An explanation of marijuana’s scheduling is essential

I have filed four peti­tions for mar­i­jua­na resched­ul­ing with the Iowa Board of Phar­ma­cy (2008, 2012, 2013, and 2014), two with­out any sci­en­tif­ic or med­ical evi­dence (2008 and 2014), and two with sci­en­tif­ic and med­ical evi­dence (2012 and 2013). I won the two that did not include any sci­en­tif­ic or med­ical evi­dence, prov­ing that I am not qual­i­fied to present sci­en­tif­ic or med­ical evi­dence and prov­ing that my legal argu­ments are sol­id enough to pro­voke action by the board with­out any sci­en­tif­ic or med­ical evi­dence. The rea­son for this appears to be sim­ple. The board does not need my assis­tance in find­ing sci­en­tif­ic and med­ical infor­ma­tion on mar­i­jua­na.

One of my con­cerns is that the board nev­er issued any expla­na­tion for it’s rul­ing in 2010, and now they admit nobody under­stood it. I’ve asked if they will put a lit­tle more sub­stance into it this time.

Feb­ru­ary 17, 2010 (Scott Galen­beck was the board­’s attor­ney and Vern Ben­jamin was the board­’s chair)
SCOTT GALENBECK: Vern, I have a ques­tion. Do you have any inter­est in doing some expla­na­tion of why, I mean artic­u­lat­ing in a doc­u­ment that would go to the leg­is­la­ture your rea­sons or your think­ing. I know that’s a lot of work, but…
VERNON BENJAMIN: Well, I was think­ing that when we were doing, when I said we as a board then could talk and give… But, yeah.

March 3, 2010 (Carl Olsen was the peti­tion­er and Lloyd Jessen was the board­’s exec­u­tive direc­tor)
CARL OLSEN: Do you have any idea when the Iowa Board of Phar­ma­cy will issue its writ­ten expla­na­tion of how it arrived at its con­clu­sions on Feb­ru­ary 17th?
LLOYD JESSEN: The Board has not set a time for the release of a writ­ten expla­na­tion.

August 27, 2010 (Ed Maier is the cur­rent board chair)
ED MAIER: I think it’s impor­tant, what­ev­er we do, that we have a sol­id cut mes­sage that the peo­ple under­stand. Last time, we were total­ly mis­un­der­stood, exact­ly what was hap­pen­ing.

To be fair to all involved, look at the time line of events.

My argu­ment has always been that sched­ule I, both state and fed­er­al, inter­feres with the imple­men­ta­tion of state med­ical mar­i­jua­na laws.

As of July 1, 2014, Iowa is now one of those states with a med­ical mar­i­jua­na law.

I filed my cur­rent peti­tion on July 7, 2014.

So, that should explain why I was able to walk in on Wednes­day and get a unan­i­mous rul­ing grant­i­ng my peti­tion.

It also explains why the board had a hard time explain­ing what they were doing in 2010.

Remem­ber, I nev­er asked them to rec­om­mend a med­ical cannabis pro­gram like New Mex­i­co, or any pro­gram.

The only thing I asked them for in 2008 was to ini­ti­ate the process to remove mar­i­jua­na from sched­ule I.

Obvi­ous­ly, the board thought it would make sense to rec­om­mend a state pro­gram to explain why they want­ed to remove mar­i­jua­na from sched­ule I.

But, that made every­thing more com­pli­cat­ed.

Now, it’s sim­ple. We have a state med­ical mar­i­jua­na law and both state and fed­er­al sched­ule I inter­fere with its imple­men­ta­tion.

I want the state of Iowa to help me get fed­er­al sched­ul­ing changed.

This might apply in dif­fer­ent con­texts as well. For exam­ple, when some­one tries to chal­lenge sched­ul­ing in a crim­i­nal case, the court will usu­al­ly say the defen­dant had admin­is­tra­tive reme­dies avail­able and did not exhaust those admin­is­tra­tive reme­dies pri­or to get­ting arrest­ed. But, here in Iowa, we have not only exhaust­ed those admin­is­tra­tive reme­dies, we’ve won a rul­ing in our favor at the admin­is­tra­tive lev­el. I am fol­low­ing a fed­er­al case that seems to break this rule about exhaust­ing admin­is­tra­tive reme­dies, called Unit­ed States v. Schwed­er, et al., No. 2:11-cr-00449-KJM-16 (East­ern Dis­trict of Cal­i­for­nia). If you’re not famil­iar with it, I have all the doc­u­ments at http://www.iowamedicalmarijuana.org/States/California.aspx