions:

Federal agencies such as the DEA should stop blocking legitimate research
that is conducted with proper security.

Until the agencies stop erecting unreasonable barriers, the Supreme Court
and federal appeals courts should recognize that FDA approval is not
currently a viable option, so patients need to be afforded full protection
of their states' laws.