DEA’s Cannabis Decision Flies in the Face of Science, Logic, and Compassion

By now, you’ve probably seen the news: the Drug Enforcement Administration has decided to keep cannabis — despite countless reports on its relative safety, healing properties, and the political and racist reasons for its very prohibition in the first place — ranked as a Schedule 1 drug under the Controlled Substances Act.

“This decision isn’t based on danger. This decision is based on whether marijuana, as determined by the FDA, is a safe and effective medicine,” DEA chief Chuck Rosenburg told NPR. “And it’s not,” he said.

However, it’s painfully obvious to anyone with a sense of the corrupt, behind-the-scenes power schemes typical in politics, that this decision is much more about self-preservation to the DEA than it is about protecting the American people. If cannabis were made legal, the DEA knows it’s only a matter of time before Drug War ideologies continue to fade, and the agency will be disbanded — or at least rebranded, with hopefully less guns — in favor of treating drug addiction as a health condition rather than a crime.

So, at the risk of getting everyone else as equally pissed off as I am while writing this piece, let’s do a short review of the absurdity of prohibition:

• Three recent U.S. presidents in as many administrations have admitted to smoking cannabis despite its prohibited status.
• More than half of the U.S. — as well as many major international players including Canada, Italy, and Germany — have legalized cannabis for medicinal purposes.
• A growing majority of U.S. voters approves of the medical and recreational legalization of cannabis.
• There are thousands of patients, families, doctors, and researchers around the world lauding the plant’s many medicinal benefits.
• Famously, there remain zero recorded deaths attributed to cannabis use (the enforcement of its prohibition, however, has claimed countless victims). Meanwhile, alcohol and tobacco — which are not regulated by the Controlled Substances Act — kill a combined half million Americans every year.
• A top official from the Nixon administration publicly admitted that the Drug War was a racist political strategy, originally instituted to disrupt Black and anti-government hippy communities.
• Black people and other minorities continue to be targeted for drug-related crimes at significantly higher rates than white people.

It’s a sad state of affairs.

And — instead of taking a logical approach to the long list of embarrassing failures the DEA has racked up — the U.S. Department of Justice continues to sit on its hands as its over-funded and now practically obsolete agency runs around, rampantly destroying lives.