MJBizMag March 2022 - 42

Court
Legal action could
spur marijuana reform
M
any cannabis industry observers
have pinned their hopes
for federal marijuana legalization
on an act of Congress or even an
executive order from the president. But
there's another option: legal challenges
through the U.S. court system.
Although no lawsuit has yet succeeded
in forcing the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration to move cannabis from
Schedule 1 on the list of controlled
substances, that doesn't mean it won't
happen, according to attorneys who
have attempted to advance marijuana
reform through the judiciary.
" It could totally be done in the
courts, " said Texas-based attorney
Matthew Zorn, who tried to force the
DEA to hold a hearing on rescheduling
marijuana but lost on a technicality.
Zorn was representing cannabis
researcher Dr. Sue Sisley, who has
been trying for years to launch clinical
trials to study the medical effects of
marijuana on patients.
The case-originally filed in 2020 as a
petition with the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals-was met with defeat in 2021,
when the court ruled the plaintiffs
failed to " exhaust administrative
remedies, " Zorn said. In other words,
the court said Sisley should have begun
by petitioning the DEA directly to
request that marijuana be rescheduled.
42 March 2022 | MJBizMagazine
" Nobody has ever managed to put
together all the pieces at once, which
is: having legal standing, exhausting
administrative remedies and then
making the right argument, " Zorn
said, noting there have been a number
Matthew
Zorn
Dr. Sue
Sisley
By John Schroyer
Fight
of legal cases that tried to overturn
the federal government's marijuana
prohibition.
Supreme Effort
Washington v. Barr, a multiyear lawsuit
that began in summer 2017, sought to
fully legalize marijuana by having the
courts proclaim its Schedule 1 status
unconstitutional.
That case failed when the U.S. Supreme
Court declined to take it up in
2020, after the plaintiffs had lost in the
lower federal courts. Judges cited the
same technicality: The plaintiffs did not
first ask the DEA to change its mind.
" We took a look at the history of
efforts to reschedule cannabis, and
each of those efforts took seven to nine
years, " said New York City attorney
Lauren Rudick, one of a team of lawyers
at Hiller PC who spent years on the
Washington case.
Rudick said her team went straight
to the courts because their plaintiffs
were medical cannabis patients who
didn't have the time and money to
wait for the DEA to say no before filing
a lawsuit.
But that doesn't mean the same tactic
couldn't be successful, Rudick said.
" For every Loving v. Virginia-the case
that legalized interracial marriage-or
Brown v. Board of Education-which

MJBizMag March 2022

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