The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has just ended what’s been described as a 52-year monopoly on growing cannabis for research purposes.
Several large-scale cannabis growers have now been awarded contracts to produce weed for federal research, a move that will hopefully go a long way towards proving what many state and foreign governments already know: Cannabis has powerful medicinal properties, particularly for pain control.
Award-winning journalist Bruce Williams described the marijuana produced on the 12-acre farm at the National Center for the Development of Natural Products at the University of Mississippi—the only federally approved supplier of cannabis for research purposes in the United States—as “terrible, low-THC “schwag.”
That “schwag” has led to several public relations disasters. In one case, Johns Hopkins University pulled out of a medical cannabis trial because they requested marijuana with at least 12% THC, and couldn’t get it from the federal agency. Scientists at the Scottsdale Research Institute (SRI) involved in the trial, speaking with PBS at the time, said what they did receive was contaminated with mold, and “didn’t look like weed [or] smell like weed.”
Another case saw a Massachusetts-based scientist file a lawsuit against the DEA for not reviewing his application to grow marijuana for a trial for MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) and Tripsitter. It came out that the DEA had received 33 such applications since 2016 that it appeared to have simply shelved.
However on May 14, the DEA quietly announced that it would “soon register additional entities authorized to produce marijuana for research purposes,” and that among those entities would be the SRI—who both received the moldy schwag and who actually played a large role in this change of policy.
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A lawsuit, Scottsdale Research vs. DOJ/DEA, brought to light a 2018 memo that suggested the DEA’s Mississippi-monopoly was a violation of federal law, as well as to certain U.S. treaty obligations.
The memo, published by the Office of Legal Council, was kept secret, even in the face of repeated attempts by the legislature to reveal it and discover why, since 2016, the 33 applicants had been repeatedly ignored.
Eventually, SRI’s lawsuit got the U.S. Court of Appeals to order the DEA to respond to why it had not processed SRI’s, or the 32 other applications.
Now the DEA has capitulated, recently publicly approving several applications.
Matthew Zorn, an attorney who co-led the FOIA-based lawsuit, told Leafly that now scientists will be able to conduct research on the kind of cannabis that people are actually using.
“A lot of people may not appreciate the importance of that, with [national cannabis] legalization around the corner,” he said to Bruce Williams. “We don’t know when, but the need for this research is urgent. We can as quickly as possible start growing and have a supply for researchers to get good data.”
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