Pubdate: Sun, 07 Aug 2016
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Copyright: 2016 The Denver Post Corp
Contact:  http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122

DEA DRAGGING ON POT DECISION

Colorado's now years-long experiment with legal medical and 
recreational cannabis markets has been mostly positive and 
fascinating, and yet the federal government has been slow to rethink 
its decades-long prohibitionist position.

We hope the Obama administration takes advantage of its historic 
opportunity to end or take steps toward dismantling the destructive 
war on pot. What an irony it would be if Obama, who has openly 
admitted to pot use in his early years, and who has shown great 
tolerance toward local legalization laws, left office without having 
moved the nation away from the antiquated reefer-madness enforcement 
of past presidencies.

The problem appears to be entrenchment at the U.S. Drug Enforcement 
Administration, which missed the July 1 deadline it set for itself to 
reach a determination on whether to reclassify marijuana from its 
current - laughable - position as a Schedule I substance. Like 
heroin, the classification is reserved for the most dangerous drugs 
with which the DEA concerns itself.

A DEA spokesman told The Cannabist's Alicia Wallace last week that 
the agency remains in the final stages of an interagency review. But 
Denver regulatory attorney Tom Downey, who recently wrote in these 
pages about the DEA's reclassification or declassification options, 
suggested the DEA would not reach a decision this year.

Certainly the issues are complex. But few of the social-ills 
predictions for Colorado and the small handful of state and local 
jurisdictions that allow recreational sales, as well as the many that 
allow medical marijuana, have come to pass. In June, for example, 
data from the state's Healthy Kids Colorado Survey showed that 
marijuana use among high school students has not increased and tracks 
the national average.

Meanwhile, families trust medical marijuana to help children with 
seizures and other ailments. Patients with serious conditions seek 
medical marijuana for a range of treatments. They do so largely 
without significant scientific study to guide them.

Both medical and recreational markets struggle with the fact that the 
federal definition of marijuana continues to block law-abiding 
dispensary owners from reasonable access to banks, creating a largely 
cash-only business model that invites risk and related security 
expense. The businesses also face enormous tax penalties and layer 
upon layer of regulatory hurdles few other legal businesses would tolerate.

In the absence of sensible national rules, Colorado also faces 
tensions when it comes to regulating medical marijuana patients who 
opt to grow their own, as we saw last month when state regulators 
took against against four doctors for recommending excessive numbers 
of plants to patients. If marijuana were legal, such problems would 
wither away.

We get it that ending marijuana prohibition would be difficult. Back 
in 2012, when Colorado voters were asking themselves whether to 
support Amendment 64, we urged them to vote against it for reasons 
specific to the amendment itself and yet also called for an end to 
prohibition at the federal level, which we considered the more 
appropriate approach.

Perhaps more debate is needed before the feds can get behind 
full-scale legalization. But without the kind of scientific research 
that prohibition shackles, it is difficult to see how that debate 
could be well-informed.

The DEA should step up and look past its ridiculous hardline approach.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom