“The essence of fanaticism lies in the desire to force other people to change: the common inclination to improve your neighbor, mend your spouse, engineer your child, or straighten up your brother, rather than let them be. The fanatic is a most unselfish creature. The fanatic is a great altruist…He wants to save your soul; he wants to redeem you; he wants to liberate you from sin, from error, from smoking, from your faith or from your faithlessness; he wants to improve your eating habits or to cure you of your drinking or your voting habits.”–Amoz Oz

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) doesn’t get it, like the temperance societies of the past century that believed that since they didn’t need or want alcohol, no one else should, either. But Carrie Nation didn’t have the power of Federal law, as J. Edgar Hoover or Harry Anslinger did, to control what substances Americans could ingest, whether to enhance pleasure or reduce pain. Our Puritan ancestors are long dead, but their death grip on our country’s law and order policies remains.

Last year, I reported on the opioid crisis in America–not the one making headlines to this day, the quiet one: the one where the heavy hands of the Center for Disease Control and the Drug Enforcement Agency are silencing the voices of patients and doctors. This columnist is on record indicating his understanding of the need for new guidelines in prescribing opioids in the face of so many deaths.

The problem? The pendulum swung in the complete opposite direction, going from overprescribing opioids to Draconian new regulations and laws that forced doctors to underprescribe or, worse, stop prescribing pain medications for patients with chronic and systemic pain.

The reason? DEA spank. In the last 53 years, starting under Dick Nixon to the present, the US Drug Enforcement Agency has had overweening control of what substances Americans may legally ingest. Since 1971, cannabis has been on Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act–along with heroin. That’s not a typo. Nor is it hyperbole. If you compare the deaths yearly from heroin use (thousands) to deaths associated with cannabis (nonexistent) or assess potential health benefits of cannabis use (considerable; see below) to potential health benefits from heroin use (limited and canceled by costs of addiction), it‘s clear that this is an apples and oranges fallacy. Yet, no one has corrected it. Only in the last year has Congress timidly suggested that cannabis should be moved from Schedule I to III so doctors can prescribe it to patients they feel would benefit from its use–without losing their medical licenses and practices. Forbes magazine reported last month on a study published by Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia proving that cannabis could protect people from getting COVID-19 virus, as well as having therapeutic uses post-COVID.

The study was a systematic review of the available scientific literature concerning how cannabis use might affect patients pre- and post-COVID. According to the study’s authors, “Post-SARS-CoV-2 infection, cannabinoids have shown promise in treating symptoms associated with post-acute long COVID-19, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress injury, insomnia, pain, and decreased appetite.” Furthermore, “Cannabinoids have the potential to be used as a preventive approach to limiting the susceptibility and severity of COVID-19 infections by preventing viral entry, mitigating oxidative stress, and alleviating the associated cytokine storm. (emphasis mine)” This is incredibly good news since cytokine storms–where the immune system goes into hyperdrive and can cause damage to the heart and other organs–have been the most serious side effect of exposure to the COVID-19 virus and vaccine, particularly affecting young people.

Also in January, a coalition of 12 Democratic state attorneys general released a letter urging the DEA to move cannabis to Schedule III. Schedule III would put cannabis on the same tier as Tylenol 3 with codeine, ketamine, anabolic steroids, and testosterone, all of which can be legally prescribed, have lower potential for abuse and addiction, and have recognized medical uses. And piling on, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) weighed in with a 252-page review on the medical efficacy and safety of cannabis, essentially demanding that the DEA do as the Attorney General suggested. The writers of the report concur with the state AGs and the researchers at Dalhousie “that there exists some credible scientific support for the medical use of marijuana in at least one of the indications for which there is widespread current experience in the United States.”

As the word limit for this installment has been reached, the next column will show that the history of marijuana prohibition is based on junk science while ignoring data from scientifically legitimate studies. It will also show the DEA has overstated the harm done by opioids and opiates, thus turning addicts into pariahs and patients into drug seekers.