When Proposition 64 passed in California, legalizing recreational marijuana use, many people imagined that UC Davis might get into the pot business. With the No. 1 agricultural school in the nation, as well as a top plant biology program, UCD seems poised to become a cannabis research leader.

Not so fast, says Chief Campus Counsel Jacob Appelsmith.

“Under federal law, (marijuana) is a Schedule 1 drug,” Appelsmith said, as are heroin and LSD. Even as states are legalizing cannabis for both medical and recreational uses, the feds are not moving forward at the same pace.

As a result, Appelsmith said, “Traditionally the only research that has been permitted has been to show harmful effects. (The government has been) very reluctant to fund research to show the benefits.”

Appelsmith has experience in marijuana law, having worked for Governor Jerry Brown for six years. He helped with the medical marijuana guidelines after Proposition 215, the California medical marijuana initiative, passed in 1996.

Ole Miss is the nation’s connection

Since the 1960s, the permitted research has all come from a marijuana farm in Mississippi.

“There’s only one place in the country where it’s grown and federally approved,” Appelsmith said, “and that’s the University of Mississippi.”

Additionally, he explained, “They’re growing it for researchers” to use in experiments, “not growing it for research on how to grow it, or breeding or pest (information).”

Imagine the opportunity for the No. 1 Ag school with all of these experts in plant biology.

“Lots of people are coming to this campus who want us to do agricultural research and other research,” Appelsmith said. “That is what we do in plant sciences; breeding, pesticides, pathogens, all sorts of things.”

Earlier this week, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a story by Tom Hesse detailing the red tape of obtaining a Schedule 1 permit from the DEA for clinical research. Note: Observational research is less restrictive. See below for observational research being done at UCD on marijuana.

Hesse described a Colorado researcher who upon seeing the results of a 2012 survey of Colorado patients with back pain — where nearly 20 percent self-reported using medical marijuana for pain management — wanted to conduct her own study.

“The research will compare cannabis with oxycodone, a commonly prescribed opioid. Patients will test both treatments to evaluate if cannabis has a future as a pain-relief alternative to opioids,” Hesse wrote.

“The project hasn’t started yet,” Hesse continued. “(The researcher) needed seven months for DEA approval, and she’s still waiting to get cleared for marijuana from the Mississippi facility, which she was hoping to have last November. (As a Ph.D., and not an M.D., she cannot hold the necessary Schedule 1 permit, so she has worked with a doctor on setting up the study.”

There are also concerns by researchers that the strains of cannabis grown by Ole Miss are not strong enough in THC, the chemical compound responsible for the high associated with marijuana. In states where it’s legal, the pot dispensaries sell much stronger strains, making researchers unable to compare apples to apples.

All of this helps explain some of the complications surrounding UCD’s decisions on “whether to apply to grow for research,” Appelsmith said.

“Last year the federal government looked at moving it to Schedule 2,” Appelsmith continued. It would still be a controlled substance, he said, but could be used for medical research, similar to cocaine and Demerol, and other narcotics that are prescribed.

“The federal government denied (the reclassification), but invited research institutions to submit proposals to become authorized to grow,” Appelsmith said.

Incidentally, UCD does have one Schedule 1 permit for drug research, according to Appelsmith. “We have one researcher who is doing research on LSD (working to isolate the hallucinogenic).”

Marijuana research at UCD

Meanwhile, UCD is able to do some studies on cannabis. “We may be sequencing DNA and RNA in the plant,” Appelsmith said, which “we can do that without a permit, because it avoids the plant parts with THC.”

Additionally, he said, “We’ve had interest from industrial hemp producers. We can do that without a Schedule 1 permit because of the way the plant is defined,” adding, “That is a far simpler regulatory controlled area.”

And UCD also has published research on marijuana use by adolescents.

Magdalena Cerdá, an epidemiologist with the UCD Violence Prevention Research Program is the first author of a study published online in December in JAMA Pediatrics titled “Did Teen Perception, Use of Marijuana Change After Recreational Use Legalized?”

In a UCD news release, Cerdá detailed some of the findings. “Some adolescents who try marijuana will go on to chronic use, with an accompanying range of adverse outcomes, from cognitive impairment to downward social mobility, financial, work-related and relationship difficulties,” Cerdá said. “We need to better understand the impact of recreational marijuana use so we’re better prepared to prevent adverse consequences among the most vulnerable sectors of the population.”

Talking to The Enterprise, Cerdá explained, “My research focuses on marijuana laws on marijuana use.” She said that the data for this research is self-reported from surveys of adolescents in schools.

“We see systematic trends over time (and) can compare states that have legalized marijuana” to those that haven’t. An interesting finding, she noted, is that “Medical marijuana legalization had no impact on adolescent use in marijuana.”

As recreational use is legalized in more places, data is becoming more abundant.

“Uruguay is the first country to legalize (marijuana) as a nation for recreational use,” Cerdá said. Legalized in 2014, she is interested in data on crime and traffic injury trends.

“We have no agenda in this,” Cerdá said. “We’re not for or against legalization, we just want to know what happens.”

She added, “Understanding it helps explain unintended consequences that might come from legalizing.”