Over 100,000 Demand DEA Stop Lying About Medical Marijuana

Johnny Green 

Over 100,000 people have signed an Americans for Safe Access petition on Change.org demanding that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) stop disseminating false information about medical cannabis immediately and ensure that all of their future information on medical cannabis treatment reflect medically-accurate, up-to-date facts.

Last year, Americans for Safe Access, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring safe and legal access to medical cannabis for therapeutic use and research, filed a legal request with the Department of Justice demanding that the DEA immediately update misinformation about cannabis.

The request asks specifically for the clearing of misconceptions that cannabis is a gateway drug and causes irreversible cognitive decline in adults, psychosis, and lung cancer. The filing references the Information Quality Act (IQA, aka Data Quality Act), which requires administrative agencies to devise guidelines that ensure the “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” they distribute and to “[e]stablish administrative mechanisms allowing affected persons to seek and obtain correction of information maintained and disseminated by the agency that does not comply with the guidelines.”

“Over 100,000 people agree that the DEA must stop disseminating blatantly false information,” said Beth Collins, Senior Director of Government Relations and External Affairs for Americans for Safe Access. “The DEA has admitted that cannabis is not a gateway drug and does not cause long-term brain damage, psychosis, and other alleged harms, yet they continue to obfuscate the truth. This misinformation affects the decisions elected officials make about cannabis, meaning that our government has been legislating on behalf of millions of medical cannabis patients using false information for years. As a result, these patients are left to fend for themselves when it comes to a drug they are prescribed and need to manage severe symptoms like pain, nausea, and more. It’s time to put this issue to rest once and for all. We hope that President Obama will perform this final action to show his support for suffering Americans across the nation.”