As marijuana legalization spreads, the Trump administration has resisted Obama-era reforms to allow more growers for research.
George Hodgin is ready to go. The moment he gets approval from the federal government, his company is ready, he said, to produce high-quality marijuana for research — and nearly two dozen university researchers are on board to buy it for studies that could help fill the surprisingly large void in what we know about marijuana’s benefits and harms.
There’s just one problem: The US Department of Justice won’t give him the approval he needs to start producing weed. So the researchers clamoring for access to marijuana — to finally learn more about the drug’s effects — can’t get it, even as states move to legalize pot.
“We only want to provide clean, consistent, compliant cannabis for researchers,” Hodgin, CEO of the California-based Biopharmaceutical Research Company, told me. “We’re sitting on one of the most sophisticated cannabis production facilities in the United States. And it’s empty, because the federal government is playing politics with something that is apolitical.”
Marijuana is already legal for recreational and medical purposes under 10 states’ laws and legal only for medical uses under 22 additional states’ laws. But it remains illegal under federal law, so researchers aiming for any federal funding or tied to a federally funded institution (including all major research universities) face big legal barriers if they want to study the drug.
For years, the federal government has allowed one approved grower, at the University of Mississippi, to supply weed to researchers who make it through an arduous application process. But the quality of this marijuana is terrible — it looks more like oregano than pot. Researchers have demanded higher-quality options for years.
That’s where Hodgin could come in. He and dozens of others applied under a new federal program, started under the Obama administration, that was supposed to get more federally approved growers for marijuana research.
Then Donald Trump won the 2016 election, and appointed Jeff Sessions, who vehemently opposes marijuana legalization, to head the Justice Department as attorney general. After that, the program seemed to stall: A former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official who worked on the research program told me his agency was ready to move forward, but it couldn’t without approval from the Justice Department. Sessions and his staff seemingly weren’t willing to take any proactive steps that could in any way be seen as pro-marijuana.
After Sessions resigned last November, there was some hope that the program would move forward. But so far, that hasn’t happened.
Asked about the program, Justice Department spokesperson Wyn Hornbuckle said he had “[n]o updates on this at the moment.” DEA spokesperson Rusty Payne said that his agency is “still working through the process with the Department.”
So people like Hodgin have been left waiting for years, ready to grow marijuana for research but without the federal approval needed to do so.
