Last month, the Drug Enforcement Administration quietly updated the Federal Register to include a new drug code for “marihuana extracts” under the Controlled Substances Act. The DEA asserts that the move was meant to better track these materials and to comply with international treaties, saying:
Under international drug control treaties administered by the United Nations, some differences exist between the regulatory controls pertaining to marihuana extract versus those for marihuana and tetrahydrocannabinols.
The DEA has previously established separate code numbers for marihuana and for tetrahydrocannabinols, but not for marihuana extract. To better track these materials and comply with treaty provisions, DEA is creating a separate code number for marihuana extract.At first glance, this seems to be a purely clerical change. However, a problem lies within the DEA’s definition of a marijuana extract, which they say is “an extract containing one or more cannabinoids that has been derived from any plant of the genus Cannabis, other than the separated resin (whether crude or purified) obtained from the plant.”
The issue here is that only the cannabis plant itself had been previously scheduled as a controlled substance, not its stems or stocks, and that “any plant of the genus Cannabis” could include hemp — which was determined to be distinct from marijuana in the 2014 Farm Bill — and its products. In fact, the Controlled Substances Act clearly states that marijuana does not include “the mature stalks of such plant, fiber produced from such stalks, oil or cake made from the seeds of such plant, any other compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of such mature stalks (except the resin extracted therefrom), fiber, oil, or cake, or the sterilized seed of such plant which is incapable of germination.”
So, in defining a marijuana extract as any cannabinoid derived from any part of the plant, the DEA is ignoring the fact that certain parts of the plant weren’t previously scheduled. It’s also problematic because CBD oil, which is commonly used for medicinal purposes and does not contain THC (the psychoactive element of marijuana), and hemp were not specifically mentioned in the Controlled Substances Act beforehand.
However, it seems the new drug code has now made these extracts Schedule 1 controlled substances.
“This would be the equivalent of making lemons a Schedule 1 controlled substance and then later suddenly saying that all extracts made from the leaves of lemon trees are bound to the laws surrounding lemons, even though only the lemon fruit itself is a scheduled substance,” Zack Ruskin of SF Weekly analogizes.
For the rest of the story go to HempLogic.
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