THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Because the Federal government still stupidly call Marijuana a Schedule 1 drug and federal rules, if not the money, govern most of the research in this country, the increasing islands of marijuana sanity that have arisen in this country have done nothing to help research about how it does what it does.

Despite the growing momentum for pot legalization, marijuana remains one of the most difficult substances to study in the United States.

Critics blame a labyrinthine federal approval process in which a handful of government agencies hobble gold-standard scientific research with red tape and intimidation and perpetuate a culture of fear and data illiteracy that delays reform.

“These are agencies in place to reflect a policy that marijuana is a prohibited Schedule I substance,” said Paul Armentano, the deputy director for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), a pro-legalization advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. “They are in the business of funding and approving research to reinforce that policy.”

The criminalization of cannabis dates back to 1971, when Richard Nixon’s administration called for a war on drugs. One year before, Congress had passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, classifying marijuana as a Schedule I drug with no medical value and high abuse potential, right alongside Ecstasy and heroin.

Today a trio of federal agencies — the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Food and Drug Administration — regulate the federal marijuana research process, determining which research gets a government stamp of approval, along with research-grade cannabis.

At the federal level, researchers first need approval for their studies from the FDA and the Public Health Service, in an interdisciplinary review process. It isn’t unusual for agency review boards and applicants to engage in a back-and-forth revision process for their protocols. Critically, researchers also require a separate Schedule I license from the DEA. NIDA’s director has the final say on whether studies merit funding. Once studies are approved, the agency releases marijuana that it grows under contract with the University of Mississippi, the site of the nation’s only licensed pot farm and — until recently — the only institution with which it considered partnering.

Critics say the tightfisted multiagency approach bottlenecks marijuana research and invites poorer findings that opponents of reform then recycle into the public debate. The effect, they say, is quantity over quality...

“The federal government uses a very low scientific burden to assess harms associated with marijuana,” he said, adding that the agencies require that pot researchers use “the highest standards of scientific research — knowing that these regulatory and legal hurdles make doing this kind of research nearly impossible.”

Any moron can pass a law but you need to be Einstein to do any research, especially about marijuana.