A federal appeals court has dismissed a petition to require the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to reevaluate marijuana’s scheduling under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA)—but one judge said in a concurring opinion that the agency may soon be forced to consider a policy change anyway based on a misinterpretation of the medical value of cannabis. In a ruling filed on Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit determined that scientists and military veterans seeking the scheduling review had failed to exhaust administrative remedies, and, therefore, it dismissed the case without weighing in on the merits. The lawsuit—filed last year by cannabis researcher Sue Sisley of the Scottsdale Research Institute, the Battlefield Foundation, and veterans Lorenzo Sullivan and Gary Hess—received oral arguments in June and largely centers on DEA’s 2020 denial of a one-page marijuana rescheduling petition filed by a separate individual. In its response, the agency argued that marijuana has no currently accepted medical value.
Kyle Jaeger, Marijuana Moment, 08/30/2021 16:35:00