Reschedule Cannabis Or 'Abolish The DEA,' Says Physician: Examining The 50-Year-Old, Trillion-Dollar Agency

The Drug Enforcement Administration turned 50 in July 2023, marking five decades and over $1 trillion spent in its unsuccessful attempt to enforce the Controlled Substances Act via what is widely viewed as a failed War on Drugs with a focus on cannabis.

Now, with Friday’s release of documents related to the Department of Health and Human Service’s recommendation to the DEA to remove cannabis from its onerous Schedule I status, one wonders what the DEA will do next.

After all, the DEA recently made it clear that it, and it alone, has the “final authority to schedule, reschedule, or deschedule a drug under the Controlled Substances Act.”

'Abolish The DEA': Julie Holland, M.D., a psychiatrist, MDMA and cannabis researcher and medical advisor to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), has some advice for the agency. 

“This will be the third time, if I’m not mistaken, that there will have been a recommendation to the DEA to make cannabis schedule three. Twice they have refused. If they do it again, I will say it again: Abolish the DEA,” Holland wrote in a tweet. 

Why Does The DEA Consistently Get It Wrong About Cannabis? Let’s go back to why the DEA was created in the first place.

It all started under Richard Nixon’s watch in 1970 with the initial creation of the Controlled Substance Act, which classifies drugs and sets criminal penalties for possession, use and distribution. 

A 2016 Harper’s Magazine cover story provided some important details on those early days of drug prohibition, how it became a national obsession and how the DEA, despite its annual budget of $25 billion, has never gotten it right.

John Ehrlichman And The War On Drugs: Author Dan Baum began his article, “Legalize It All: How to Win the War on Drugs,” with quotes from a 1994 interview he'd done with Nixon’s top adviser John Ehrlichman in which he asked how the U.S. got entangled in a drug prohibition policy that "yielded so much misery and so few good results.”

Ehrlichman responded that the Nixon White House had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. 

"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said.

"We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”

This policy put the U.S. on a punitive path led by the DEA that resulted in disproportionate drug arrests, mass incarceration and the decimation of many communities across the country. It continues to target minority communities. 

And now, 50 years later, what will the DEA do to finally end this useless war on cannabis?  

Photo courtesy of the DEA.