Should marijuana be removed from the list of controlled substances (like alcohol)?

Alex raises some great questions about how the DEA evaluates the costs of drugs, and in particular, how it defines “potential for abuse” when scheduling drugs like marijuana. But I think there’s a potentially deeper problem with the Controlled Substances Act scheduling criteria, at least as I understand them: while the statute considers a drug’s medical value, it gives no weight whatsoever to a drug’s recreational value. For example, the key difference between Schedule I and Schedules II-V is that a drug on Schedules II-V has a “currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States” and a drug on Schedule I does not.  

Should the CSA consider the recreational value of a drug? I recognize this question raises deeply philosophical questions that are tough to resolve. And I recognize that considering “recreational value” would pose practical difficulties as well, such as figuring out how to assess the value of fun (we have a comparably easy time assigning dollar figures to things like curing diseases). But it still strikes me as odd that the CSA privileges medical utility to the exclusion of all other types of utility.

It’s possible the CSA criteria work well enough for most drugs. After all, there are thousands of scheduled substances, and I would guess that the vast majority (nearly all?) of them were designed for use in some sort of medical treatment. For these drugs, the focus on medical value (and exclusion on all other types of value) makes perfect sense.

But this focus doesn’t make sense for every drug. Consider alcohol. If alcohol were subject to the scheduling process, it would probably land on Schedule I (where marijuana is now) or at the very least Schedule II. After all, it has a very high potential for abuse, as anyone would define that term, and it arguably has no accepted medical use in the United States. But the CSA exempts alcohol from the list of controlled substances, because 21 U.S.C. section 802(6) expressly excludes “distilled spirits, wine, malt beverages, or tobacco” from the definition of “controlled substance.” If the CSA doesn’t make sense for alcohol (or tobacco), does it make sense for marijuana?

To the extent states like Colorado and Washington want to treat marijuana like alcohol – i.e., as a recreational substance, not (just) a medicine, subjecting marijuana to the CSA’s scheduling process – and the regulations that flow from it – poses a problem. Namely, as I pointed out in an earlier post, even if the DEA were to reschedule marijuana, it would still be subject to federal regulations that are more befitting of medicines than of recreational drugs like alcohol (e.g, one would need a prescription to buy / sell the drug). The pharmacy is probably not the right place to buy alcohol (or tobacco, per CVS’s decision) – so why make it the place where people buy marijuana?