In consecutive days both the acting Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Attorney General have come under fire from lawmakers for their retrograde positions on marijuana.
In a floor speech on Wednesday, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Or.) blazed interim DEA chief Chuck Rosenberg saying that he was “clearly not the right fit” to head the agency.
Blumenauer was reacting to a statement made earlier this month by Rosenberg, claiming that marijuana was “bad and dangerous,” and that studying the medicinal benefits of the plant was a “joke.”
“What is a joke is the job Rosenberg is doing as acting DEA administrator,” Blumenauer said in comments first reported by the Washington Times. “He’s an example of the inept, misinformed zealot who has mismanaged America’s failed policy of marijuana prohibition,” the congressman added.
A day earlier, it was Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s turn to account for the federal government’s prohibition on pot, and she left reformers similarly dissatisfied.
During a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, Rep. Steven Cohen (D-Tenn.) called on Lynch to intervene and remove marijuana from the DEA’s list of Schedule 1 drugs—a class of substances deemed by law to have no medicinal value.
Lynch, however, offered up a technocratic defense of the status quo.
“With respect to the issue of scheduling, that is typically determined based on whether or not there is another use for the product and I think there would have to be studies by the FDA among others to determine whether or not a scheduling change in any drug is necessary,” she claimed.
“You have to change the scheduling from one to get the studies,” Rep. Cohen countered, alluding to laws that require medical studies on marijuana and other Schedule 1 drugs to be certified by the DEA and approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
“Don’t you agree, unlike Chuck Rosenberg, that medical marijuana is something serious and should be looked at as an aid to people in our society to get through difficult problems and not considered a joke?” Cohen pressed Lynch.
Attorney General Lynch claimed that the department does support ongoing FDA studies on the use of cannabinoid oil that “have been shown to have some effects.“
“You can talk to Montel Williams and what it does for multiple sclerosis,” Cohen told Lynch, referring to the former daytime TV talk show host who was diagnosed with the disease in 1999.
The previous DEA Administrator, Michele Leonhart, similarly failed to assuage congressional pot reformers in an infamous 2012 exchange with a House Democrat. Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) asked Leonhart to state if marijuana was more dangerous than other Schedule 1 drugs, including substances that routinely cause fatal overdoses. Leonhart repeatedly decline to answer Polis’ questions, and the tongue lashing went viral.
On the campaign trail, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is, so far, the only presidential candidate to call for cannabis to be completely removed form the DEA’s schedule of controlled substances.
Americans over the past few years have increasingly called for the federal prohibition on the plant to end.
