“Without such clinical studies, veterans who live in states where medical marijuana is not available as a treatment for PTSD cannot obtain the treatment, and veterans who can obtain the treatment in states where it is legal do so at their own personal expense, without coordination with their VA medical teams, and without any scientific evidence to establish the promise of the efficacy and safety of the treatment,” IAVA said.

This isn’t the first time that this group of scientists and veterans has taken the feds to court over their marijuana decisions.

The plaintiffs were also successful in forcing DEA to issue an update on the status of applications to become federally authorized cannabis manufacturers for research purposes and then got the Justice Department to hand over a “secret” memo that DEA allegedly used to justify a delay in deciding on those proposals.

Meanwhile, DEA could also become involved in a separate U.S. Supreme Court case challenging its marijuana scheduling actions.

In a petition filed in July and formally docketed for a private conference at the high court on Friday, a group of patients and advocates asked the justices to take up their case challenging the constitutionality of federal cannabis prohibition. This comes after a series of rulings in lower courts since the original lawsuit was filed in 2017.

Seven members of Congress and a slew of marijuana reform groups submitted legal documents last month urging the court to take up the case.

Separately, a federal court recently ruled that California regulators must comply with a DEA subpoena demanding information about marijuana businesses that they are investigating.

Read: IAVA’s amicus brief on the marijuana scheduling case here. 

This piece originally ran in the Marijuana Moment publication on October 8, 2020.