President Donald Trump announced he might loosen the federal restrictions on marijuana, but moral and legal scholars who spoke with CNA this week expressed concern about the drug and its impact on American society.
The federal government considers marijuana — also referred to as cannabis, the name of the plant that contains psychoactive compounds called cannabinoids — a Schedule I substance. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), this is reserved for drugs with “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”
Trump said in a news conference Aug. 11 that he is considering rescheduling it to Schedule III, which is a drug “with a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence” and has abuse potential “less than Schedule I,” according to the DEA.
“We’re looking at reclassification and we’ll make a determination over the next … few weeks and that determination will hopefully be the right one,” the president said.
Trump called it a “very complicated subject” and said he hears good things about medical cannabis and bad things “with just about everything else.”
Federal law prohibits the sale of marijuana for recreational and medical use, but 40 states have medical cannabis programs and 24 states legalized recreational use. Both violate federal law, but the government has generally allowed states to regulate it as they see fit rather than enforce the prohibition.
Rescheduling marijuana would not lift the ban, but it could reduce criminal penalties, open the door for more medical research, and potentially be a step toward further deregulation.
Charles Nemeth, the director of the Center for Criminal Justice, Law, and Ethics at Franciscan University, told CNA that Schedule III is “generally for more minor things” and “the seriousness and the impact is supposed to be reflected in these schedules.”
“The [federal] ban would not exist in the same way [if Trump reschedules marijuana],” Nemeth said. “Right now, the drug is an illicit drug and it can be a felony, depending on how much you have or how much you’re selling.”
“It [would] have an enormous impact on the policymaking of law enforcement, decision-making, [and] what they concentrate on,” he added. “They [would] not look at the drug as much as they used to.”
Concerns about recreational use
The Catechism of the Catholic Church does not directly mention marijuana but broadly teaches “the use of drugs inflicts very grave damage on human health and life.” It calls drug use a “grave offense” with the exception of drugs used on “strictly therapeutic grounds,” such as treatment for a condition.
Nemeth said “marijuana’s destructive impact” is clear in studies about mental acuity and brain development, calling it “destructive to intellectual formation.” He also pointed to concerns that it may harm fertility.
On top of this, Nemeth noted the immediate impact of the high, saying: “It shuts your mind down; it makes you less intellectually curious than you normally would be.”
“It’s so contrary to human flourishing,” Nemeth said. “There is nothing that comes from the perpetual smoking of marijuna that has a positive impact on the human person.”
Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, a senior ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, also has concerns about rescheduling marijuana, telling CNA that labeling it a Schedule I drug has “sent a much-needed message to Americans and drawn a kind of moral line for many years.”
“Adults who smoke[d] marijuana regularly during adolescence have decreased neural connectivity (abnormal brain development and fewer fibers) in specific brain regions,” he said. “These notable effects of marijuana on brain development may help to explain the association between frequent marijuana use among adolescents and significant declines in IQ, as well as poor academic performance and an increased risk of dropping out of school.”
He said drug users “seek to escape or otherwise suppress their lived conscious experience and instead pursue chemically-altered states of mind, or drug-induced pseudo-experiences.”
“Any time we act in such a manner that we treat something objectively good as if it were an evil by acting directly against it, we act in an immoral and disordered fashion and make a poor and harmful choice,” Pacholczyk said.
Catholic Answers’ senior apologist Jimmy Akin echoed those concerns, noting that “all mind-altering substances — including both marijuana and alcohol — have the potential to be misused in sinful ways.”
“The classic Catholic moral analysis distinguishes imperfect intoxication, which does not rob one of the gift of reason, from perfect intoxication, which does and disposes one to commit grave sins,” he told CNA. “To deliberately engage in perfect intoxication is itself gravely sinful.”
Jared Staudt, a Catholic theologian who serves as director of content for Exodus 90, told CNA “a federal reclassification would only further the damage” of recreational marijuana.
“It’s time to acknowledge that legalization has proven to be a failed experiment,” he said.
What about medical cannabis?
Trump’s primary motivation for the potential rescheduling is his interest in research for medicinal uses of cannabis.
According to Akin, “Catholics may have different opinions on the best legal policy regarding marijuana.” He said learning about medicinal uses could have benefits but that Catholics should make informed decisions.
“Catholics contemplating using medical marijuana should consider whether the science actually supports its use as the best treatment for a condition or whether the science has been ‘cooked’ to make marijuana more available,” he said. “
Nemeth expressed concern about most purported uses of medical cannabis. He said there are almost always alternatives, which is a “mind-altering … product.” For mental health conditions such as anxiety or depression, he said it may mask symptoms “just because you’re high” but does not provide a cure and could exacerbate issues long-term.
“Most people who need to be high all the time are either anxious people or unhappy people or people in distress,” he said.
Alternatively, some Catholic hospitals have engaged in research about the use of medical cannabis as an alternative to opioids for pain management.