How Many Had to Die First?
Missouri just announced it’s opening an unlimited number of cannabis research licenses in the state. The Missouri Division of Cannabis Regulation filed proposed rules allowing any qualified researcher to apply, with no cap on licenses and no restrictions on subject matter. As Rieka Yu, the division’s policy director, put it: “Ultimately, it’s just exciting to make progress on marijuana research because we know that that’s been historically difficult.”
Historically difficult. That’s one way to put it.
Let me put it another way: the United States government spent more than fifty years making it functionally impossible to study drugs that millions of people were already using, that indigenous cultures had employed for centuries, and that early research before the Controlled Substances Act was passed in 1970 had flagged as potentially valuable for mental health treatment. Then they were shocked, shocked, to discover that people were self-medicating with them anyway.
What the CSA Actually Did to Research
The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 didn’t just criminalize drug use. It created a research authorization framework so restrictive that it effectively ended scientific inquiry into an entire class of compounds for a generation. Schedule I designation, the category assigned to cannabis, psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, ibogaine, and heroin, means not only that there is no accepted medical use, but that researchers must obtain a Schedule I license from the DEA, source their materials from the federal government’s own supply, and navigate an approval process designed more for gatekeeping than for scientific advancement.
For cannabis specifically, the only federally approved source of research-grade marijuana until very recently was a single grow operation at the University of Mississippi, a facility that produced material that bore little resemblance to what people were actually consuming. Researchers who wanted to study the plant as it existed in the real world had no legal pathway to do so.
For psychedelics, the situation was even more stark. After the CSA passed, research into psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA essentially halted at the federal level for decades. The promising clinical work from the 1950s and 1960s, research that had shown real potential for treating alcoholism, depression, and end-of-life anxiety, got buried under the political agenda of the War on Drugs.
The Body Count
Here’s the question that should haunt everyone who defends the research ban: how many people died of opioid overdoses while ibogaine sat in a Schedule I vault?
According to the CDC, drug overdose deaths in the United States exceeded 80,000 per year at their recent peak, the majority opioid-related. The opioid crisis built up over years of inadequate treatment options and a pharmaceutical industry that had every incentive to sell more pills and no incentive to cure addiction. Meanwhile, ibogaine, a plant compound used in West African Bwiti religious ceremonies for centuries, was showing in small studies abroad that it could interrupt opioid cravings in ways that no approved medication could match.
Researchers couldn’t study it here. The DEA wouldn’t authorize it. The FDA had concerns about cardiac risks. And so Americans died by the tens of thousands annually while people who could afford to travel to clinics in Mexico paid $15,000 to $20,000 per session for a treatment their own government forbade.
Or consider psilocybin and depression. Johns Hopkins researchers began their modern psilocybin trials in the early 2000s. By the time they published meaningful results on treatment-resistant depression, around 16 million Americans were experiencing a major depressive episode annually according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The treatment worked, often dramatically, often after just one or two doses. The pathway from “this works” to “this is available” has been fifteen-plus years of regulatory navigation because the compound had spent three decades classified as having no medical value.
And LSD for alcoholism. Researchers in the 1950s and 1960s were producing some of the most promising results in the literature for LSD-assisted treatment of alcohol dependence. Rates of abstinence that dwarfed what conventional treatment programs were achieving. Then the CSA happened, the research stopped, and Americans died of alcoholism for the next fifty years while those results collected dust. A 2012 meta-analysis in the Journal of Psychopharmacology re-examined the old data and found the original results were legitimate.
Missouri’s Move and Why It Matters
What Missouri is doing is, in the grand scheme of drug policy reform, a modest step. The proposed rules would allow an unlimited number of research licenses for cannabis, with no artificial cap on who can study what. The public can comment through May 31, the final rules go through summer rulemaking, and it’s roughly eight months from formal rules to implementation.
But the precedent matters. Missouri joins a growing number of states recognizing that scientific inquiry into these compounds cannot be limited to whoever the federal government decides to bless with permission. A national study found that 17 of the 38 states with medical or adult-use cannabis laws have some framework for research licensing. The problem, as Missouri’s division director Amy Moore acknowledged, is that most of them have no funding mechanism attached. Without money, even an unlimited number of licenses generates limited actual research.
That’s the next fight: not just opening the door, but putting researchers in a position to walk through it.
Unlimited Research Is the Only Honest Policy
I want to make an argument that might seem counterintuitive coming from a cannabis advocate: if a drug is potentially dangerous, that is the argument for more research, not less.
Ibogaine has cardiac risks. The appropriate response is not to classify it Schedule I and prohibit research. The appropriate response is to fund rigorous clinical trials, identify the risk factors, develop protocols that mitigate them, and find out whether the benefit-risk ratio justifies clinical use. We do this for every other class of medication. We don’t ban chemotherapy because it’s toxic. We study it, refine it, and use it where it’s warranted.
The CSA’s research framework never made scientific sense. It was a political framework dressed up in the language of public health. The evidence for that is straightforward: cannabis and psilocybin were placed in Schedule I despite existing evidence of medical use, over the objections of scientists at the time. The Shafer Commission, which Nixon himself appointed to study cannabis policy in 1972, recommended decriminalization. Nixon ignored it because the political utility of cannabis prohibition outweighed its public health rationale.
Those decisions had consequences measured in deaths, in overdoses, in suicides, in people with treatment-resistant depression who ran out of options, in veterans with PTSD who bought mushrooms on the black market because their VA prescriptions weren’t doing anything.
The Standard We Should Demand
Missouri’s unlimited research licensing model should be the floor, not the ceiling. Every state that has legalized cannabis should have a funded research program attached. Every Schedule I compound should have a legal pathway for legitimate scientific inquiry that doesn’t require navigating a maze designed to keep researchers out.
The federal government, with Trump’s psychedelic executive order, is at least gesturing in this direction. The proof will be in whether the FDA and DEA follow through with meaningful access or whether priority vouchers become another administrative mechanism for delay.
Fifty years of prohibition-as-policy has left us with a generation of lost research, a mental health crisis with inadequate tools, and an opioid epidemic that destroyed communities while better options sat classified on a list next to heroin. The least we can do, for the people who died waiting, is make sure we don’t repeat it.
Open the research. All of it. Fund it. Publish the results. Let the science do what it was always supposed to do.
SHOULD CANNABIS BE ON THE CSA, READ ON…
