After more than 50 years, the US federal government, through a contract with the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), has given the green light to produce cannabis for medical and scientific purposes in private laboratories.
It is an important decision that will accelerate studies on possible therapies for the treatment of chronic and chemotherapy pain, multiple sclerosis and mental illness.
“It’s an almost historic decision,” said executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Rick Doblino, who led the research on other Schedule 1 drugs, the most restrictive class of controlled substances, still believed to be practically drugs. illegal.
Over a third of Americans live in a state where marijuana for personal use is legal, and more than 30 states have programs on medical use.
Despite this, cannabis still remains illegal and scientists are not yet allowed to use it for clinical research.
The new DEA decision does not resolve the inconsistency between federal and state laws, but it does give researchers a new federally approved pipeline for more cannabis products and varieties. And the hope is for new discoveries for differentiated health uses.
The federal “monopoly” that for decades blocked those scientists who wanted to cultivate it for pharmaceutical use has finally been overthrown.
In 2001, Dr. Lyle Craker, a plant biologist, for example, first applied for a license to grow marijuana for research. But only fifteen years later did the federal government respond to this request and others but in a negative way.
“The NIDA monopoly was mainly the reason we have medical marijuana in the US, but we don’t have medical marijuana through the FDA,” says MAPS’s Doblin. “It is a fundamental change to be able to have the development of drugs through private supplies”.
Some barriers still remain.
The few companies that will soon get the go-ahead from the DEA to grow cannabis have a large market of researchers asking for the legal possibility to study the scientific properties and medical potential of the plant.
Biopharmaceutical Research Company, for example, a company that will soon grow cannabis under a DEA license, already has dozens of agreements in place with US researchers and is in contact with academic institutions, drug manufacturers and biotech companies.
“It’s definitely a big step in the right direction because the industry is moving much faster than we are in research,” say many professors and healthcare professionals.
Despite this, it is still not easy to study cannabis at all, because researchers need a special license when working with a Schedule 1 drug, and grants to conduct these studies are difficult to obtain.
It is also curious to see how despite the widespread use of marijuana in the United States, research on the medical potential of other Table 1 drugs such as ecstasy is far ahead of cannabis which should be put out of Schedule 1 drugs. But the time is not yet ripe for this.