High on Politics, Part II

 The Biden administration announced earlier this month it plans to reclassify marijuana as a less-dangerous Class III controlled substance, alongside steroids and Tylenol with codeine.  It appears that the White House had to go around its own DEA for the most significant drug policy change in 50 years.

After the announcement, we learned that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was a notable holdout in President Biden’s politically driven push to loosen federal marijuana restrictions.

The process of reclassifying pot was driven by the Justice Department, and the proposed rule was signed not by the head of the DEA, Anne Milgram, but by Attorney General Merrick Garland (even though DEA is required to collect comments). 

Former DEA Administrator Tim Shea told the Associated Press “the striking absence” of Milgram’s sign-off suggests she was backing the professionals on her staff who oppose the move and sought time to do more scientific studies.

Shea, who served in the Trump administration, said the “DEA was opposed to this and the politics entered and overruled them. It’s demoralizing. Everybody from the agents in the streets to the leadership in DEA knows the dangers this brings.”

And the Biden administration’s action would create a constitutional conflict.

“This move, although it may appeal to voters in the ‘baked community,’ doesn't address the crisis of drug regulation,” Galen Senior Fellow Emeritus Doug Badger wrote.  “While it is a federal crime to possess and distribute certain controlled substances, the federal government does not enforce that law in states and localities that have ‘legalized’ or ‘decriminalized’ the sale and possession of these substances.

“In addition to inverting the constitutional order by permitting state law to contravene federal law, it breeds contempt for the rule of law,” he said.

“Congress should consider legislation to amend the Controlled Substances Act, at least concerning marijuana. And, whatever the outcome of that debate, the president must commit to enforcing the law.” 

But the administration’s contravention of the rule of law doesn’t end there.  The Biden administration is continuing the legacy of the Obama administration in defying the law in its “enforcement” of the Affordable Care Act.

Doug Holtz-Eakin of the America Action Forum is appalled that the Biden administration is allowing tens of thousands of immigrants to lack legal status to quality for Obamacare health plans. 

The “Dreamers” are “not lawfully present, and it is the plain reading of the ACA that they should not be eligible for benefits…[S]omething is way off the tracks if the president can ignore the clear intent of the law on behalf of the Dreamers, or anyone else.”

Additional ACA subsidies and marijuana reclassification need to be accomplished through congressional action—as does student loan “forgiveness.”  These efforts are examples of how the Biden administration is defying the rule of law for raw political purposes.

Many of you wrote to me after my earlier piece about witnessing marijuana’s harm in your clinical practices and about parents seriously worried about their teenagers who are defiantly smoking weed.

On a personal note, I know marijuana’s dangers firsthand in my own family.  My younger brother, Marvin, started smoking pot as a teenager and moved into harder drugs, eventually heroin. For him, marijuana unquestionably was a gateway drug. It is painful to me that I could not do more to help my dear brother in a life that devolved into drugs and alcohol and that ended far too early at age 49.  May God rest his soul.

Grace-Marie Turner runs the Galen Institute, a think tank devoted to patient-centered health policy reform.  She can be reached at gracemarie@galen.org  @gracemarietweet

https://www.realclearhealth.com/blog/2024/05/29/high_on_politics_part_ii_1034675.html