Friday, August 12, 2016

The DEA's reasons for banning marijuana. Or tobacco?

The DEA recently denied two requests that marijuana be removed from Schedule I, meaning it has no legitimate medical or other uses. See DEA.gov / Headquarters News Releases, 08/11/16.



I've taken the DEA's list of reasons to keep marijuana under Schedule I control and applied them to tobacco:



(1) Tobacco has a high potential for abuse.



(2) Tobacco has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.



(3) Tobacco lacks accepted safety for use under medical supervision.



The DEA's response runs to about 150 pages, but replacing marijuana with tobacco still applies to most of the detailed response. Yet banning tobacco obviously wouldn't work, just as banning alcohol didn't work in the 1920s. Perhaps its time to follow the lead of Colorado and Oregon (neither of which have experienced a drug addict apocalypse) and recognize that marijuana prohibition doesn't work. It might even put a few criminals out of business.

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