Marijuana meets criteria for reclassification as lower-risk drug, FDA scientific review finds | CNN
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Marijuana has a lower potential for abuse than other drugs that are subjected to the same restrictions, with some 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 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.

  • Cracks_InTheWalls
    1·
    11 months ago

    Thing is, I 100% believe you. Cannabis can help with these kind of problems too, depending on the person.

    My only gripe is when people say “Lol, no one gets withdrawl symptoms when they stop smoking weed”. It’s true that not everyone experiences it, but a) when I have stopped cold turkey for anything more than a few days, I personally have these problems, with a fairly predictable timeframe/duration, and b) I don’t seem to be the only one who does*

    Want to make it clear that I really like cannabis, and it can legitimately be a game changer for some people’s conditions. But it’s important to balance out the actual good and the actual bad when talking about it - cannabis is neither 100% perfect for everyone every time, nor is it the Devil’s Lettuce that will lead to doing bumps of heroin on a pile of dead babies and an unhealthy love of freeform jazz. The truth’s in the middle - it has benefits as well as downsides, and different people experience both to different degrees.

    *There is, of course, an argument to be made that people who get ‘hit hard’ with withdrawl effects do so because they were self-medicating for some unrecognized condition. I don’t necessarily buy that for all cases, but it’s worth thinking about.