Why Rescheduling Cannabis Won’t Cut It
If you’ve been following the news about cannabis law reform lately, you’ve probably heard people calling for the DEA to “reschedule” it.
While this may seem at first like a step in the right direction (and maybe it is), we here at antiprohibit are concerned that this isn’t the best option.
There’s a difference between rescheduling and descheduling. Cannabis should be descheduled. We’re talking about a naturally occurring plant that has been used for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and which is virtually impossible to overdose on.
The LD50 number of cannabis (the amount required to kill half of a test population) is on the order of kilograms, making cannabis one of the safest substances on Earth. This means that an individual would have to consume pounds of marijuana, all at once – and even then, half of the population would survive.
If it’s simply “rescheduled,” that would allow the government to impose all sorts of taxes, stipulations, limits, and other “red tape.” This is not the way forward. Rescheduling cannabis won’t stop them from placing limits on the amount of plants we’re “allowed” to grow, and it won’t put an end to the DEA’s tyranny.
It never should have been on the DEA’s unconstitutional and arbitrary list of “forbidden substances” to begin with. This should serve as a reminder that it’s not about safety – it’s about control.
Politics makes strange bedfellows, as the saying goes. That’s what we’re dealing with here. The DEA, an arm of the government, receives all of their funding from taxes. Therefore, they should be subservient to the taxpayers. However, pharmaceutical giants have spent billions of dollars on cancer treating drugs. Cannabis, which has no patent, threatens their profit margins. Therefore, it’s within their best interest to ensure that it’s not legalized. Despite the potential therapeutic value of cannabis, these companies have a vested interest in keeping cannabis prohibited unless and until they find a way to profit from it. That’s one of the reasons why pharmaceutical giants donated over $1,400,000,000.00 (almost one and a half billion dollars) to the federal government in 2022.
I hope that one day, we are given sovereignty over our own bodies. Until then, I will continue to fight for what’s right. The “War on Drugs” isn’t right. Not only has it been an abject failure, but it’s also a source of racism and is the most often used excuse to violate the rights of our people. We have to put an end to it – while we still can.
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Done reading? Check out some of our other articles!
- The War on Drugs Is a War on People: Why Prohibition Has to Die
- Legal Weed, Illegal People: How Governments Turn Freedom Into a Subscription Service
- How Heroin Went From Medicine to Moral Panic: A Century of Manufactured Crisis
- Drug Legalization Doesn’t “Unleash Chaos” — Prohibition Does
- When “Responsible Prescribing” Becomes Cruelty
