Medical Marijuana Research Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. HARRIS. Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your concern about addiction and all the problems. This is an ancillary problem that deals with that. I thank you for your concern about that.

I thank the chairman of the committee and the ranking member. This has been years in the making. I thank them for bringing this across the finish line.

I thank my cosponsor from across the aisle. The gentleman from Oregon is absolutely right. He and I will disagree, probably the most two people can disagree, about recreational marijuana. We agree 100 percent that we need to do this research and that we need this bill.

Now, because of the discussion about COVID and the vaccines and therapeutics for that, Americans realize how medical research has to be done and how important it is to be done. They expect purity, safety, and efficacy for anything that has a claim of a medical product.

Now, unfortunately, because of the public policy we have had in place with marijuana and its scheduling, this simply couldn't be done. The unfortunate consequence is that legislatures in general across the States, and, unfortunately, this legislature last week, took a ready- fire-aim approach: Let's go ahead and legalize it, even for recreational use, without a medical basis.

But I am only going to talk about medical marijuana. We need good studies. Understandably, because of current scheduling, we can't do it. I get it. I did research, as a physician, on drugs. You can't do it under the current scheduling, but we need to do the research.

As the chairman pointed out, Dr. Volkow, who has appeared before our committee many times, has said that the claims of medical usefulness are simply greatly exaggerated because we don't have the science. Many claims are made; very few are proven.

We don't tolerate that for other medications. We certainly don't tolerate it for COVID vaccines and therapeutics. We shouldn't tolerate it for medical marijuana. This research just simply hasn't been done, for a variety of reasons, most of which get cured by this bill.

Now, could medical marijuana be useful for PTSD for my fellow veterans? Absolutely. It might be useful. We have no idea.

What we have done is, instead, the public press has said it is useful for PTSD. That is not the way we treat medicine in this country. We actually do the research. Our veterans deserve for us to do this research.

It couldn't be done, because of the scheduling, because of the rules--the rules, by the way, that Congress made. This is on us. We shouldn't have taken so long to get to this point.

Could it be useful for non-neurogenic chronic pain? Yes, it might be, but I don't know. The last thing we should do to our chronic pain patients, as you know, Mr. Speaker, because of the problems with treating chronic pain, is make false promises to them about something.

If this works for it, oh, my gosh, that is great. We have a potential solution for part of our addiction problem. If it doesn't work, those people deserve to know.

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Mr. HARRIS. Mr. Speaker, is it useful for that group? Is CBD useful for that group of pediatric patients with seizures? Yes, it sure is. Is it useful for people with glaucoma? Yes, it sure is. Is it useful for spasticity with multiple sclerosis? Yes, it sure is.

But there are 40 or 50 other claims that we don't know about. We deserve to know about it. Those claims are simply not founded on science.

Look, let's do the science. Let's see what medical marijuana is useful for. As a physician, anything it is useful for, I want to provide for patients. Let's do the science. Let's pass H.R. 3797.

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