Pubdate: Thu, 29 May 2014
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2014 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Evan Halper
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?261 (Cannabis - United States)

OFFICIAL POT STASH

The Government's Stockpile of Marijuana for Research Is Impressive, 
and Controversial

OXFORD, Miss. - Walk along the narrow, brightly lighted beige 
hallway, along the washed-out linoleum floor, around the corner to 
the imposing steel vault. As a scientist swings open the door, a 
familiar, overpowering scent wafts out.

Inside, marijuana buds are packed into thousands of baggies filed in 
bankers boxes. Fifty-pound barrels are brimming with dried, 
ready-to-smoke weed. Freezers are stocked with buckets of potent 
cannabis extracts. Large metal canisters are crammed full of hundreds 
of perfectly rolled joints.

The vault even has boxes of "marijuana trash" - contaminated garbage 
that a crafty pothead might try to steal for a cheap high.

It is one of the nation's most impressive stockpiles of marijuana - 
and probably the most controversial.

What makes the cannabis here on the campus of the University of 
Mississippi unique is that it is grown, processed and sold by the 
federal government. The stockpile represents the only source of pot 
allowed for researchers who want to conduct Food and Drug 
Administration-approved tests on using marijuana for medical purposes.

Researchers can't get anything from the 46-year-old Marijuana 
Research Project at Ole Miss unless the Drug Enforcement 
Administration gives the go-ahead. A panel on which the National 
Institute on Drug Abuse is represented often must sign off too. Some 
prominent researchers complain that approval is unreasonably tough 
for scientists whose work aims to find beneficial uses for the drug.

That has made Mahmoud A. ElSohly, the scientist who heads the team 
here, a favorite boogeyman for legalization activists and some researchers.

"It is a bizarre situation," said Orrin Devinsky, director of the 
Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at NYU Langone Medical Center. "The DEA 
is acting like this is 1935 and cannabis is this extremely dangerous 
substance."

Indeed, under federal law, the government classifies marijuana as a 
more dangerous substance than cocaine, one that has no medical use, 
even as consumers in 21 states and the District of Columbia can 
legally light up. The DEA guards the stockpile here as if it were plutonium.

Devinsky, for example, is pursuing research involving a chemical in 
marijuana, known as CBD, which has shown promise in suppressing 
certain types of seizures. The storage vault here contains marijuana 
with high levels of the substance. But physicians can't easily get at 
it - nor can their patients, Devinsky said.

Meantime, patients in states with dispensaries can walk up to a 
counter and buy pot, but with no good information about whether it 
includes a lot of CBD or a little.

ElSohly is currently ramping operations back up at the 12-acre farm 
here, which budget cuts have forced him to keep fallow since 2007. He 
is laying the groundwork to grow 30,000 plants. As he does, he finds 
himself accused of colluding with the DEA to maintain a monopoly.

But ElSohly, an Egyptian immigrant who has been in charge since 1980, 
is not so much a collaborator as a scientist stuck in a time warp. He 
is caught between marijuana researchers and a government agency that 
remains deeply suspicious of marijuana use even as it controls the 
million-dollar contract that funds his project.

Just before taking visitors on a tour of an indoor grow room, where 
he will roll the buds from mature pot plants between his fingers and 
declare "I love it" as he talks of the rich fragrance, ElSohly 
ponders the possibility that it will all come to an end as 
legalization gains momentum.

"I could lose it," ElSohly said of his contract. "But so what? It 
would be just another research project that is terminated. I could 
start another.

"Maybe if it becomes legalized, we could start producing high-quality 
materials for a pharmaceutical product," he adds. Then, he clarifies. 
"The liberalization of those laws really scares me," he says. "To 
have marijuana available just like that? I feel sorry for Colorado 
and Washington state. In a few years, you are really going to see the 
impact of the liberal laws they have there."

Unlike other cannabis researchers, ElSohly says pot should never be 
smoked. You do that for a high, he said, and there are ways to move 
the curative chemicals into your system without getting stoned.

For years, he has been trying to get approval to market a 
suppository. THC, the component of pot that makes people high, is 
"not absorbed through the rectum," he says.

Business proposals like that have been a point of concern for 
critics, who accuse ElSohly of exploiting his insider status for 
profit and failing to recognize that many patients will never be able 
to afford cannabis in the forms he promotes.

The scientist notes that he has to jump through the same hoops as 
every other researcher to get trials approved. He doesn't dare bend 
the rules, he says, since his contract depends on the DEA, and other 
institutions are eager to have it.

In 2007, a DEA administrative law judge ruled that the University of 
Massachusetts should also be permitted to grow pot for research. Top 
officials at the DEA overruled her.

Standing inside his grow room, where hundreds of small plants sit on 
metal grates, illuminated by industrial-scale lamps hanging from 
chains hooked to the 30-foot-high ceiling, ElSohly confides that he 
has never ingested the stuff himself.

"Never ever," he says. "And I can say that with a straight face," he adds.

"It doesn't make sense for me to be working with a controlled 
substance and be using that controlled substance."

That abstinence has made for awkward moments at cannabis conferences.

"They are always asking ElSohly and me to smoke," said Zlatko 
Mehmedic, who was a narcotics official in Yugoslavia before joining 
ElSohly as a top deputy in 1995.

Inside the vault, Mehmedic grabs one of the thousands of baggies of 
buds sent for analysis by law enforcement agencies. Researchers here 
have been monitoring the increasing potency of pot sold on the 
street. A few puffs of the rich, green product he is holding could 
put a novice user in the emergency room, Mehmedic warns.

By contrast, he notes, the Mississippi researchers can say almost 
nothing about the strength or content of the products sold in 
licensed dispensaries.

"I would very much like to be able to get some of the materials 
available in dispensaries, look at them, analyze them, compare them 
with everything else around," ElSohly said. "But I was categorically 
told by the DEA, ' You cannot receive materials from a non-DEA registrant.' "

Meanwhile, the university's pot farm remains a source of great 
interest on campus. Mehmedic looks into the distance at a cluster of 
student housing abutting the farm's outer security fence and smiles. 
In addition to farming, there is also some fishing that goes on at 
the Marijuana Research Project, he says.

"They try, you know, to fish," Mehmedic says of the students, 
mimicking the motion of casting a line over the fence in an attempt 
to reel in a pot plant.

All the anglers ever catch are visits from security.

But, Mehmedic adds, still "they try."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom