The English poet Hilaire Belloc wrote, ‘The flightless Dodo used to walk around, and take the sun and air. The sun yet warms his native ground. The Dodo is not there!’ The DEA seems equally unable to adapt, but it did skip and hop across a marijuana field the other day in a fruitless attempt to take to the air. They stubbornly rejecting calls to reschedule marijuana. However, it did make a decision and this may prove its undoing in the end.
Probably the biggest challenge the marijuana lobby faces, is the inability to do decent research and prove its point. The only federally legal marijuana farm is on the grounds of the University of Mississippi, and it does not produce sufficient legal samples to go around.
This leaves researchers with two choices. Do they hold back, or risk ending up in the slammer for the night, for having an ounce of what could better a patient’s life in their possession?
If the DEA has a brain or heart is must have figured out its attitude is inhumane. Many of the chemicals it allows can, and do cause deaths through overdoses. On 11 August 2016, the DEA announced that it would ‘foster research by expanding the number of DEA- registered marijuana manufacturers’.
This gets us approximately back to 1937, when Congress encouraged farmers to grow the crop for ropes, and sails, and parachutes to support the military, after outlawing consumption.
Congressman Earl Blumenauer – a longtime cannabis constituent is unimpressed. He told Marijuana Business Daily, ‘this decision doesn’t go far enough and is further evidence that the DEA doesn’t get it … keeping marijuana at Schedule 1 continues an outdated, failed approach.’
We see the DEA as having retracted talons. It knows that change is coming, and as bureaucrats like to, is hoping to claim the credit for managing the situation. More research samples will permit deeper investigation. More research will prove what is fast becoming common knowledge.
Medical marijuana is an essential part of alternative, green, organic medicine. History will reflect the day that common sense won over, and patients had the right to choose their doctor and their treatment.
Image Attribution: A Real Dodo: Roeland Savery