{"id":19862,"date":"2025-08-23T17:01:17","date_gmt":"2025-08-23T16:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/?p=19862"},"modified":"2025-10-21T20:58:02","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T19:58:02","slug":"the-illusion-of-safe-marijuana-rescheduling-it-only-helps-big-weed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/2025\/08\/the-illusion-of-safe-marijuana-rescheduling-it-only-helps-big-weed\/","title":{"rendered":"The illusion of \u2018safe\u2019 marijuana\u00a0– rescheduling it only helps Big Weed"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Kevin Sabet\u00a0\u00a0August 22, 2025\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2018, 27-year-old Bryn Spejcher, an inexperienced marijuana smoker in California, killed her boyfriend Chad O\u2019Melia by stabbing him 108 times, a crime the local district attorney described as \u201chorrific\u201d and \u201cone of the worst our medical examiner has ever seen.\u201d A jury found Spejcher guilty of involuntary manslaughter, but she received only probation at sentencing because of a compelling presentation of her defense of cannabis-induced psychosis. Prior to the violent incident, Spejcher had taken two hits of legal marijuana from a bong, and claimed that she began \u201cseeing things that weren\u2019t there\u201d and lost touch with reality. She also stabbed herself repeatedly in the neck, and stabbed her own dog. Law enforcement agents called to the scene had to break her arm with a metal baton to get her to let go of the knife; multiple Taserings had no effect.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Cases like Spejcher\u2019s\u00a0illustrate the stakes involved in the federal reclassification of marijuana. If President Trump follows through with such a move, the drug would remain illegal on the federal level, but would receive an imprimatur of being safer and face fewer restrictions, with significant commercial and social implications.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet voices across public discourse persist in asking: why should anyone\u00a0care<\/em>\u00a0if President Trump does just that?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Celebrities like Mike Tyson and Joe Rogan\u00a0and hedge-fund bosses like Andrew Lahde\u00a0tell us that marijuana is no big deal. Numerous states have already legalized it for medical and recreational usage, and they claim to be regulating it well. If we are to believe the advocates, marijuana is a miracle cure for PTSD, anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder \u2014 not to mention an unbeatable salve for the pain suffered by cancer patients.<\/span><\/p>\n

So what sense does it make for this drug to sit in the same federal category as PCP and heroin? Isn\u2019t marijuana\u2019s placement in Schedule I, the most serious category, merely a relic of discredited thinking from the bad old days of the War on Drugs? It isn\u2019t. To understand why\u00a0it isn\u2019t, and why a Trump move to reclassify weed would risk unmitigated harm to American health and safety, it\u2019s first important to clear up some common misunderstandings around how and why drugs end up classified as they do.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Under the Controlled Substances Act of 1971, a five-part schedule was established for classification of potentially dangerous drugs. This schedule is emphatically not an index either of a drug\u2019s \u201chardness\u201d or a kind of unofficial charging and sentencing guide for prosecutors and judges. Placement is earned specifically through consideration of a drug\u2019s accepted medical use and its abuse risk. Drugs with no accepted medical use and a high risk of abuse get placed in Schedule I.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s the commonality between marijuana and heroin; under federal law, the relevant agencies necessarily view them that way.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Neither has an accepted medical use, though both drugs have approved medicines derived from them that remain in lower schedules (the medicine dronabinol, for example, is synthesized THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, and is in Schedule III). Both have high risks of abuse. The argument that one is a \u201chard\u201d drug and the other is not\u00a0 \u2014 which is debatable, especially given today\u2019s ultra-high-potency weed \u2014 simply doesn\u2019t come into play.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Nor does the criminal-justice question. Keeping marijuana in Schedule I isn\u2019t, as critics have it, a carceral strategy; conversely, moving it into Schedule III isn\u2019t a de-carceral one. Under a move to Schedule III, the drug would remain federally illegal, still subject to the enforcement power of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Justice. No low-level offender would see his sentence commuted. This is sort of beside the point anyway, since most low-level marijuana users never receive a sentence for anything.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But how can it be, another objection runs, that the drug has no medical use? Most US states currently allow doctors to recommend it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That, again, is technically correct. But the decisions those states made to allow doctors (and in some cases, \u201cdesignated caregivers\u201d) to recommend marijuana to treat pain and other issues were political decisions, not medical or scientific ones. Voters stated a preference; that has no effect on how federal agencies are required by current law to view the question. The facts of just how those recommendations get handed out drive home that political aspect. In 2022, Pennsylvania saw some\u00a0132,000 medical-marijuana certifications, a third of the state\u2019s total for that year, issued by only 17 doctors.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those decisions, taken in the aggregate, don\u2019t constitute an accepted medical use. Or at least, they didn\u2019t until October 2022. That was the month the Biden administration directed its Department of Health and Human Services to look into a possible reclassification of the drug.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis schedule is emphatically not an index either of a drug\u2019s \u2018hardness\u2019 or a kind of unofficial charging and sentencing guide.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Again, history is important here. Before the Biden process, the federal government had used an\u00a0eight-factor test to determine\u00a0how to schedule various drugs. Those factors focus on what the current and historical patterns of its abuse look like, as well as what that means for individual users, what risk it presents to public health, how likely it is to cause dependence (either physical or psychological), the state of the science around the drug and its pharmacology, and whether it\u2019s a chemical precursor or \u201canalogue\u201d of another controlled substance.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

