Executive Order Rescheduling Cannabis Won’t Help Pain Patients Anytime Soon
/By Crystal Lindell
This week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that aims to reclassify cannabis as a less dangerous drug, but the move stopped short of making it federally legal.
The order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to complete the process of reclassifying cannabis from an illegal Schedule I controlled substance to a Schedule III drug with lower abuse potential and accepted medical uses, in the same category as codeine and ketamine. President Biden started that process three years ago.
It’s important to note that moving cannabis to Schedule III will not legalize it for recreational use nationwide. It will be up to FDA to determine what an “accepted medical use” is for cannabis-based medicines.
The White House specifically mentioned chronic pain as one of the medical conditions that cannabis could help treat, noting that six in 10 people who use medical marijuana in the states where it is legal do so to manage pain.
In addition to rescheduling, the Trump Administration is trying to expedite medical research so that CBD and hemp-based cannabis products can be legally sold nationwide. Those products are not FDA-approved, putting them in a legal limbo under federal law.
“In short, the current legal landscape leaves American patients and doctors without adequate guidance or product safeguards for CBD,” President Trump said. “It is the policy of my Administration to increase medical marijuana and CBD research to better inform patients and doctors. It is critical to close the gap between current medical marijuana and CBD use and medical knowledge of risks and benefits, including for specific populations and conditions.”
My hope is that pharmaceutical companies will finally be able to tap into cannabis’ full potential as a medical treatment and develop new drugs. Once they find the best ways to produce it, dose it, conduct clinical trials, and get FDA approval, then cannabis-based drugs could potentially help millions of pain patients. .
Of course, that process could take years or perhaps even decades, so the odds are that many pain patients will remain reliant on CBD, hemp-based products, and marijuana dispensaries. That’s if cannabis is even legal in their state.
Plus, whenever we do get pharmaceutical cannabis products, the next barrier will likely be price. Medical and recreational cannabis sold in dispensaries is more expensive than street supply, and I’m sure pharmaceutical companies will mark it up even more. But at least then it could be covered by insurance.
Looking back, it seems obvious that cannabis should have never been classified as a Schedule I substance to begin with, as there are clearly multiple medical uses for it.
I am old enough to remember a time before any states had even legalized it, when the idea of it even being re-classified federally was a pipe dream.
I remember guys I knew in college in the early 2000s puffing away and going on and on about how one day marijuana would be legal. I would look at them with extreme skepticism. But as it turns out, they were basically right – at least in states like California and Colorado where recreational cannabis is legal.
The Trump administration still has not made cannabis fully legal, but we are on track to see it happen.
Any time there’s a major change in the U.S. drug policy like this, it is worth noting how arbitrary much of it can be. Very little of it seems based on actual medical reasoning. It’s more about law enforcement and turning substances into dastardly villains.
After all, if the stroke of a pen can move a drug from one controlled substances category to another — suddenly making them legal — perhaps the categories themselves are poorly designed. That logic follows when you see how the federal government handles things like opioids and kratom. You should not accept their reasoning at face value.
We should all remain skeptical whenever the government tries to say any drug is inherently bad – especially when it tries to enforce such a classification with jail time and fines. Because clearly, their definition of “bad” and a medically-backed definition of “bad” are not the same thing.
