For decades, there’s just been one farm at the University of Mississippi that’s cleared by the Drug Enforcement Administration to cultivate marijuana for research purposes.
That’s led to calls from investigators, advocates and lawmakers to expand the number of approved manufacturer registrants.
Bipartisan lawmakers did recently introduce a bill to remove barriers to conducting research on cannabis, including by giving scientists access to cannabis from dispensaries.
Recruits with documented histories of marijuana use were just as likely as their peers to make sergeant, for example, and while they were more likely to leave the Army over drug use, they were less likely to separate as the result of health or performance concerns.
The same goes for people diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder , anxiety disorders or depression, who in some cases may not even qualify for a waiver.
“Without waivers, a failed drug test for marijuana would block the one-third of American 18-year-olds who say they have used marijuana at least once in the past year,” a RAND official wrote in a blog post about results.
The Army asked RAND’s Arroyo Center, its sole federally funded research and development center, to analyze the performance of the recruits who receive waivers.
Recruits with weight- or health-related waivers, including those with behavioral health conditions, were more likely to leave the Army for health-related reasons, for example.
The report should quell concerns that state-level moves to legalize cannabis has hurt the quality of incoming recruits.
Currently, applicants can request waivers for positive tests for marijuana during their physical exam, in which case they must wait 90 days and then test negative.
Recruits with a documented history of using cannabis and a non-traffic offense waiver, for example, are 32.7 percent more likely to separate from the Army due to misconduct regarding something other than drug abuse and 72.9 percent more likely for drug abuse specifically.
The RAND report suggests the Army adopt some changes to how it handles waivers.
The concept centers on whether a person “has overcome his or her disqualifications,” it observes, although “no formal definition of the whole person concept is provided.” In practice the decision is made by individuals with authority to approve the waiver, who decide based on personal judgement.
It would take a much, much greater proportion of recruits with documented histories of cannabis use to make a meaningful impact on military performance, the report notes.
“The term waiver is not well understood by policymakers and the press, and the term is often confused to mean that the Army is lowering standards and enlisting unqualified soldiers,” the report says.
Department of Veterans Affairs under the Biden administration last month continued its opposition to a bill that would require VA to conduct clinical trials into the therapeutic potential of marijuana for military veterans.
In September, meanwhile, a U.S.
But the Navy replied by, just four days later, expanding its ban on CBD and hemp products for sailors to cover topicals like shampoos and soaps.
Advocates have pointed to studies showing that marijuana appears to effectively treat certain conditions and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder , for example.
The scientists are previewing their findings, but it’s still in the process of undergoing peer review and is set to be published in “a major scientific journal,” one of the authors said.
“Critics of marijuana legalization point to studies showing correlations between heavy cannabis use and suicide, depression, and mental health disorders.
There was “no change” in the rate of current cannabis use among high school students from 2009-2019, the survey found.
Past-year cannabis use for those aged 12-17 dipped from 13.2 percent to 10.1 percent from 2019-2020, the survey, conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration , found.
For this latest survey, researchers emphasized that there were changes to methodology due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
That said, past instances of the annual survey have continually shown that legalization opponents’ predicted spike in youth marijuana use as reform spreads has simply not come to fruition.
When analyzed using a quadratic change model, however, lifetime marijuana consumption decreased during that period.