U.S. bills would make it easier to study health effects of marijuana

For decades, marijuana’s federal criminal status has raised obstacles for researchers trying to study the plant’s health impacts, such as forcing them to rely on a single grower or keep samples in 340-kilogram safes under 24/7 surveillance. Now, the U.S. Congress is poised to eliminate some of those hurdles.

Two bills, passed unanimously in the Senate on 24 March and by an 82% vote in the House of Representatives on 4 April, would ease storage rules, streamline application procedures for would-be cannabis researchers, and allow them to modify research protocols more easily. The Senate version allows universities to grow their own plants for research, and the House bill allows researchers to study products sold at dispensaries in states that have legalized marijuana.

The two bills share a common theme, says Representative Andy Harris (R–MD), a leading co-sponsor: giving researchers “access to a wider range of products that reflect the modern marijuana marketplace.” He predicts that House and Senate negotiators will iron out the differences “by summer or fall” and the resulting measure will become law. “My hope is that [in facilitating research] we once and for all determine whether marijuana or its components actually have a role in the treatment of disease,” he says.

The United States designates marijuana as a schedule I drug, in the same category as heroin and LSD. Researchers studying it must win Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) registration, an arduous process, and keep samples in high-security vaults or safes. Until recently, they could only study plants from one grower, the University of Mississippi, although DEA recently registered a few additional growers.

As a result, “All that researchers can get is cannabis that’s worse than probably what my parents smoked in college,” says Logan Leichtman, an attorney for cannabis companies in Portland. Oregon. Plants from the Mississippi farm have far less delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), cannabis’ main psychoactive ingredient, than many products legally sold today for medical use in 37 states and Washington, D.C.

Despite the broad and growing medical usage, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has only approved a few cannabis-based therapies, including two synthetic THC-based medicines for nausea and loss of appetite and one drug, cannabidiol (another chemical in cannabis), for intractable epilepsies. Researchers are keen to examine cannabinoids as potential therapies for chronic pain, cancer, anxiety, and other conditions.

To do that, “Researchers need to be able to study these chemicals that the rest of the world can get very easily,” says Ziva Cooper, director of the Cannabis Research Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The House provision allowing access to dispensary products may not survive. The more modest Senate version “has been very carefully negotiated to make it able to pass by unanimous consent through the Senate, which is no small feat,” says a policy staffer for Senator Dianne Feinstein (D–CA), the bill’s lead sponsor. Such unanimity could speed final passage. “Our hope is that the House will consider adopting a bill that looks a lot like ours.”

The Senate bill, which has the backing of the American Medical Association, would also allow researchers to import cannabis and require DEA to register companies producing FDA-approved drugs.

Still, studying marijuana will remain challenging because of funding constraints and its continued U.S. criminal status, scientists say.  “Symbolically I think [the bills] are really important,” Cooper says. “But for somebody who does human research … [studying cannabis is] still going to be hard.”