The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) seems happy to respond to public and private parties inquiring about the control status of various substances. DEA answers some of these inquiries more quickly than others, and the response letters are usually short and to the point. The letters typically come from the desk of Terrence L. Boos, Ph.D., Chief of the Drug & Chemical Evaluation Section. They often contain helpful diagrams of the chemical structures at issue, just above the signature blocks.
Last month, my colleague Griffen Thorne touched on one of these letters, which covered THCA. The title of that article was “Bad News for Intoxicating Hemp Products.” As you might infer, the letter concluded that hemp-derived THCA is a schedule I controlled substance, notwithstanding purported “loopholes” of the 2018 Farm Bill.
This blog post will not analyze whether DEA got it right or wrong in any of the recent letters. Instead, I’m going to talk about what the letters mean more generally, and how we should “weight” them. For context, below is a list of the letters I’m talking about, going back three years or so:
Letter re: the legality of delta-8 THC derived from CBD (August 11, 2021) Letter
