Marijuana legalization activists are very familiar with the decades of research on its medicinal benefits, some of which were mentioned in the previous column. Even the DEA is not totally ignorant of these facts. One of their Chief Administrative Law Judges, the late Francis L. Young, argued back in 1991 (!) that marijuana should be moved from Schedule I to III, contending that for the DEA to refuse to do so would be “arbitrary, unreasonable and capricious.”

The document in which Young laid out his case for rescheduling contained this fascinating nugget of information: the LD-50 for marijuana (the dosage at which at least 50 percent of users would experience a fatal dose) would require a user to ingest 1500 pounds–¾ of a ton–in 15 minutes (!!!). By comparison, there are readily prescribable and over-the-counter drugs on the market that have a much (by factors of 10) lower LD-50. Marijuana users have been self-medicating for decades to treat glaucoma, multiple sclerosis, chemotherapy-induced nausea, neuromuscular disorders such as tardive dyskinesia, fibromyalgia, epilepsy, autism spectrum disorder, ADD/ADHD, depression, and obviously, I could go on for pages.

That’s what makes classifying pot with heroin one of the all-time bonehead moves, which is what happens when you leave such details to politicians and law enforcement while excluding medical opinion. While we wait with bated breath to learn if the Federal narcs can finally buy a clue–they’ve only had 87 YEARS–and reclassify cannabis, there is more progress on the opioid front.

The CDC has retooled its prescribing guidelines to give more leniency to doctors who prescribe pain medications. And legislatures across the US–Minnesota in particular–are rewriting their punitive opioid laws and guidelines to allow doctors and patients to make their own informed decisions on medications and doses, free from Big Brother’s menacing glare. But it will take time for these new regs and laws to sink in, and many more state legislatures will have to get on board before chronic pain patients will be once again treated like people and not things. It will also require pharmaceutical companies to ramp up production of certain opioids, especially hydrocodone since their production has come to a virtual standstill. And I haven’t even mentioned yet the lawsuit Ascent Pharmaceuticals has brought against the DEA for inhibiting the production of ADHD drugs, thereby causing an artificial crisis for millions of kids and adults who regularly take Adderall, Focalin, Ritalin, Concerta, and Vyvanse for ADD/ADHD.

Normally, I wouldn’t take up the cudgel so much for Big Pharma–it makes one look like a shanda fur de goyim–but as with opioids, it’s a very bad idea to deprive patients, especially children, of a medication that their bodies and brains have gotten used to having. Going “cold turkey” off stimulants can be as traumatizing as abrupt cessation of opioid use. There’s at least a whole column there, which I will address later since it’s germane to unhoused people. So until the legislative damage can be fully undone, millions of chronic pain patients will continue to suffer unending pain, mollified only by do-gooders proffering ibuprofen, naproxen, and other ineffective palliatives. And doctors will continue to reject patients in need of opioids out of simple self-protection, thereby inadvertently – or in some cases deliberately – casting their former patients as drug-seeking addicts.

It is the McCarthy Era revisited, but this time, the bogeyman is painkillers. And again, yes, if it even needed saying–which it absolutely shouldn’t–this touches on the unhoused population, who have even less reliable access to needed medications and who have issues with chronic pain, addiction, and mental disorders. Any interruption of any medication regimen has consequences. And those consequences can range from debilitating to fatal. Even something as basic as legal, easy access to inexpensive cannabis could be a game-changer for many of the unhoused, with potentially far-reaching physiological and psychological benefits. I have been saying for decades that the DEA needs to be abolished.

They need to stop imprisoning and ruining the lives of millions of Americans who enjoy smoking joints, find medicinal benefits from psychoactive and hallucinogenic plants, or who need a pill to be able to function without debilitating pain. Since the narcs and their bosses seem uninterested in redressing these grievances, it’s long past time to relieve them of this oversight function and turn it over to an agency, like Health and Human Services, more invested in treating drug abuse as a medical issue. “Our bodies, our choices” doesn’t just apply to reproductive rights, but ingestatory rights as well. It’s long past time for Uncle Sam to stop treating us like wayward children and more like responsible adults capable of ministering to our own needs and wants.

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