It turns out the federal government might just be winging it when it comes to deciding which drugs belong in which legal categories. A new report from the Government Accountability Office—essentially the hall monitors of the federal bureaucracy—has kindly pointed out that both the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Food and Drug Administration are severely lacking in actual, written policies for their drug scheduling process. You know, the very process that dictates federal criminal penalties and is currently determining whether or not marijuana gets moved to Schedule III. Apparently, while the DEA and FDA usually manage to agree on these things, neither agency has bothered to draft specific procedures on how their staff should actually conduct evaluations or make recommendations. To make matters even more confidence-inspiring, the FDA is relying on a memo of understanding with the National Institutes of Health that is over four decades old, which is basically the bureaucratic equivalent of using a floppy disk to run a modern federal agency.
The GAO politely noted that these glaring gaps in policy might pose a tiny bit of a risk to the whole system, especially if someone retires and takes all the unwritten institutional knowledge out the door with them. All of this administrative chaos comes at a highly convenient time, right as the DEA is in the middle of reviewing testimony to finally decide if they are going to comprehensively reschedule marijuana. The Department of Health and Human Services already recommended the move, and the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel even had to step in recently to tell the DEA that their notoriously strict five-part test for medical use was impermissibly narrow. So now, the entire cannabis industry gets to wait for the DEA Administrator to make a final, historic call based on a system that the government’s own watchdog admits is essentially held together by duct tape and good vibes. But don’t worry, all the federal agencies involved have pinky-promised to agree with the GAO’s recommendations to actually write some rules down, so maybe by the time they finish fighting off the current wave of lawsuits trying to block cannabis reform, they’ll actually have a training manual to read.
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