ICYMI: The Feds Have Their Own Crop Of Whacky-Tobacky In The Heart Of Mississippi

What exactly goes down at Ole Miss regarding marijuana? And why is Ole Miss growing cannabis at all?

Believe it or not, the federal government maintains its own marijuana crop at the University of Mississippi (commonly known as Ole Miss). It likely surprises you that one of the most conservative states in the Union — one of the last to relent to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and one with some pretty tough drug laws — actually assists the federal government in cultivating a Schedule I controlled substance. What won’t surprise you is that all of the studies performed by Ole Miss and the federal government on this southern marijuana crop have led to consistent and unwaveringly negative reports about marijuana and its “effects.”

But what exactly goes down at Ole Miss regarding marijuana? And why is Ole Miss growing cannabis at all?

The Feds gave Ole Miss the marijuana in 1968 to study and research cannabis. This was before implementation of the federal government’s Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program (CINDP), which Ole Miss’s grow now serves, in addition to conducting cannabis research for the federal government. The National Institute on Drug Abuse oversees CINDP and this program allows the Feds to distribute marijuana grown at Ole Miss to a very small list of people in the United States for medical use. Currently, there are only four people on the coveted list and no new entrants are permitted. CINDP began after Robert Randall brought a lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the Department of Justice, and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Randall, who had glaucoma, successfully used the common law doctrine of necessity to argue against criminal charges of marijuana cultivation by arguing that for him, cannabis was a medical necessity.

The criminal charges against Randall were dropped, and federal agencies began providing Randall with FDA-approved access to government supplies of medical marijuana after he petitioned for it 1976. Randall went public with his victory and soon the government tried to prevent his legal access to marijuana. In 1978, Randall sued the government again and that suit led to an out-of-court settlement, which resulted in Randall gaining prescriptive access to marijuana through a federal pharmacy near his home.

Randall’s settlement was the basis for the CINDP. At its height, the program had 30 active patients. It stopped accepting new patients in 1992 after public health authorities concluded that cannabis had no medical value and that it would make better sense to go along with President George H.W. Bush’s desire to “get tough on crime and drugs.”

So, with only four active patients on the list, why does the federal government continue cultivating a relatively large cannabis crop in Oxford, Mississippi? It seems to do so just to frustrate any other researchers from uncovering or reporting on the potentially useful science behind marijuana for medical use or otherwise. As the L.A. Times put it last year: “Researchers can’t get anything from the 46-year-old Marijuana Research Project at Ole Miss unless the Drug Enforcement Administration gives the go-ahead. A panel on which the National Institute on Drug Abuse [NIDA] is represented often must sign off too. Some prominent researchers complain that approval is unreasonably tough for scientists whose work aims to find beneficial uses for the drug.”

But, for one scientist, Mahmoud A. ElSohly, approval of marijuana trials and tests does not seem nearly so demanding. ElSohly heads up Ole Miss’s marijuana science team and manages its 12-acre marijuana farm. ElSohly also maintains his own private lab, ElSohly Laboratories, Inc., which has benefited privately from ElSohly’s relationship to the marijuana grow in multiple ways, including applying for and receiving at least one patent for the medical use of THC.

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So, what we have here is the federal government (through Ole Miss and its own private contractors) maintaining a monopoly over the only federally lawful marijuana grow in the U.S. Since in various reports ElSohly himself has acknowledged the potential medicinal benefits of marijuana, I also have to wonder how much of the Feds’ reluctance to approve new research facilities is largely a battle to defend its monopoly providing financial benefit to a select few.

P.S. If you’re interested in starting a marijuana law practice — or if you’d like to learn about the steps it will take to open a dispensary legally in your state — please attend Above the Law’s Marijuana Law event next week in Denver, Colorado, where I’ll be a panelist. I look forward to seeing you there and helping you learn the ins and outs of this complicated and rewarding practice area.


Hilary Bricken is an attorney at Harris Moure, PLLC in Seattle and she chairs the firm’s Canna Law Group. Her practice consists of representing marijuana businesses of all sizes in multiple states on matters relating to licensing, corporate formation and contracts, commercial litigation, and intellectual property. Named one of the 100 most influential people in the cannabis industry in 2014, Hilary is also lead editor of the Canna Law Blog. You can reach her by email at hilary@harrismoure.com.

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