The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has delivered a recommendation to the Drug Enforcement Administration on marijuana policy, and Senate leaders hailed it Wednesday as a first step toward easing federal restrictions on the drug.
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00:00 You can already use legally used recreational marijuana in more than 20
00:05 states while 38 states have approved it for medicinal use. Despite those changes
00:09 pot though has remained illegal on the federal level but now the nation's top
00:12 health agency wants to ease some of those restrictions. Now the DEA
00:16 currently lists marijuana as a schedule one drug along with heroin, LSD and
00:20 ecstasy and currently marijuana is listed as having a higher potential for
00:24 abuse than cocaine, oxycodone and meth which are scheduled to. That is why the
00:29 Department of Health and Human Services wants to take pot down to a schedule
00:33 three which would put it on the same level as aspirin, cough syrup and
00:37 ketamine which you can get a prescription for. So what changes if pot
00:42 is reclassified? Well for starters schedule one is reserved for drugs again
00:46 like heroin with no currently accepted medical use. Those drugs are also way
00:50 more difficult to research for medical purposes and are often more aggressively
00:55 criminalized. Now if the DEA follows through with the change we would likely
00:58 see the booming cannabis market further expand. Additionally a certain tax
01:03 provision only applying to schedules one and two substances would no longer apply.
01:08 Now it's no secret that marijuana legalization has increasingly gained
01:12 bipartisan support over the years. This year several states as you see here have
01:16 seen legalization victories including in Georgia where if you have a medical
01:21 marijuana card you can now go into any dispensary and legally get oil and then
01:25 in Minnesota beginning August 1st it became legal there to possess, grow and
01:29 use certain amounts of pot for residents over the age of 21. And when it comes to
01:34 reclassifying marijuana the DEA will review the recommendation and then make
01:38 a decision. It's a process that could take months. Mara Sirianni, Scripps News.