TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — Marijuana is legal in Arizona law but Federal law classifies marijuana as an illegal drug as dangerous as heroin. President Trump wants to change that and that could help University of Arizona researchers bring you better medicines.
President Trump’s order loosening the regulations on Marijuana could have its biggest impact in the laboratory and for people who want marijuana for its medical benefits.
In a signing ceremony for his executive order President Trump made it clear he’s not trying to make marijuana legal. He wants it moved from DEA Schedule One—the same category as heroin, to Schedule Three which lists prescription drugs like Tylenol with Codeine.
The President said: “This reclassification order will make it far easier to conduct marijuana related medical research, allowing us to study benefits, potential dangers and future treatments. It's going to have a tremendously positive impact I believe.”
Doctor Todd Vanderah leads U of A’s Comprehensive Center for Pain and Addiction. He has been researching medical marijuana for 20 years but the Schedule One classification has made it more difficult. Classing marijuana as a top tier illegal drug makes it hard to get research grants and the marijuana he must use is highly restricted cannabis grown by the government. It’s very different from the marijuana people might actually use.
He says,“It tends to be much weaker, and it tends to be a plant that was probably grown specifically for just the purpose of studying cannabis 20 years ago. But as you know, the cannabis plant has really changed a lot.”
Doctor Vanderah says classifying cannabis as Schedule Three like many other common prescriptions could give him the freedom to get modern marijuana like people buy from Arizona dispensaries, extract the chemicals and work on balancing them so they control pain and have other positive effects without making patients so high they have a hard time functioning.
He says, “We've taken that into trials, people with metastatic bone cancer or back pain, and we can actually see a significant effect with that. But what we'd like to do is be able to use more than just the one approved source out there, which, again, is just a pure THC. We'd love to be able to use actual marijuana or some type of cannabis product, so that we could actually see if we can get
better results.”
The change is not official yet. The Justice Department will still have to formally re-write the rules to reclassify cannabis and make it easier for researchers to turn it into finely tuned medications.
