Christopher Ingraham at The Washington Post’s Wonkblog has a terrific piece up today on Eric Holder’s refusal to use executive branch authority under the Controlled Substances Act to reclassify marijuana as a less harmful substance. The crucial portion is here:
The crowning inconsistency of the federal drug control system has always been the classification of marijuana as a Schedule 1 substance under federal law, which makes it among the Worst of the Worst drugs as far as the DEA is concerned — literally as bad as heroin, and worse than cocaine! Drug reform advocates have pushed the DEA to change its position for years, citing decades of research on the relative harmlessness of weed compared to other drugs — including alcohol — but the agency hasn’t budged, even as public opinion has rapidly evolved.
The Controlled Substances Act, which set up the drug schedules in the early 1970s, explicitly places drug scheduling authority in the hands of the attorney general, and even instructs him or her to “remove any drug or other substance from the schedules if he finds that the drug or other substance does not meet the requirements for inclusion in any schedule.”
Much to the chagrin and outright befuddlement of drug law reformers, however, outgoing attorney general Eric Holder has repeatedly stated that any changes to the scheduling status of marijuana should be made by Congress.
Ingraham then explains that
a bipartisan group of congressmen asked the administration to [re-schedule marijuana] … In essence, the Justice Department and Congress are both begging each other to fix federal marijuana laws, but nobody’s doing anything.
As Ingraham writes, “Welcome to Washington in 2014.”
