Dear readers, sorry to bring this back up but just like your yard, this weed doesn’t want to die. It seems to be timely, yet again, as the president has just reclassified marijuana as a Schedule 3 drug. At the State level, I chalk this up to a desire for tax revenue. Likely plenty of lobbyist money was/will be spent to try to bring this back up for a vote. But something like this, coming the President, who should have good advisers, is confusing. I suspect this is not a simple revenue issue.
So what does it mean that this is now a Schedule 3 drug? What was it before this? Marijuana was a Schedule 1 drug. Basically Schedule 1 drugs have a high abuse potential and little or no medical value. They are highly regulated and access is supposed to be tightly controlled.
Schedule 2 drugs still have high abuse potential, but have more medical value. Medications like morphine, oxycodone and methylphenidate are Schedule 2 drugs. As you may have guessed, Schedule 3, 4 and 5 are less abusable, in that order, not necessarily more medically useful. Medications like antibiotics, blood pressure pills and diabetes medications are not scheduled. While I can only guess at why the change, down regulating marijuana will make it easier to access for research. Research that I hope is accurate and unbiased (always the optimist).
Since I wrote the or ...
