Among those drugs listed in the less restrictive Schedule II are methamphetamine and opium.
By Cathryn Jakobson Ramin December 2, 2013 In late October, the Food and Drug Administration made the front page of the Times by announcing that it would recommend moving drugs like Vicodin, which combine hydrocodone with over-the-counter painkillers, to the restrictive Schedule II class of drugs.
By ruling that there is not enough evidence of "currently accepted medical use"—a key distinction between the highly restrictive Schedule I classification and the less restrictive Schedule II the administration essentially makes it harder to gather such evidence.
Cocaine and methamphetamine are among the drugs listed below marijuana in the less restrictive Schedule II category.
"This can mean that physicians have to use substitutes or pharmaceutical formulations that aren't ideal as is already the case currently for medicines on the least restrictive schedule, Schedule IV, of the Convention on Psychotropic Substances," says Christophe Perrin.
Meanwhile, regular marijuana will continue to be listed alongside heroin in the more restrictive Schedule I category, which is reserved for drugs that have "no currently accepted medical use" and "a high potential for abuse".
He's begun circulating a letter to the president among other members of Congress, seeking signers who will ask that marijuana be stricken from the controlled substances categories or at least moved to a less restrictive schedule.
In 2014, the Drug Enforcement Administration reclassified hydrocodone from a Schedule III drug to the more restrictive Schedule II category, and last month the Justice Department announced a far-reaching strategy to fight the opioid crisis with stepped-up enforcement measures, including prosecuting doctors who improperly prescribe painkillers.
Researchers and medical marijuana advocates have pointed out that keeping marijuana in the restrictive Schedule I category creates a sort of catch-22, where scientists can't definitively prove or disprove the drug's efficacy in treating certain conditions because of the difficulties they face in conducting clinical research.
Aside from heroin, most other opiates are listed in the less restrictive Schedule II and Schedule III, alongside other drugs considered less dangerous and more medically valuable than those in Schedule I. Now, 50 years later, the war on drugs is widely regarded as a public policy failure.
Perhaps more significantly, the next US president could work to move marijuana out of the restrictive Schedule I category of controlled substances (where it is currently classified alongside heroin, LSD, and other hard drugs), or back legislation to make weed legal in all 50 states.
