In a one-sided decision that reinforces the federal government’s recent toughening stance on medical marijuana, the DEA announced on Friday that they were denying the request of a nine-year-old petition that sought to reclassify cannabis from Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act, which legally categorizes pot as having a “high potential for abuse” with “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.”
 
And despite the thousands of medicinal cannabis studies that point to medi-pot treating a myriad of diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis and glaucoma, DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart stated: “There is no substantial evidence that marijuana should be removed from Schedule I.”
 
The DEA’s decision comes in the wake of the Obama administration warning that medical marijuana dispensaries in states where they have been legalized are still subject to federal prosecution.
 
The recently addressed petition, that sought a comprehensive rescheduling of cannabis, was introduced all the way back in October 2002, filed by the Coalition for Rescheduling Cannabis. But it was ignored by the Feds for almost a decade and by two presidents until a consortium of pot groups including Americans for Safe Access (ASA) and NORML filed a lawsuit in May 2011, forcing President Obama’s administration to respond to the ’02 petition.
 
There is a silver lining though; now that the DEA has finally made a decision, pro-cannabis activists can appeal in federal court. “We have foiled the government's strategy of delay, and we can now go head-to-head on the merits,” Joe Elford, chief counsel for ASA and the lead attorney on the lawsuit told the Los Angeles Times.
 
More @ [link|http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-marijuana-20110709,0,255022.story?trac...|latimes.com]
 
Longtime HIGH TIMES contributor Jon Gettman is a member of the coalition that petitioned to reschedule cannabis. He began writing the Cannabis Column on this site to track the petition's progress. You can read his take on rescheduling and the 2002 petition in his most recent column, [link|http://hightimes.com/legal/jgettman/7121|here].