Scientists push pot cultivation

WASHINGTON – Armed with a legal decision in their favor, scientists and advocates of medical research on marijuana pressed the Drug Enforcement Administration on Wednesday to allow them to grow their own, saying pot supplied by the government is too hard to get and its low quality limits their research.

The proponents said a DEA administrative law judge’s recent ruling that it would be in “the public interest” to have additional marijuana grown – and to break the government’s monopoly on growing it – had put them closer to their goal than ever before.

“The DEA has an opportunity here to live up to its rhetoric, which has been that marijuana advocates should work on conducting research rather than filing lawsuits,” said Richard Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which has fought for years for access to government-controlled supplies to test possible medical uses of marijuana.

“It’s become more and more obvious that the DEA has been obstructing potentially beneficial medical research, and now is the time for them to change,” he said.

The agency has opposed petitions that would break up the government’s marijuana monopoly, saying the current system works well and that allowing other growers could lead to more diversion to illicit use. All the marijuana produced for research is grown at the University of Mississippi and distributed through the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

But a petition filed in 2001 by University of Massachusetts agronomy professor Lyle Craker seeking to grow marijuana in his greenhouses has worked it way through the DEA appeal process and resulted in a ruling against the agency earlier this year.