This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, August 26, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Marijuana research was for a long time simply prohibited.

That research now requires a federal permission slip which is incredibly

difficult to get. That despite the fact, cannabis is legal for adults in eight states and

legal for specific medical reasons and many more.

Trevor Burris is a research fellow at the Cato Institute. He comments. The

Marijuana Tax Act was at mid 1930s.

1937. And it was mid-1930s and it was misnamed yes because it effectively prohibited marijuana

so if we're talking about marijuana research and the prohibitions on that or limitations on that.

We have to go back to that law.

Yeah, it's been going on for an unbelievably long time and it really upsets me because if listeners don't know that right

now in 1970 we still consider marijuana with the Control Substance Act, we consider marijuana a schedule one drug, meaning as far as the government's

concerned it's more dangerous than cocaine, which is a schedule two drug which has legitimate

medical uses.

The story going back, as you said, before the Controlled Substances Act, marijuana came on with

the first federal law in 1937 called the Marijuana Tax Act.

In that act when they were debating it and it was a very short debate, it was mostly pushed,

the act was mostly pushed by a guy named Harry Anslinger, who was the commissioner for the Federal

Bureau of Narcotics for 32 years from 1930 to 1962, and he hated marijuana with a visceral hatred.

I believed it made kids insane, made them kill their family with axes.

And so he pushed this and Congress looked at it pretty quickly.

...