WASHINGTON — Medical marijuana is now sold in nearly half of all states, and even one red state has legalized it for recreational use. Veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are clamoring for access to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. Loosening pot laws polls better in three swing states than any 2016 presidential candidate.
But House Republicans have so far declined to keep pace with shifting public opinion. They did so again late Wednesday, when a rare bipartisan pot proposal died a quiet death in the House that would have reclassified marijuana so that national laboratories could conduct “credible research on its safety and efficacy as a medical treatment.”
The amendment to a bill scheduled for debate Thursday on the House floor would have encouraged the National Institutes of Health and the Drug Enforcement Administration to work together to allow studies of the benefits and risks of marijuana to treat cancer, epilepsy, glaucoma and post-traumatic stress disorder, among other conditions.
The vote is the latest action to reflect national Republicans’ uncertainty on how to address shifting public sentiment about marijuana use. Although the GOP has supported steps to allow state medical-marijuana programs to flourish, Republicans generally have not supported efforts to advance national policy on legalization.
When a Senate committee this year passed a measure to let doctors discuss marijuana with patients at Veterans Affairs clinics, House Republicans shot it down. When the District legalized weed for personal use, a powerful House committee chairman threatened the city’s mayor with jail time.
House Republicans have defended their opposition to pot. There is no evidence, they have said, that loosening marijuana laws would do anything but destroy the brains of the nation’s adolescents, let alone offer benefits to veterans.
The lack of evidence, however, can be traced to congressional Republicans who have made it all but impossible for federal agencies to fund objective testing on the effects of marijuana use.
The amendment that died Wednesday was seen by some as a potential game-changer. With 23 states allowing medical marijuana — and a handful plus the District of Columbia having outright legalized it — some House Republicans (and Democrats, too) thought that it was finally time to allow more federal testing of marijuana.
For Republican opponents, the research could provide either evidence to continue holding the line or solid ground for the party to begin tiptoeing toward the mainstream.
Perhaps surprisingly was the House Republicans’ most outspoken critic of legalization over the past two years who co-sponsored the measure.
Maryland Rep. Andy Harris, a doctor and author of a measure in Congress that has left legalization in the District of Columbia in limbo, said more science was the way to go.
“We need science to clearly determine whether marijuana has medicinal benefits and, if so, what is the best way to gain those benefits,” he said Wednesday before the House Rules Committee sidelined the amendment in a vote late Wednesday night.
Another Republican, Rep. Morgan Griffith of Virginia, pleaded with the committee in person to approve it, but for a different reason.
Whereas Harris sponsored the measure confident that the research would prove marijuana is bad, Griffith has become convinced that there are limited circumstances in which marijuana has medical benefits for patients.
“We let doctors use heroin derivatives, barbiturates and all kinds of nasty stuff that I wouldn’t want people to use recreationally. Why not study marijuana?” Griffith, still smarting from the unraveling of the amendment, said in an interview.
“Andy Harris doesn’t think the research will show anything positive, but I do, and both of us feel willing to take the risk, do the research, and let us use evidence to make decisions,” he said. “This amendment would have answered the question one way or the other. I think it would have shown it is a valuable medical substance, but now we don’t have the evidence.”
Why the measure failed remains unclear.
To allow for federal research of marijuana, the amendment would have created a new designation for the substance. Marijuana is currently in a class of Schedule 1 drugs designated as the most dangerous, alongside heroin and LSD, and considered more addictive by the federal government than even cocaine.
The amendment, also sponsored by Democrats Earl Blumenauer of Oregon and Sam Farr of California, would have created a new subclassification within Schedule 1 dubbed “Schedule 1R” for research.
