Medical Marijuana: Just Say Know Nothing

Suzanne Wills, Drug Policy Chair

October, 2005

Researchers have complained for many years that the National Institute on Drug Abuse would not release marijuana from its garden at the University of Mississippi for research that might demonstrate the benefits of the drug. NIDA’s garden is the only legal source of marijuana in the United States. Researchers have access to private supplies of every other drug.

In early 2001, Dr. Lyle Craker, a professor in the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an expert on the cultivation of medicinal plants, applied for a Drug Enforcement Administration license to produce marijuana for federally-approved research in a privately funded facility. Both Senators from Massachusetts wrote letters to the DEA in support of Dr. Craker’s application. The DEA ignored his application for over 3 years. Finally Dr. Craker and his backers sued the DEA charging “unreasonable delay.” The lawsuit forced DEA to issue its ruling. It rejected Dr. Craker’s license application saying it “would not be consistent with public interest.” He submitted an appeal for a DEA Administrative Law Judge hearing.

The first week of the hearing was held the week of Aug 22. A second week is scheduled to begin Dec. 12. The testimony has provided interesting insights into the dispute over medical marijuana.

Dr. Barbara Roberts, a former Office of National Drug Control Policy deputy, testified that NIDA had been under orders from the drug czar's office not to allow approval of smoked marijuana. Dr. Roberts said she originally proposed the 1998 Institute of Medicine study [which found that marijuana has unique medicinal uses] as a way of giving then-drug czar Barry McCaffrey "a way out" of the increasingly heated public controversy over medical marijuana. She said the IOM's conclusions were not what the czar’s office had expected, and nothing was done to implement them.

In 2004, Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of NIDA, wrote a letter to Dr. Richard Doblin, one of Dr. Craker’s backers, refusing to support a private source of marijuana for research purposes. She stated, it is "not NIDA's mission to study the medical uses of marijuana."

In the DEA hearing Dr. Doblin testified, "This lawsuit is really our last hope for trying to take marijuana - whether it's smoked or vaporized - through the FDA regulatory system."

The hearing has not gone unnoticed by the medical community. In the August 17, 2005 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Lawrence Gostin, Director of the Center for Law and the Public's Health at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown University wrote, "The Institute of Medicine found that 'scientific data indicate the potential therapeutic value of cannabinoid drugs, primarily THC [tetrehyrdocannabinol], for pain relief, control of nausea and vomiting, and appetite stimulation.' Yet research has been sporadic, with the federal apparatus posing multiple hurdles to scientists. The FDA must approve research on scientific grounds and an institutional review board must approve on ethics grounds.”