Feds Set to Spend $70 Million on Cannabis Research

arlier this month, the federal government announced
a plan to spend tens of millions of dollars on cannabis research through the
University of Mississippi, which holds the only federally legal cannabis garden
in the United States for FDA-sanctioned research.

The grant restitutes a contract held 40
years ago by the federal government with Ole Miss. The university’s Marijuana Research Project began in 1968, supplying medical cannabis for up to 30
patients at one point, but the program closed its doors to new patients in the
early 1990s–there were only four patients still alive and receiving treatment in 2014.The new agreement is worth up to $68.7
million over five years and was awarded by the National Institutes of Health
and was posted on the Federal Business Opportunities website. Although feds expect the number to be
closer to $8 million spent on research, unless demand increases.

National Institute of Health

“To serve the research community, the National
Institute on Drug Abuse  has tried to
build farm capacity flexible enough to accommodate various levels of demand for
research [cannabis] and [cannabis] products over the next five years,” stated
the spokesman for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a sector of NIH that
supervises cannabis operations at Ole Miss. NIDA is obligated to spend at least
$1.5 million on University of Mississippi cannabis research in the 2015 fiscal
year.

Dr. Mahmoud ElSohly, lead scientist at Ole
Miss’s cannabis lab, told the Los Angeles
Times that his team was preparing to grow 30,000 cannabis plants last year; but it’s uncertain how many plants they will
cultivate in the coming year.

In a 2014 call for research facilities, the government proposed seeking a facility that could
“cultivate and harvest, process, analyze, store, and distribute cannabis
for research.” The call also stated that researchers wanted to
“extract cannabis to produce pure and standardized cannabis extracts”
containing different concentrations of THC, CBD (a non-psychoactive compound)
and other cannabinoids. The federal government also said that it was interested
in research that would “develop new methods for growing cannabis plants
containing high THC, low CBD; high CBD, low THC; and equal strength of CBD and
THC.”Critics of the proposal argue that federal
research on the plant concentrate too much on the negative effects of the drug, instead of its prospective medical benefits. The DEA,
which controls any potential researcher’s license to test the plant, has also
been blamed for obstructing research of the drug. However, a recent bill introduced into
Congress called the CAREERS Act might break up the federal government’s cannabis monopoly by allowing non-governmental research
facilities to grow the plant and reclassify it as a less hazardous substance.

Photo Source

There have been copious studies done over
the years showing the health benefits of cannabis; from attacking some forms of aggressive cancer, to better blood sugar control, and helping to slow the spread of HIV. One new study published by
the Cato Institute suggests pro cannabis laws promotes a decrease in suicide attempts.

However, under federal law, cannabis still
remains illicit and a Schedule I drug, meaning it’s classified as one of the
“most dangerous” substances “with no currently accepted medical use.”