The attorney general of Colorado recently sent letters to federal agencies including the National Institute on Drug Abuse to request permission for the state’s colleges to grow marijuana in order to study it. Right now in Colorado you can buy strains of varying strength, with names like Golden Goat and Presidential Kush, for your personal enjoyment. So growing it for research purposes doesn’t seem like a stretch.
Yet when it comes to marijuana research, the federal government has a long history of turning down what appear to be reasonable requests.
Ask Lyle E. Craker. In 2001, Mr. Craker, a professor of plant and soil sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, began trying to persuade the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to allow him to grow marijuana for other researchers.
Mr. Craker and his sponsor, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit group known as MAPS, argued that the crop grown at the University of Mississippi, the only government-approved marijuana grower and supplier, was inadequate. It contained too little tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive compound, rendering it less like what people actually use and therefore not as valuable for researchers.
The Chronicle wrote about Mr. Craker’s struggle for approval in 2005. Two years later, an administrative law judge ruled that it was in the public interest for him to be granted a license to grow marijuana and recommended that the DEA drop its objections. The agency overruled that decision in 2009, despite a letter of support for Mr. Craker signed by Massachusetts’s two senators at the time, Edward Kennedy and John Kerry.
Mr. Craker asked to have the denial reconsidered in 2011, to no avail. “What happened in the course of this is that we had years of research that were wasted,” he said recently. With a mixture of resignation and exasperation, the professor has more or less ended his quest.
Suzanne A. Sisley is one researcher who has had trouble getting the type of marijuana she needs. Actually Dr. Sisley, who studies whether marijuana can alleviate post-traumatic stress in veterans, has had trouble on more than one front. Until last September she was a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Arizona. Her annual contract, however, was unexpectedly not renewed—a nice way of saying she was fired.
Even before her dismissal, she says, the university delayed responding to her request for a laboratory to conduct the study. “I guarantee that if I were a cancer researcher or any other conventional science, they would’ve had a lab space available to me within a month of IRB approval.”
Certain state legislators in Arizona wanted her gone, she believes, because of her work on marijuana, which had been approved by the federal government. The university, she suspects, was afraid to stand up to them for fear that funding in other areas might be cut. A spokesman for the university, Chris Sigurdson, denies that the decision to let her go was made because of political pressure, but said he couldn’t comment further on a personnel matter.
Dr. Sisley has since received offers from other universities, though she is reluctant to accept a position in another state, because she doesn’t want to abandon the veterans she treats in Arizona in her private practice.
Harvested but Unavailable
She is also one of the principal investigators on a $2-million research grant from the State of Colorado, but so far the federal government has been unable to provide the strains that she has requested—a constant problem, according to marijuana researchers, and the reason Mr. Craker wanted permission to grow.
In the approval process, Dr. Sisley notes, “our study reached the final hurdle in March of last year. Yet still “we have no marijuana and no timeline or even a price sheet. When are we going to get it?”
A spokeswoman for the institute on drug abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, said in an email that while the marijuana for Dr. Sisley’s study has been harvested, it could not be delivered until more bureaucratic boxes were checked.
When Dr. Sisley lost her position at the University of Arizona, the campus institutional review board’s approval went with it. So if another university does get on board, the MAPS group, which oversees Dr. Sisley’s grant, must submit a revised protocol to the Drug Enforcement Administration, and to the Food and Drug Administration, and to the U.S. Public Health Service. The length of delays at each stage can be unpredictable.
Meanwhile, she notes, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide among veterans remain serious, and effective treatments hard to come by.
Even if the researchers finally get the marijuana, it won’t be exactly what they requested. Dr. Sisley wants three strains with varying levels of THC and cannabidiol, or CBD, another compound found in the plant, one thought to have therapeutic value. CBD does not produce the euphoria associated with THC. Part of what she’s determining is whether changes in the ratio of the two compounds affect symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Perhaps getting high helps, or maybe that’s a side effect and it’s really the CBD that eases the symptoms.
What Dr. Sisley and her fellow researchers have been promised via the institute on drug abuse are strains that don’t quite match the percentages of compounds outlined in the research proposal. Such a discrepancy is no mere detail. If the study proves successful, the researchers need to know how much of each compound has the desired effect to determine the proper dosage.
Donald I. Abrams started his marijuana research in 1993, inspired by a partner with AIDS who had found marijuana to be a useful therapy. Over the past two decades, Dr. Abrams, a professor of clinical medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, has run into roadblocks both in obtaining certain types of marijuana and in getting money for his research.
He has been asked by the federal government in years past to perform animal testing on strains that are already widely used by people, illustrating the odd gap between what’s available and what researchers can study. “People come up to me with cannabis products they want me to do research on, and I say, ‘I can’t,’ " he says.
Other researchers point to Dr. Abrams as an example of someone who has learned how to do research despite onerous regulations. He’s in the midst of a study on how marijuana might help reduce inflammation in people with sickle-cell disease. But to get federal funding, he proposed studying both the harm and the benefit of marijuana to patients with the disease—knowing from experience that if he emphasized only possible benefits, his application would be denied.
“It’s frustrating,” he says. “But my modus operandi has always been to work within the system to do the research.”
The government has supplied the marijuana he needs for the study, and he gives the drug-abuse institute and the University of Mississippi credit for that. But he supports Colorado’s efforts to break the monopoly on the production of marijuana for research. “I think it’s worth pushing the envelope,” he says, “because the system, as it is, is years behind the popular feeling.”
