Acting Chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration Chuck Rosenberg made a comment last week that angered medicinal marijuana patients and started a petition demanding Rosenberg to resign.
In its report, The Washington Post said that the online petition had already gathered over 10,000 signatures at change.org.
Rosenberg, in a press briefing last week, called medicinal marijuana a joke, saying (via CBS News), "What really bothers me is the notion that marijuana is also medicinal-because it's not. We can have an intellectually honest debate about whether we should legalize something that is bad and dangerous, but don't call it medicine-that is a joke."
"There are pieces of marijuana-extracts or constituents or component parts-that have great promise but if you talk about smoking the leaf of marijuana-which is what people are talking about when they talk about medicinal marijuana-it has never been shown to be safe or effective as a medicine," he added.
Rosenberg's statement, accordingly, concur with the release of the DEA's 2015 National Drug Threat Assessment Summary, which claims that over 120 people die daily in the United States as a result of drug overdose.
Numerous studies, however, oppose the stand of Rosenberg and the DEA. According to The Washington Post, a meta-analysis of 79 medical marijuana studies that involved over 6,000 patients and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association discovered that there is enough evidence to show that the use of cannabinoids is effective for treatment of chronic pain and spacity.
Several studies also claim that the availability of medical marijuana and its legalization reduced painkiller abuse rates and deaths due to drug overdose.
Furthermore, organizations like the Brookings Institution, the American Medical Association and the American Civil Liberties Union oppose to DEA categorizing marijuana as "Schedule 1" controlled substance, meaning it has "no currently accepted medical use." Many institutions say that DEA's designation of medicinal marijuana is inappropriate and noted that the science behind medicinal marijuana should not be dismissed that easily.
