Lawmakers demand acting DEA chief’s ouster after he calls medical marijuana ‘a joke’
A bipartisan group of lawmakers say the acting DEA chief’s dismissal of medical marijuana as ‘a joke’ is no laughing matter — and they want him out of the job.
Chuck Rosenberg, who came on as the acting administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration after embattled head Michele Leonhart resigned in May, told reporters on Nov. 4 that calling marijuana a medicine is “a joke,” and that smoking marijuana “has never been shown to be safe or effective as a medicine.”
“What really bothers me is the notion that marijuana is also medicinal — because it’s not,” he said.
Currently, some 23 states and the District of Columbia disagree, having medical marijuana laws on the books allowing for the use of pot to treat a range of ailments and illnesses, including chronic pain, glaucoma, muscle spasms, seizures, and to counter appetite loss in cancer and HIV/AIDS patients. Another 17 states have approved measures that allow the use of cannabinoids, the chemical compound found in the pot plant, for medicinal purposes.
Seven lawmakers signed a letter delivered to the White House Thursday, telling President Obama that “Mr. Rosenberg is not the right person to lead the DEA.” The letter was spearheaded by Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., and included signer Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., who has been fighting for medical marijuana acceptance in congress for over a decade. While four states and D.C. have fully legalized pot, and scores of states have decriminalized it, marijuana, including the use of it for medicine, remains illegal at the federal level.
President Obama, however, has directed his Justice Department to take a largely hands-off approach to medical marijuana and pot as a whole in states that have legalized it. He removed longstanding barriers to streamlining federal medical marijuana research this summer.
The lawmakers said that for millions of Americans, medical marijuana is serious business. Entire families have moved thousands of miles to legal states like Colorado to help treat their children suffering from crippling diseases like epilepsy, for example.
“There is no doubt in my mind that my son Jagger is still alive today because of medical cannabis,” said Sebastien Cotte, who helped deliver a petition to the DEA Friday with a group of medical marijuana patients and caregivers. The petition, hosted online by Change.org, also calls for Rosenberg’s replacement. It had over 101,000 signatures Friday afternoon.
“Cannabis has tremendously decreased the pain and seizures caused by his mitochondrial disease, while improving his quality of life. For our family, that’s no joke,” she added.
“Mr. Rosenberg’s statements send a clear signal to the American people that the federal government isn’t listening to them. It erodes trust,” the lawmaker’s letter reads. “Cavelier statements like these fly in the face of state policy and the experience of millions of patients.”
On Friday, the DEA clarified Rosenberg’s remarks in a statement sent to Foxnews.com.
“We’ve been trying to make clear that Acting Administrator Rosenberg indicated that marijuana should be subject to the same levels of approval and scrutiny as any other substance intended for use as a medicine,” the DEA said.
“In fact, DEA supports efforts to research potential medical uses of marijuana. To this end, DEA has never denied a registration request from anyone conducting marijuana research using FDA approved protocols. Acting Administrator Rosenberg has also been clear to point out there are a number of marijuana components and/or extracts which appear to show promise as medicines, but have not yet been approved as safe and effective.”
This is not how the lawmakers interpreted Rosenberg’s comments, rather, they charge, “the only reason there are remaining doubts about the safety and effectiveness of marijuana, or questions about the proper applications of extracts or component parts, is because federal policies have routinely hampered medical marijuana research for decades.”
In May, a Harris Poll found that some 81 percent of Americans supported the legalization of medical marijuana. Furthermore, according to the most recent Gallup Poll, 58 percent of Americans now think marijuana would be fully legal.
Filed under: General Problems
I’ve stated this following here in one form or another, ad nauseum, s i apologize if one is becoming annoyed at my presentation of this idea yet again; understand that many have not yet been exposed to this idea, so frequency of presentation is a necessary exercise.
The CSA of 1970 and the associated creation of the DEA is one of the greatest public policy failures that this nation has ever seen and had inflicted upon it. Prohibition does not work. Draconian laws and the locking of millions in cages to enforce the prohibition does not work. Trillions of dollars invested in enforcing the prohibitionist policy does not work. We have 45 years of trying the same kinds of things and we are worse off than we started. The policy has created more criminals, led to greater incidences of violence by both sides and has not changed the per capita rate of addiction in any significant way. We incarcerate a greater percentage of our population than any other nation on the planet and in the history of the planet as far as I am aware; most of the incarcerations are related to the CSA of 1970. We have sacrificed significant amounts of our Constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties on the altar to the gods of prohibition with a promise of greater security in tern for the sacrifice of Liberty and the promise has been broken time and time again.
We need to do something different. A harm reduction model that includes treating addiction as the disease that it is, rather than a manifestation of criminal behavior would be a fine start. While I do not use these prohibited substances recreationally myself, I believe that the whole Neopuritanical concept of not allowing an otherwise responsible adult to choose to do so is a fundamental violation of the concept that the ultimate arbiter of personhood, is the individual themself. While outright legalization and regulation, in terms of treating these substances as we do alcohol, is too much for some, I would be content for there to be a model similar to what Portugal has instituted. After 15 years in force, the Portuguese model has proven to be a reasonable and more productive public policy than we have. The So-called War on Drugs is one of those treatments that is worse than the disease.
Harrumphfft. When Professor Lyle Craker of UMASS Amherst teamed with a group of faculty at Tufts Medical School, to grow a standardized strain of Cannabis sativa and create a standardized extract, to provide the FDA with the reference material it needed, so that it could write a protocol for clinical trials of cannabis and cannabis derivatives, the University had to litigate with DEA, because DEA arbitrarily denied the professors’ request for permission to create the very substance that the FDA required, in order to perform such tests. The litigation dragged on for years.
DEA’s claim is facially fraudulent. The Agency can not “support research that follows an FDA protocol”, while denying FDA the ability to procure the substance it needs, to create the very same protocol.
The only way to teach the Agency anything, is to constrain it from paying its officials a salary.
Congress? What say you?