The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has rejected an application filed by Prof. Lyle Craker, a University of Massachusetts – Amherst researcher, to grow marijuana in a strictly controlled setting for the purpose of creating a supply for the large number of scientists who have long wanted to study the medical efficacy of the plant. The DEA decision, while disappointing, is not surprising – coming as it does 3 ½ years after Craker filed his application. It also highlights as well as any other the federal government’s hypocrisy and unscientific foot-dragging over marijuana research.

Many experts, including Alliance executive director Ethan Nadelmann, appealed to the DEA to approve the researcher’s request, which would have created the first and only supply of marijuana for research in the nation. In the end, though, the DEA, which no doubt would have preferred to sit on the application indefinitely, only issued its decision as a result of a lawsuit, launched by Craker; Rick Doblin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS); and Valerie Corral, co-founder of the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana in Santa Cruz, CA forced its hand.

Rick Doblin, head of MAPS, which would have sponsored the facility and conducted federally approved marijuana research through UMass had the application of Professor Craker been approved, says that they and Craker have already begun the onerous task of appealing the ruling.

 “[T]he lawsuit forced DEA to issue its ruling,” Doblin writes, “which we can now challenge in the context of [DEA] Administrative Law Judge hearings.”

Outside of a victory in the U.S. Supreme Court's Raich case, medical-marijuana research is the only means currently available to garner FDA-mandated approval for legalizing its use in combating a host of illnesses.