Marijuana has a lower potential for abuse than other drugs that are subjected to the same restrictions, with scientific support for its use as a medical treatment, researchers from the US Food and Drug Administration say in documents supporting its reclassification as a Schedule III substance.
Marijuana is currently classified as Schedule I, reserved for the most dangerous controlled substances, including heroin and LSD. In 2022, President Joe Biden asked US Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and the attorney general to begin the administrative process of reviewing how marijuana is scheduled under federal law. HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Adm. Rachel Levine wrote a letter to the Drug Enforcement Administration in August in which she supported the reclassification to Schedule III, a list that includes “drugs with a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence” such as ketamine, testosterone and Tylenol with codeine.
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Rescheduling marijuana could open up more avenues for research, allow cannabis businesses to bank more freely and openly, and have firms no longer subject to a 40-year-old tax code that disallows credits and deductions from income generated by sales of Schedule I and II substances.
The reason for this has often been thought due to prison and possibly even tobacco lobbyists. Dunno about the second one, though the first certainly has the numbers to back it up, and the history. The history itself is quite the rabbit hole that begins in the U.S. back around the late 1930s. Though the drug itself has been around for hundreds of years, according to study.
Sadly, due to the times we live in, just ask yourself what the modern Republican party would want to claim. Who uses Marijuana and for what reasons and you’ll probably land on why this became a fiasco in the first place.
The schedule 1 classification of cannabis and LSD is pretty famously linked to Nixon pushing for its criminalization, due to it being primarily used by anti-war “hippies”
I was just highlighting how absurd it is to consider heroin and lsd in the same category at all.
Agreed. Not even remotely comparable to each other from an addiction/damage potential standpoint. LSD is entirely non-addictive habit forming, while heroin is the polar opposite. In terms of health damage, you can’t die from doing too much LSD, but you can from heroin (easily).
All in all, it’s like comparing apples to heroin. Or cake to heroin. Or pizza to heroin. Or LSD to heroin.
Longer than that. There is credible evidence that humans have been using cannabis for at least about as long as we’ve been brewing alcohol. Ancient religious relics recovered from archeological digs have been tested and shown cannabis residue.