Current federal laws that determine how marijuana and other drugs are classified have “fundamental flaws” that have done “immense damage,” according to a new analysis coauthored by a former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) senior advisor.
While the Department of Justice and its component agency DEA are currently working to finalize a rule to move cannabis from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) to Schedule III in accordance with an executive order from President Donald Trump, the agency’s “choices about how to regulate marijuana are sharply—and irrationally—constrained” by existing law, Matthew Lawrence, the former DEA official, argued in the new paper that he coauthored with Columbia Law School’s David Pozen.
“These schedules often force regulators into a Hobson’s choice between overcriminalizing drugs, through prohibitions that predictably backfire, or overcommercializing drugs, through hands-off approaches that leave users vulnerable to corporate exploitation,” Pozen and Lawrence, who worked in the office of the DEA deputy administrator from 2022 to 2023 and who is now at Emory University School of Law, write.
Rather than relying on criminal prohibition, the U.S. should instead look to what the authors call “capitalism controls” to more effectively regulate drugs, they say.
“US drug policy relies far too
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