In the United States today many people have seen great advances in terms of medicine and technology and how these advances have benefited people suffering from a multitude of diseases and the symptoms caused by diseases. One aspect of medicine that remains prehistoric is the use of medicinal marijuana. Numerous studies exist in the United States and other countries that show that marijuana is in fact beneficial from a medicinal standpoint, however the number of scientific studies is limited in the United States. Scientist and doctors have received little approval on proposed scientific studies on medicinal marijuana by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) because the federal government has scheduled marijuana as a schedule I drug. As a Schedule I drug, marijuana is considered illegal. The federal government does not recognize any of the laws passed by the eighteen states and D.C., legally allowing its use as medicine. People using marijuana for medicinal reasons, despite the fact that it may very well be legal in their state, could still face federal prosecution.
             Repeatedly the DEA has parried any advancement in the judicial process to make medicinal marijuana use legal. The DEA (2011) stated that "The clear weight of the currently available evidence supports this classification, including evidence that smoked marijuana has a high potential for abuse, has no accepted medicinal value in treatment in the United States, and evidence that there is a general lack of accepted safety for its use even under medical supervision" (Drug Enforcement Agency, 2011, p. 2). It is time these draconian laws were reversed and the federal government reschedules marijuana to a lower class, schedule II, allowing marijuana to be fully researched by members of the scientific community and that marijuana be allowed to be used medicinally under the supervision of a physician without the threat of federal prosecution so that those patients who may ...