Medical marijuana legalization likely headed to Supreme Court

"An appeals court refused on Tuesday to even consider reviewing evidence to reclassify marijuana due to its medical usefulness, leaving the nation's largest medical marijuana advocacy group vowing to ask the Supreme Court for a review.

In their ruling (PDF), three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. explained that they did not take up the question of medical efficacy because the suit was otherwise disqualified by a technicality. Attorneys for Americans for Safe Access argued that a petition denied by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 2011 was denied on "arbitrary and capricious" grounds, which the court took exception to.

That petition, which the DEA sat on for nearly a decade without any action, asked the agency to examine the latest scientific evidence for marijuana's medical uses and consider changing the drug's status in the federal register of controlled substances. The DEA considers marijuana to be Schedule I, a classification reserved for drugs like LSD, Peyote and Ecstasy that are considered to have no medical value."

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