For a year, the loudest opponents of rescheduling have called reform a corporate payday. In a July 2 filing defending rescheduling, the Justice Department told a federal court the money is on the other side: the two groups trying to freeze the policy are guarding a commercial interest the drug laws were never written to protect.
One of the loudest arguments against cannabis reform has always been about money. Legalizers are in it for the cash, prohibitionists have argued, and the science is just the wrapping paper. On July 2, in a filing before the D.C. Circuit, the Justice Department argued that the challengers’ alleged harms were commercial interests the CSA was never written to protect. Two of the groups trying to freeze marijuana rescheduling asked the court to hit pause on the reform, and the government told the judges that those two were guarding their own revenue.
The two groups behind the request are a drug-testing trade association and a pharmaceutical company that has never brought a product to market. The DOJ told the court that both of them “invoke pocketbook interests served by keeping all marijuana in Schedule I.” Their own sworn declarations, the government argued, undercut their request for a stay.
Here is the shape of it. In April, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche moved FDA-approved cannabis medicines and state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III. A coalition of prohibition and drug-testing groups, two state attorneys general and a pharmaceutical developer is suing to undo that order, Kevin Sabet’s Smart Approaches to Marijuana and the attorneys general of Nebraska and Indiana among them. But the request to freeze the order while the case plays out came from just two of those parties, the National Drug and Alcohol Screening Association, or NDASA, and MMJ International Holdings. …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
