Drug war exceptions can be the rule in US law. Chief among domestic drug war violators are drug rehabilitation facilities that recruit and provide drug addicts to businesses where they work for no pay. The jobs can include plucking chickens on poultry farms, working 80-hour weeks in senior care centers, or laboring for wealthy corporations like Exxon, Shell, and Walmart, minus any labor or health protections, benefits or cash. The Center for Investigative Reporting has examined the legality of the practice:

…the regulatory agencies and laws don’t really matter. The judges don’t really care. They don’t look into this. They think they’re doing, what, God’s work, or—you know, because sometimes there’s a big Christian aura over the whole thing, and required church attendance, required Bible study. And now go out and pluck chickens on an assembly line. […]

…a common theme among all of these programs is that they tend to be unregulated. They’re not licensed, they don’t have medical staff or other aspects to their program that would typically have to fall under regulation in these states. On top of that, many of them are Christian-based or faith-based, and many Christian-based programs in the United States are eligible for licensing exemptions from state to state. […]

“We forget the founders faced a situation in society where we had a lot of people who were held in the stockade or something, because ‘Oh, you violated the terms of your employment,’ or what have you…” […]

The 13th Amendment basically outlawed slavery in the United States. And it states that involuntary servitude is not OK, except essentially as a punishment upon conviction of a crime. And so when you have participants who are getting sent by courts to these programs, ostensibly for rehab and treatment for their addictions, what lawyers have told us is there’s an argument that that violates the 13th Amendment. Because not only sometimes are there no convictions in these cases yet, but a lot of the time, even if there are convictions, the courts are saying: this is not for punishment. This is to rehabilitate you. This is to provide treatment so that you can recover from your addictions and become a productive member of society. […]

California requires licensing and regulation for non-medically assisted drug rehabs. Under the DHCS system, slaves and indentured servants are not allowed to compete in the job market no matter how disgusting the job. With the advent of marijuana legalization serving to spotlight these activities, non-medical rehabs in the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Texas are being investigated or sued for illegal labor practices.

Dopamine receptors can be quantified using PET scans. For cannabis researchers this is tremendous news. A pair of studies demonstrate how stressful environments decrease the dopamine receptors of songbirds, while the other clarifies marijuana’s effects on dopamine release, PTSD and depression:

19-JUL-2019 – Louisiana State University Department of Biological Sciences Assistant Professor Christine Lattin, and colleagues conducted this study of wild songbirds showing that dopamine is important in responding to chronic stressors, which can help wildlife conservation efforts in response to environmental stressors such as habitat destruction, natural disasters, extreme weather events and increases in predation. […]

They found that one type of dopamine receptor decreased over time during captivity, which suggests that birds became less resilient to stress over time. The greater the decrease in dopamine receptors, the more they exhibited anxiety-related behaviors such as feather ruffling. All of the wild birds also decreased body mass.

“These physiological, neurobiological and behavioral changes suggest that songbirds are not able to habituate to captivity, at least over short periods of time. It is very important that scientists studying stress in wildlife find more ways to study them in their natural habitat,” Lattin said. […]

In a previous study, marijuana’s endocannabinoids were shown to affect the firing of dopamine neurons. University of Maryland School of Medicine scientists revealed the process:

…dopamine causally drives animals to avoid unpleasant or painful situations and stimuli. The results greatly expand the role that dopamine plays in driving behavior.

The researchers also examined the role that endocannabinoids play in this process. Endocannabinoids, brain chemicals that resemble the active ingredients in marijuana, play key roles in many brain processes. Here, Dr. Joseph F. Cheer and his colleagues found that endocannabinoids essentially open the gate that allows the dopamine neurons to fire. When the researchers reduced the level of endocannabinoids, the animals were much less likely to move to avoid shocks.

In both depression and PTSD, doctors already sometimes treat patients with medicine to increase dopamine and there are now clinical trials testing use of endocannabinoid drugs to treat these conditions. Dr. Cheer suggests that this approach may need to be used more often and should certainly be studied in more detail.

Dr. Cheer argues that the research sheds light on brain disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. In depression, patients feel unable to avoid a sense of helplessness in the face of problems, and tend to ruminate rather than act to improve their situation. In PTSD, patients are unable to avoid an overwhelming sense of fear and anxiety in the face of seemingly low-stress situations. Both disorders, he says, may involve abnormally low levels of dopamine, and may be seen on some level as a failure of the avoidance system. […]

About 34% of medicinal cannabis use is directed at treating depression. For many patients marijuana reduces the anxiety and emotional pain that form links in the chain to their illnesses. The current findings raise another possibility, and not just for house sparrows (Passer domesticus). Cannabis may be the treatment of choice for people arrested and confined in cages for consuming marijuana or any other illicit drug.

Seventy-three percent of surveyed medical specialists providing health care think cannabis benefits their patients, but only forty-six percent felt comfortable recommending it. Topping the list of complaints is the usual drug war collateral harm involving uncertainties in marijuana strains versus specific medical effects, product availabilities, and punitive state or federal regulations:

“I think in some cases we’re missing out on providing a useful tool. Providers think it has benefit,” says Ashley E. Glode, PharmD, assistant professor at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and the study’s first author. […]

Providers … reported legal and regulatory concerns, especially providers working in academic medical centers who expressed uncertainty whether recommending medical marijuana could jeopardize federal funding (marijuana remains a [DEA] Schedule 1 drug). Providers felt as if additional clinical data describing the effectiveness of medical marijuana and endorsed guidelines describing the conditions and situations in which it should be used would increase their comfort in prescribing. […]

“Knowledge is an issue,” Glode says. “If we could do a better job educating our healthcare providers, it might be used more often….”

Continued use of DEA scheduling to deliberately obstruct education and research on marijuana is futile. Research gets diverted elsewhere to countries such as Canada, making Canadians the first to profit from any patentable discoveries in their labs. Even those who reject marijuana for moral reasons become better informed about cannabis and its consumers when confronted by a diversity of people–some of them medicating cancer patients–who exemplify the fact marijuana use has nothing to do with a person’s moral character.

One possibility for US hesitancy to reschedule cannabis is it sees it as an admission of an embarrassing and crushing trillion-dollar defeat. Perhaps the beleaguered traditionalists in the federal government can find some comfort in knowing that defeats like those of the drug war, Viet Nam, General Custer’s last stand at the Little Bighorn, are a new national tradition thanks to prohibitionists.