By these metrics, marijuana is precisely where it belongs in Schedule I. The best science shows that it isn\u2019t an effective medical treatment. One of the most frequent conditions it\u2019s used to treat is chronic pain. But the 2017 study cited to prove its efficacy there has seen dozens of subsequent meta-analyses and reviews fail to support its conclusions;\u00a0a 2022 study of a decade\u2019s worth of surgical records\u00a0from a Cleveland hospital even found that using marijuana actually increases pain after surgery.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The data also demonstrate that marijuana poses a significant risk of dependency:\u00a0addiction rates are around 30%\u00a0of all users and rising. Addiction in this case means exactly what it does for other substances: inability to quit, a need for ever more of the drug to achieve the same effect, and even withdrawal symptoms. Given the recent avalanche of data cataloguing marijuana\u2019s harms specifically to cardiac and mental health \u2014 like a June\u00a0British Medical Journal<\/em>\u00a0review\u00a0 connecting it to\u00a0a two-fold risk of cardiovascular death\u00a0or the massive Danish study from 2023 suggesting that as much as 30% of schizophrenia cases among men between 21 and 30 were linked to cannabis-use disorder \u2014 its wider public-health risks are glaringly clear.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Biden administration supplanted the eight factors with a new system seemingly designed to push the drug into a less restrictive schedule. The Biden recommendation \u2014 likely a political compromise between the status quo and full legalization, timed just before Joe Biden\u2019s re-election bid \u2014 also incorporated the shaky argument that\u00a0because<\/em>\u00a0so many states have made political decisions to allow medical marijuana, that constitutes an accepted medical use.<\/span><\/p>\n

An incisive article in\u00a0JAMA Neurology<\/em>, by the Harvard addiction scientist Bertha Madras, took a hard look at the process and found disturbing evidence of politicization. This included the fact that a high-ranking Biden DOJ official, Acting Assistant Attorney General Peter Hyun, argued that \u201ccannabis has not been proven in scientific studies to be a safe and effective treatment for any disease or condition\u201d \u2014 six months before the rescheduling directive appeared. Yet the science Hyun cites certainly had not changed in the interim.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The federal government has long held the position Hyun laid out. Under the Obama administration, Jay Inslee and Gina Raimondo \u2014 then the governors of Washington and Rhode Island, respectively \u2014 petitioned the federal government to reclassify marijuana. The administration\u2019s response made clear that federal drug schedules reflect what the science says, not \u201cdanger\u201d or \u201cseverity.\u201d\u00a0Obama\u2019s then-DEA chief, Chuck Rosenberg, announcing the denial of the petition, used language Hyun would later echo: \u201cThis decision isn\u2019t based on danger. This decision is based on whether marijuana, as determined by the FDA, is a safe and effective medicine . . . and it\u2019s not.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Suggested reading<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

I have seen the damage cannabis does<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

By\u00a0Peter Hurst<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

But let\u2019s assume, for the sake of argument, that Trump reverses years of federal precedent to follow the logic of the rescheduling argument. What happens then?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The truth: no one knows.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear that the marijuana industry believes that rescheduling will be an enormous benefit to its shareholders. In one sense, that\u2019s likely correct. Businesses selling substances in Schedule I face severe commercial restrictions under the tax code. A provision of the tax code prevents any such business from taking normal deductions at tax time on expenses like advertising. Lifting those restrictions seems sure to provide an enormous boost to revenues and reach for businesses selling marijuana products.<\/span><\/p>\n

The impact on society is a different matter. The available evidence suggests that this will be a significant negative for society, especially given the research around how the young start using the drug:\u00a0data published in June by researchers\u00a0from the University of Southern California and Rutgers University show that exposure to marijuana social-media content plays a huge role in teens initiating use.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But there are other externalities in play.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If marijuana moves into Schedule III, it will be the only substance there without Food and Drug Administration approval. Will that play out in a similar way to the case of opium-poppy straw (i.e., the entirety of the plant, as it exists prior to the processes that turn it into heroin or opium)? Poppy straw is listed in Schedule II, but it also lacks an FDA approval \u2014 and it\u2019s regularly seized by drug and border authorities, with\u00a0a massive shipment grabbed up just in May. Though weed entrepreneurs clearly expect smooth sailing after a reclassification, they may well be in for a rough ride.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the fact that substances listed in Schedule III face additional regulatory and enforcement power: Not only from the DEA and DOJ, but also from the FDA. There are strict rules around what sellers of Schedule III substances can and can\u2019t say in advertisements. They\u2019re forbidden from advertising off-label uses \u2014 and since marijuana lacks an FDA approval,\u00a0all<\/em>\u00a0therapeutic uses are off-label. It\u2019s easy to imagine another operator in the Schedule III space filing a lawsuit demanding precisely that kind of enforcement.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words, rescheduling opens the door to regulatory chaos, even as it seems certain to add commercial firepower to an industry whose products, on the evidence, are extraordinarily harmful. How this combination will produce the benefits promised by proponents of rescheduling also remains unclear.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The federal government shouldn\u2019t signal to the American people that a drug that lacks medical or scientific imprimatur somehow possesses such approval. Others disagree \u2014 and vocally. They have a lot of money riding on it. But we should be crystal clear about what their preferred policy would\u00a0 actually mean for American society \u2014 nothing good.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Kevin Sabet, a former three-time White House senior drug-policy adviser, is president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source:\u00a0 https:\/\/unherd.com\/2025\/08\/the-illusion-of-safe-marijuana\/?edition=us?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Kevin Sabet\u00a0\u00a0August 22, 2025\u00a0 In 2018, 27-year-old Bryn Spejcher, an inexperienced marijuana smoker in California, killed her boyfriend Chad O\u2019Melia by stabbing him 108 times, a crime the local district attorney described as \u201chorrific\u201d and \u201cone of the worst our medical examiner has ever seen.\u201d A jury found Spejcher guilty of involuntary manslaughter, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,30,129,68,40,36,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brain-and-behaviour","category-cannabis-marijuana","category-culture","category-drug-use-various-effects","category-prevention-research","category-treatment-addiction","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19862"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20133,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19862\/revisions\/20133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}