Lawyers for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) on Monday highlighted testimony on marijuana’s medical benefits and its relative safety compared to other substances such as alcohol and opioids on the opening day of a hearing on the Trump administration’s cannabis rescheduling proposal.
While the proceedings were not livestreamed to the public in line with requests from Marijuana Moment, a congressman and others, Marijuana Moment spoke to several people who were in the room for Monday’s hearing to get a sense of how the testimony is going.
According to those sources, DEA lawyer James J Schwartz began by noting that the government is formally the proponent of the proposed rule to move cannabis from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) to Schedule III—noting that the hearing is “not about recreational use of marijuana” and is about “regulation, not legalization.”
“The government is not putting forth any evidence to suggest marijuana is not dangerous. All controlled substances are dangerous,
he said. “However, controlled substances must be evaluated by risks they pose, balanced by medical benefits they provide.”
Dominic Chiapperino, who serves as director of the controlled substance staff with the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research and is one of DEA’s two witnesses, provided testimony about how federal health officials formed their recommendation in support of rescheduling cannabis.
They used a new two-part test that reform opponents have argued improperly departs from an earlier analysis, though the DEA lawyer said the hearing is not about that dispute—and Chiapperino said the new test is now considered “every time” a new analysis on a drug is undertaken.
The FDA official said the agency compared marijuana to alcohol, opioids and other substances when conducting its scheduling analysis, finding that day-to-day harms for marijuana were generally lower than all or most of those comparators.
Cannabis is tied to fewer overdose deaths than comparator substances, Chiapperino said, and that when marijuana is mentioned in case reports involving deaths, the fatalities are usually attributed to secondary events like accidents or self-imposed harm. Marijuana’s potential for overdose deaths is “much lower” than other Schedule I drugs as well as Schedule II opioids, the FDA official said.
With respect to withdrawal for regular users, Chiapperino testified that cannabis has similar symptoms to those for tobacco, including irritability—but that alcohol has a “more several withdrawal syndrome” that can include seizure and death.
Also on Monday, lawyers for some of the anti-rescheduling parties had an opportunity to cross-examine Chiapperino.
Kevin Sabet, president and CEO of the prohibitionist organization Smart Approaches to Marijuana, which was also invited to participate in the hearing, said in a video posted to social media that seeing the government argue on behalf of cannabis’s medical uses and relatively low harms is “surreal”—claiming that “they’re just lying through their teeth.”
The DEA is in the “super awkward position of arguing the opposite of what it’s been arguing for the last 50 years, the opposite of opposite of what the science says, the opposite of where the evidence is,” he said, “which, of course, is that marijuana is more harmful, not less harmful than we thought it was—the government’s trying to argue the opposite.”
On Tuesday, other opponents of rescheduling will get a chance to cross-examine the FDA official, and the government’s second witness, Corey Burchman, a medical doctor from New Hampshire, will begin his testimony. DEA previewed in a filing last week that he will provide testimony about how “medical marijuana provides a medical benefit to pain patients.”
On Monday, a DEA lawyer said during his opening remarks of the hearing that Burchman would “describe real-world impacts of treatment of pain with marijuana instead of opioids” based on his experience with both and will discuss how he has “personally transitioned patients from opioids to marijuana for their pain.”
The witness will also provide testimony on the differences between cannabis and opioids when it comes to withdrawal and overdose potential, he said.
Ahead of the hearing’s start, marijuana reform activists held a press conference outside DEA headquarters to highlight how they feel the have been “shut out” of the process—criticizing the fact that no supporters of reform were invited to participate and that the proceedings are not being livestreamed despite officials’ vows of “transparency.”
DEA Administrator Terrance Cole invited only organizations and people who oppose marijuana reform to join the hearing as designated participants—telling supporters that they do not meet the definition of an “interested person” to participate because they are not “adversely affected or aggrieved by any rule or proposed rule issuable.”
Last week, Marijuana Moment sent requests to DEA Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek Julius and to Cole, the DEA administrator, requesting they reverse a decision to prohibit the public from tuning into the cannabis hearing via livestream. A congressman and other journalists later joined in that request.
