The recent actions by the Trump administration to reschedule marijuana and certain psychedelics has brought a measure of common-sense to the regulation of these substances.
Federal policy for more than 50 years has classified marijuana and psychedelics as Schedule I drugs, placing them into the same category as truly-dangerous drugs such as heroin and opioids, which never has made any sense.
Schedule I drugs are defined as substances with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse which have never been applicable to marijuana and psychedelics.
The placement of marijuana and psychedelics into Schedule I occurred during the Nixon administration, which did so with the express intent (as was revealed 10 years ago with the release of Nixon-era documentation) of using the drug laws as a weapon against minority communities and college students who opposed Nixon’s policies.
The Nixon-era drug laws led to the “war on drugs,” a battle that America has been fighting — and losing — for more than five decades.
And as with any war, the war on drugs has had numerous casualties, measured not only in the lives directly lost and the trillions of wasted dollars spent at the federal, state, and local levels on ill-conceived enforcement, but also in the damage to communities, families, and individuals throughout our country, as well as the destabilization our war on drugs wrought in foreign countries.
In addition, the war on drugs has altered the way in which our nation fights crime at a basic level. All too often, the methods employed by authorities in their zeal to enforce the drug laws have conflicted with the Fourth Amendment (which protects citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government) and has led to entrapment.
However, the biggest loss to our nation because of the ill-conceived war on drugs has been the decades lost to the potential for research into these substances. Both marijuana and psychedelics had been used for thousands of years by mankind for the treatment of maladies of all sorts.
Recently, psilocybin has been shown to be of benefit to veterans suffering from PTSD and marijuana has benefited patients undergoing cancer treatment. In addition, studies have shown that patients using marijuana for the treatment of pain have reduced their use of opioids significantly.
But the placement of these substances into Schedule I in the early 1970s effectively eliminated research into their potential uses for most of the past 50 years.
The recent actions by the Trump administration bring us a step closer to a day when these substances can be studied thoroughly and then regulated at the federal level (similar to alcohol), eventually allowing medical providers at long last to prescribe them to treat patients safely.