Who in the Federal Government Can Make Weed Illegal Again

Even as several states and Washington, DC, permit marijuana, the federal regime still strictly prohibits pot.

Under the scheduling system, the federal government classifies marijuana equally a schedule 1 drug, meaning it's perceived to have no medical value and a high potential for abuse.

The classification puts marijuana in the same category equally heroin and a more than restrictive category than schedule ii drugs like cocaine and meth.

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But that doesn't mean the federal government views marijuana and heroin as equally unsafe drugs or that it considers marijuana to be more than unsafe than meth or cocaine. Schedule i and two drugs are both described every bit having "a high potential for abuse" — a vague description that doesn't rank drugs in the two categories as equal or dissimilar.

The big distinction between schedule 1 and 2 substances, instead, is whether the federal authorities thinks a drug has medical value. The DEA says schedule 2 substances have some medical value and schedule 1 substances do non, so the latter receive more regulatory scrutiny even though they may non be more unsafe.

It may be helpful to think of the scheduling system as made up of two distinct groups: nonmedical and medical. The nonmedical grouping is the schedule 1 drugs, which are considered to have no medical value and loftier potential for abuse. The medical group is the schedule two to 5 drugs, which take some medical value and are numerically ranked based on abuse potential (from high to low).

The schedule is not something the president could modify alone, but the administration, through the attorney full general or secretary of health and human being services, tin can begin a review procedure for the current schedule.

There have been many calls to reschedule marijuana, merely they've run across a serious hurdle: To appointment, at that place have been no large-scale clinical trials on marijuana. Those kinds of studies are traditionally required to prove a drug has medical value to the federal authorities. Merely these studies are also much more hard to conduct when a substance is strictly regulated by the federal authorities as a schedule 1 drug. So pot is essentially trapped in a catch-22: Information technology likely needs a large-scale clinical trial to be rescheduled, but those trials are going to be much harder to conduct until it's reclassified.

Congress tin also pass legislation to reschedule marijuana, which legalization advocates accept been lobbying legislators to do for decades.

Although the scheduling arrangement helps shape criminal penalties for illicit drug possession and sales, it's not e'er the final word. Penalties for marijuana are generally far more relaxed than other schedule 1 drugs — mayhap an acquittance that the drug isn't equally much of a hazard equally, for example, heroin.

Despite federal prohibition, the Obama administration took a relaxed approach to marijuana, generally letting states exercise as they wish equally long every bit they met certain criteria (such every bit not letting legal pot fall into kids' hands or cross state lines). Only the Trump administration has taken a tougher line, allowing federal prosecutors to crevice down on marijuana fifty-fifty in states where it's legal — which could let federal law enforcement close downwardly state-legal pot businesses.

Pot'south criminal classification at the federal level has other serious ramifications for marijuana policy fifty-fifty in places where land police force says the drug is legal. Many state-legal marijuana businesses, for case, must function every bit cash-just enterprises, since many banks are nervous about dealing with businesses that are essentially breaking federal constabulary. Businesses likewise can't file for several deductions and, as a result, their effective income taxation rates tin can soar to as high as xc percent or more.

The effect is that fifty-fifty as several states and public opinion motion in favor of marijuana legalization, the federal authorities often finds itself standing in the way of a reform that many voters want after seeing the longstanding struggles and failures of the war on drugs.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/8/20/17938372/marijuana-legalization-federal-prohibition-drug-scheduling-system

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