Cannabis To Be Classified As Medicine Soon: Report (image@Pixabay)
Earlier this year, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) proposed rules that would officially give cannabis status as a medication rather than an illegal narcotic. The question of if cannabis would be transported from dispensary to drug store is looming.
Experts say that the process may not be simple. According to Peter Grinspoon, a physician and Harvard medical school instructor, the upshot of rescheduling will be a “little bit incoherent”, as quoted by The Guardian.
Under the new rules, Cannabis would be reclassified as a schedule III drug, which means any cannabis-based medications would probably require FDA approval and a doctor’s prescription. It also means that it will be still more regulated than the alcohol or tobacco, even though it is “safer in every metric”.
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At the same time, Cannabis will continue to be available at state legal dispensaries without the FDA’s signoff.
Grinspoon said the most change is the US government admitting that Cannabis is a medicine. It is currently extremely hard to get permission from the government to do research on the cannabis plant. Grinspoon thinks rescheduling would make it easier to study medical cannabis by easing stigma as well as the legal restrictions.
“Cannabis isn’t magically different from everything else. It’s less harmful than opiates, but it still has harms, and if you use it, you should want to know the harms”, said Grinspoon. He said people on both sides of the debate are going to be sort of forced to contend with reality.
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The Harvard medical school instructor is particularly keen to see research on whether cannabis could actually fight diseases. Speaking to The Guardian, he said cannabis is very good at alleviating symptoms, and helps with chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, and pain.
He wanted to know if the cannabis can help modify the course of diseases versus just treat the symptoms. He said that “like in the test tube, cannabis is very good at treating killing cancer cells, it has not been shown to cure cancer in humans yet, just in the test tube”.
Notably, there are already some FDA-approved medications on the market that are related to cannabis. Dronabinol, which was first approved in 1985 for the chemotherapy induced nausea as well as Aids-related anorexia.
