DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart - the last remaining member of the Bush Administration working for the Obama Administration.
In a move preceded by its Governor Chris Gregoire and other governors like Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee and Vermont’s Peter Shumlin, 42 Washington State Legislators today petitioned the DEA’s Administrator Michele Leonhart to reschedule marijuana at the federal level to recognize medical use.
We write in support of the petition that Governor Chafee and Governor Gregoire recently submitted to initiate rulemaking proceedings for the reclassification of medical cannabis (also known as marijuana) from Schedule I to Schedule II of the CSA.
We are also concerned that qualifying patients with serious medical conditions who could benefit from medical use of cannabis do not have a safe and consistent source of their medicine that has been recommended by a licensed health care professional in our state. The divergence in state and federal law creates a situation Where there is no regulated and safe system to supply legitimate patients who may need medical cannabis. More to the point, it is clear that the long-standing classification of medical use of cannabis in the United States as an illegal Schedule I substance is fundamentally flawed and should be changed. The federal government could quickly solve the issue if it were to reclassify cannabis for medical use from a Schedule I drug to a Schedule II drug so that it can be prescribed, which we believe the petition provides substantiated peer-reviewed scientific evidence to support.
The solution lies ultimately with the federal government. We urge the DEA to initiate rulemaking proceedings to reclassify medical cannabis as a Schedule II drug so qualifying patients who follow state law may obtain the medication they need through the traditional and safe method of physician prescribing and pharmacy dispensing.
Reacting to the news, NORML’s Allen St. Pierre replied to an activist who’d asked if this was the first time a state legislature has initiated such a rescheduling petition. ”While 36 states from 1980-1994 passed numerous toothless medical cannabis reforms (most of these bills took the form of the legislature and governor ’memorializing’ Congress and the Executive Branch to change cannabis’ scheduling to II or below),” St. Pierre noted, “I think you maybe right that a state legislature itself to date has not formally petitioned the feds for down scheduling.”
