In his latest evolution on drug policy, Obama suggests that he wouldn’t oppose changing marijuana’s Schedule 1 designation – but he’s leaving that to Congress:
“First of all, what is and isn’t a Schedule I narcotic is a job for Congress,” Obama said. … The DEA is required to make determinations, Obama said, but based on laws passed by Congress. A spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy tweeted Wednesday that the attorney general can reclassify marijuana after a scientific review, but that it was “not likely given current science.” But Obama said he would support congressional action to remove the schedule I classification for marijuana.
Sullum calls out Obama for acting like he doesn’t have to power to make that change himself:
While Congress can amend the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) to increase or reduce restrictions on particular drugs, the statute also gives that power to the attorney general, who has delegated it to the Drug Enforcement Administration (a division of the Justice Department). In fact, the DEA has repeatedly rejected petitions to reschedule marijuana, most recently in 2011. I forget: Who was president then?
Apparently Obama forgot too. Obama often speaks as if he is an outside observer of his own administration—condemning excessively long prison sentences while hardly ever using his clemency power to shorten them, sounding the alarm about his own abuses of executive power in the name of fighting terrorism, worrying about the threat to privacy posed by surveillance programs he authorized. Now here he is, trying to distance himself from his own administration’s refusal to reclassify marijuana.
Nicole Flatow points out that the state of “current science” on marijuana is subject to a catch-22, courtesy of the federal government:
[T]here have been many peer-reviewed studies, but very few of sufficient size and scope to satisfy the government, particularly about the drug’s medical benefits. Ironically, this dearth of research is perpetuated by the federal government’s position on marijuana. Federal funding, the lifeblood of academic research, is severely curtailed for large-scale studies of pot, particularly those that aim to study the plant’s potential benefits rather than its potential for abuse, because of the drug’s Schedule I designation. Perhaps even more significantly, the legal access to a supply of marijuana for conducting this research is controlled by one federal agency with a mission to combat drug abuse. And the panel that controls access to the marijuana has delayed and rejected academics’ FDA-approved requests to research some of the most pressing medical marijuana issues, including treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
The Dish 