Marijuana Is Same As Heroin According To Nevada Supreme Court In Reversal Ruling That Cannabis Is A Schedule 1 Drug

A precedent 2022 ruling under which the Nevada Board of Pharmacy could no longer list cannabis as a Schedule I Controlled Substance was overturned this week by the Nevada Supreme Court, reported Las Vegas Review-Journal.

What Happened

In 2022, Clark County District Judge Joe Hardy Jr. sided with the argument from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Nevada that marijuana has an accepted medical use.

The lawsuit from Antoine Poole and the Cannabis Equity and Inclusion Community organization, both represented by the ACLU, argued that the Nevada State Board of Pharmacy failed in its attempt to honor the will of Nevada voters, following the passage of the Nevada Medical Marijuana Act in 2000 and the Initiative to Regulate and Tax Marijuana in 2016.

The Board of Pharmacy, a body in the executive branch, oversees pharmacies – entities that do not distribute cannabis and therefore lack the authority to grant licenses for the sale or consumption of marijuana, as recently highlighted by Benzinga's Rolando García.

Judge Hardy ordered the Board of Pharmacy to remove cannabis from the list of Schedule 1 drugs at the time, although the timeline for the action was unclear. Additionally, Hardy said he was not ruling on any issues related to overturning convictions for cannabis-related crimes, as the ACLU's lawsuit did not address the topic, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported at the time.

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On Monday, the Nevada Supreme Court justified its latest decision, which was backed by all seven Supreme Court justices. The court ruled that outside of a criminal case, plaintiffs had no standing to challenge the classification of cannabis by the Board of Pharmacy.

In April 2017, Poole, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, was found guilty of possession of a controlled substance, even though recreational cannabis was legal in Nevada at the time.

Nevada Cannabis Saga As Lawmakers Push To Reschedule Marijuana On Federal Level

The process has been in making as of late November 2022, with the Board of Pharmacy’s intention to appeal. During this spring's appeal hearing in the case of Nevada Board of Pharmacy v. CEIC, Justice Kris Pickering pointed out the disconnection between the state's legislative advancements in cannabis legalization and its continued classification as a substance with high abuse potential and no recognized medical benefits.

"As a threshold matter, while the declarations establish that Poole and at least one of CEIC's members sustained a possession-of-marijuana conviction after medical marijuana was legalized, they do not tie the conviction(s) to the Board's classification of cannabis as a Schedule I substance," according to the justices.

In the meantime, the Nevada cannabis saga shift is making the headlines as a group of U.S. senators yet again push Attorney General Merrick Garland and DEA administrator Anne Milgram to reschedule marijuana.

In a letter made public last week, the senators expressed their support for the DEA’s proposal to transfer marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

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