It was reported in the Den­ver Post today that Col­orado is ask­ing the U.S. Drug Enforce­ment Admin­is­tra­tion to reclas­sify mar­i­juana.

 

I haven’t seen the let­ter from the Col­orado Depart­ment of Rev­enue yet, but I can tell you what’s wrong with the one sent by Wash­ing­ton and Rhode Island. There are two ways of going about this. The first way is the sci­en­tific review of the 8 fac­tors in 21 U.S.C. § 811©. The sec­ond way is the fact states have the right to deter­mine accepted med­ical use in the United States under 21 U.S.C. § 812(b)(1)(B). Gon­za­les v. Ore­gon, 546 U.S. 243 (2006). I’ve seen how the DEA applies those 8 fac­tors before, and none of them says any­thing about whether a state has accepted mar­i­juana for med­ical use. With­out a demand that the DEA acknowl­edge states’ rights to accept the med­ical use of mar­i­juana, these peti­tions will take for­ever and they will be denied when it’s all said and done, just like the U.S. Com­mis­sion on Mar­i­huana was ignored in 1972 and DEA’s Chief Admin­is­tra­tive Law Judge Fran­cis Young was ignored in 1989.