The piece says Trump’s Dec. 18 order to speed medical marijuana and CBD research, plus Acting AG Todd Blanche’s April 23 move of FDA-approved and state-licensed medical products from Schedule I to III, ended a decades-long federal claim that cannabis had no accepted medical use.

It traces the 1937 tax-act ban, rejected NORML petitions, DEA overrides of its own judges (including Francis Young in 1988), and later crackdowns under Clinton, Bush, and Obama despite AMA, NAS, and other research on pain, nausea, MS, and related uses.

Author James Bovard (libertarian frame) treats rescheduling as incomplete: he wants federal marijuana controls ended and cites the episode as a warning about health policy driven by politics rather than evidence.

For more than 50 years, the federal government shamelessly pretended that marijuana had no recognized medical use. Last December 18, President Trump signed an executive order entitled, “Increasing Medical Marijuana and Cannabidiol Research.” Trump ordered the Attorney General and the Drug Enforcement Administration to speed up rule-making to finally enable far more medical research on the benefits of marijuana.

On April 23, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that henceforth all “FDA-approved marijuana-derived products” and “State-licensed medical marijuana products” are immediately shifted from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3, a far less restrictive federal regulatory regime.

Of course, libertarians want to see all federal restrictions on marijuana abolished. The nearly 100-year federal war on the loco weed has been a disgrace and a failure from the start.

But the long history of federal persecution of marijuana users, researchers, and growers provides a high-potency kick on the perils of federal intervention to purportedly protect Americans’ health.

During the 1920s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture encouraged farmers to grow cannabis to boost their sagging incomes (hemp was used for such things as paper and rope). Marijuana also grew in popularity during the 1920s as a result of Prohibition, which inflated the price of alcohol by curtailing its availability.

During the Great Depression, Mexican immigrants surged into the United States searching for work and brought marijuana with them. Hostility toward the immigrants led to the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively criminalized the possession of marijuana and, according to Yale professor David Musto, “mostly put a lot of jazz bands in jail.”

Criminalizing marijuana 

Harvard Professor of Psychiatry Lesther Grinspoon notes, “Between 1839 and 1900, more than a hundred articles on the therapeutic uses of marijuana appeared in scientific journals. As late as 1937, extract of cannabis was still a legitimate medicine marketed by drug companies.” The American Medical Association testified at hearings that year urging that marijuana not be effectively banned. Unfortunately, Congress — bowing to the exhortations of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics — proclaimed in 1937 that marijuana had no medical value. Congress effectively prohibited any use of marijuana for ailing Americans. But simply because a majority of congressmen say something doesn’t make it true.

In 1972, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) petitioned the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs to reclassify marijuana and recognize its medical uses. The director of the agency refused to consider the petition. NORML took the case to a federal appeals court, which issued a ruling that admonished the agency for rejecting the petition without “a reflective consideration and analysis.”

In 1975, NORML sued the Drug Enforcement Administration (the successor agency to the Bureau) to force the agency to evaluate the evidence on whether Americans should have access to marijuana strictly for medicinal purposes. DEA held a hearing, and a DEA administrative law judge........

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