Jacob Sullum recently made the case for rescheduling cannabis. Kleiman throws cold water:
There’s no legitimate doubt that some of the chemicals in cannabis have medical value. But “marijuana” doesn’t name a medicine, if a medicine is a material of known chemical composition that clinical trials have shown, at some specific dosage and route of administration, to be safe and effective in the treatment of some specific ailment. The huge variations from strain to strain, and from one means of administration to another, mean that clinical trials would have to be done on specific cannabis preparations, not on “marijuana” as a general category. And it’s only those specific preparations that would then qualify for “downscheduling.”
Even an arbitrary decision to move the plant itself from Schedule I to Schedule II (or even Schedule III) would have mostly symbolic effects. It would still be a federal offense to grow, sell or possess cannabis except as a Food and Drug Administration-approved drug available by prescription. Downscheduling would be a consequence of clinical trials leading to FDA approval and prescription availability, not a substitute for them.
In a follow-up, he adds:
That essay doesn’t include one item on which the discussion has been especially confused: the claim that the President, by himself, has the power to reschedule. In fact, the Controlled Substances Act gives that power to the Attorney General, and requires that the AG get medical advice from the Secretary of HHS and take that advice as authoritative. The AG has delegated his responsibility to the DEA Administrator, and the HHS secretary has delegated hers to the FDA Commissioner.
The Dish 