I Was Wrong About the Medical Marijuana and Cannabidiol Research Expansion Act

Turns Out, It's Way Worse Than I Realized

In December of last year, President Biden signed into law the “Medical Marijuana and Cannabidiol Research Expansion Act, H.R. 8454.” As regular readers know, I vigorously opposed the Act. For months, I railed against it in series of essays that detailed its various flaws and counterproductive measures.

Tomorrow, June 2, 2023, will mark six months since President Biden signed the Act into law, so I thought it a good time to take stock of whether my criticisms were proving well-founded. As I’ll explain, for the most part, they were. I do have to admit, however, that I overlooked one very important feature of the Act completely: its implications for the ongoing administrative process to reconsider cannabis’s scheduling status under federal law.

I’m more than a little embarrassed to find myself needing to correct the record in this way. What can I say? Nobody’s perfect, and this stuff is extraordinarily complicated. All I can do now is set the record straight. So here it goes.

In an earlier post discussing the pros and cons of descheduling cannabis or transferring it to schedules II, III, IV, or V, I repeatedly emphasized that rescheduling would remove some of the absurd barriers to cannabis research that have hobbled cannabis science for over half a century. At the time that I was researching and writing that post, H.R. 8454 hadn’t yet become law, meaning its amendments to 21 U.S.C. 823—the section of the CSA responsible for the senseless redtape that has made cannabis research inordinantly difficult for so many years—had not yet taken effect.

Before H.R. 8454, section 823 imposed exceedingly strict requirements on substances listed in schedule I. By comparison, it was far easier to research substances listed in schedules II-V. I was therefore correct (at the time at least) to conclude that rescheduling cannabis to schedules II-V would make it far easier to study cannabis without violating federal law. Less than a week later, however, President Biden signed H.R. 8454 into law, and everything changed.

The bottom line? By amending section 823 through a series of marijuana-specific research provisions, H.R. 8454 makes the regulatory burdens it imposes on cannabis research impervious to rescheduling. Unlike the prior iteration of section 823, which imposed different registration requirements on different substances depending on which schedule they are listed in, the new H.R. 8454 imposes a special set of detailed registration requirements on marijuana in particular and regardless of its scheduling classification. I’ve included a couple of screen shots below so you can see for yourself:

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Because these restrictions apply to “marijuana” without regard to where marijuana is listed among the CSA’s schedules, they will remain in place even if cannabis is transferred to schedule II-V.

This wouldn’t be such a big deal if the new requirements H.R. 8454 did what most people think they do—make it significantly easier to research cannabis without violating federal law. Unfortunately, for reasons I explained at length in previous posts, those requirements are, in fact, even harsher than the ones they replaced.

As hard as I was on H.R. 8454 in the leadup to its passage, it turns out I actually underestimated just how bad it really is. Not only does it make cannabis research harder than ever, but it cements its backward, anti-science regime in place for good, ensuring that cannabis research will remain a near “Mission Impossible” even if cannabis is transferred to schedule II, III, IV, or V. What a mess.