In letter to Prez Trump, Gov Christie throws cold water on idea of marijuana as part of solution to opioid crisis

Prez Trump’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis issued this big final report today, and marijuana only gets some minor mentions throughout the document.  The heart of the report’s themes and recommendations are usefully summarized in this extended letter to Prez Trump penned by Commission Chair Chris Christie, and that letter include this notable final substantive  paragraph speaking directly to the notion that marijuana reform should be part of the response to the opioid crisis: 

The Commission acknowledges that there is an active movement to promote the use of marijuana as an alternative medication for chronic pain and as a treatment for opioid addiction. Recent research out of the NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse found that marijuana use led to a 2½ times greater chance that the marijuana user would become an opioid user and abuser. The Commission found this very disturbing. There is a lack of sophisticated outcome data on dose, potency, and abuse potential for marijuana. This mirrors the lack of data in the 1990’s and early 2000’s when opioid prescribing multiplied across health care settings and led to the current epidemic of abuse, misuse and addiction. The Commission urges that the same mistake is not made with the uninformed rush to put another drug legally on the market in the midst of an overdose epidemic.

For the record, I agree with the notion that we do not want to make mistakes in marijuana law and policy as a result of an “uninformed rush” to do anything. But marijuana’s continued status as a Schedule 1 drug play a huge role in keeping us “uninformed” about so many aspects of the drug’s potential benefits and harms, and only by moving marijuana off that Schedule do we really have any real chance in the coming years to start to get more of the needed “sophisticated outcome data on dose, potency, and abuse potential for marijuana.”