“Why Medical Marijuana Research Is Gaining Support From the GOP”

The title of this post is the headline of this notable new Rolling Stone article. Here is a snippet:

Senator Orrin Hatch … is among a frustrated set of the nation’s policy makers who are up in arms over a Washington Post report that Sessions’ Justice Department is blocking the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) from approving about two dozen proposals for experts to research the effects of marijuana.  Not to legalize weed.  Not to sell it.  Not even to smoke it. Merely to study it – just as is allowed with deadly and highly addictive opioids, booze and even cigarettes – to find out if 38 states and the District of Columbia have made grave mistakes by allowing marijuana to be used either medicinally or recreationally, or whether those states are actually on to something.

At 83, Hatch agrees with his former Senate colleague Jeff Sessions on much of his prohibitionist stance on weed – but he says the attorney general and his DOJ are basically out of touch when it comes to medicinal marijuana, which can be ingested as an oil or a baked good or even developed into high-grade pharmaceuticals. “I think it’s a mistake.  We ought to do the research,” Hatch continues.  “They’re worried about a widespread abuse of the drug, which is something to worry about because it is a gateway drug that’s a very big problem. But there’s a difference between smoking marijuana – using it illegally – and using it to alleviate pain and suffering.”

Pot remains listed by the DEA as a Schedule I drug, which is a classification that by definition means the government sees no medicinal benefit to it, along with the likes of LSD, ecstasy and peyote.  But now 30 states have embraced marijuana for a varying degree of medicinal purposes, but there isn’t good, peer reviewed research on it because many researchers don’t want to risk a DEA raid or being cut off from future federal grants.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers on the Senate Appropriations Committee are working to enact what eventually could become a national standard for marijuana quality, and they want to start by allowing testing of pot already seized by the DEA.  That’s why a handful of lawmakers are trying to pressure Sessions into relaxing his own personal war on marijuana that seems to be tying the hands of officials at the DEA.  “There’s really only one reason to sit on a request: Because you suspect that perhaps the science will show that medical marijuana does have some therapeutic benefit and therefore disprove the need for the failed war on marijuana,” Colorado Democrat Jared Polis tells Rolling Stone.