Bloomberg March 7, 2018 By Josh Dean
Why? Because the feds are bogarting the weed, while Israel and Canada are grabbing market share.
Lyle Craker is an unlikely advocate for any political cause, let alone one as touchy as marijuana law, and that’s precisely why Rick Doblin sought him out almost two decades ago. Craker, Doblin likes to say, is the perfect flag bearer for the cause of medical marijuana production—not remotely controversial and thus the ideal partner in a long and frustrating effort to loosen the Drug Enforcement Administration’s chokehold on cannabis research. There are no counterculture skeletons in Craker’s closet; only dirty boots and botany books. He’s never smoked pot in his life, nor has he tasted liquor. “I have Coca-Cola every once in a while,†says the quiet, white-haired Craker, from a rolling chair in his basement office at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he’s served as a professor in the Stockbridge School of Agriculture since 1967, specializing in medicinal and aromatic plants. He and his students do things such as subject basil plants to high temperatures to study the effects of climate change on what plant people call the constituents, or active elements.
Craker first applied for a license to grow marijuana for medicinal research in 2001, at the urging of Doblin, the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit that advocates for research on therapeutic uses for LSD, MDMA (aka Ecstasy), marijuana, and other psychedelic drugs. Doblin, who has a doctorate in public policy, makes no secret of his own prior drug use. He’s been lobbying since the 1980s for federal approval for clinical research trials on various psychedelics, and he saw marijuana as both a promising potential medicine and an important front in the public-relations war. Since 1970 marijuana has been a DEA Schedule I substance, meaning that in the view of the federal government, it’s as dangerous as LSD, heroin, and Ecstasy, and has “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.â€
By that definition, pot—now legal for medicinal use by prescription in 29 states and for recreational use in eight—is more dangerous and less efficacious in the federal government’s estimation than cocaine, oxycodone, or methamphetamine, all of which are classified Schedule II. Scientists and physicians are free to apply to the Food and Drug Administration and DEA for trials on Schedule I substances, and there are labs with licenses to produce LSD and Ecstasy for that purpose, but anyone who seeks to do FDA-approved research with marijuana is forced to obtain the plants from a single source: Uncle Sam. Specifically, since 1968 the DEA has allowed only one facility to legally cultivate marijuana for research studies, on a 10-acre plot at the University of Mississippi, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and managed by the Ole Miss School of Pharmacy.
More:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-07/america-is-giving-away-the-30-billion-medical-marijuana-industry
