A federal health official said that marijuana should be legalized and descheduled by law enforcement.
WASHINGTON — Francis Collins, the director of the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH), expressed his support for the therapeutic potential of psychedelics and the advancement of marijuana rescheduling and research for wider medical purposes.
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, asked Collins about these questions during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing earlier this week.
“I think as we’ve learned more about how the brain works we began to realize that these are potential tools for research purposes and might be clinically beneficial,” Collins said.
The NIH director also said that the progress being made in access to medical marijuana for federal research is positive and should continue to the eventual descheduling and recreational legalization nationwide.
“There has been a resurgence of interest in psychedelic drugs, which for a while were sort of considered not an area that researchers legitimately ought to go after,” Collins replied during testimony before the committee.
Collins: “And I think as we’ve learned more about how the brain works, we’ve begun to realize that these are potential tools for research purposes and might be clinically beneficial.”
“We’re making some progress. You may know that in the past, researchers who wanted to do clinical studies on marijuana had all kinds of limitations,” Collins said.
He added that for the past five decades had been only one source of marijuana for federal research purposes.
“That of course is an issue because it’s a limited opportunity for access,” said Collins in the statement. He added that the Drug Enforcement Administration had expanded the granted permission to expand the number of research marijuana providers.
“What we really need is to moderate the schedule 1 limitation,” Collins said in the final stage of the testimony that was delivered.
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