Science - USA (2022-04-15)

232 15 APRIL 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6590 science.org SCIENCE

Bills to ease cannabis research

advance in U.S. Congress

Legislation may allow study of edibles or let universities

grow their own plants for research

SCIENCE POLICY

F

or decades, marijuana’s federal crimi-

nal status has raised obstacles for re-

searchers trying to study the plant’s

health impacts, such as forcing them

to rely on a single grower or keep

samples in 340-kilogram safes under

24/7 surveillance. Now, the U.S. Congress is

poised to eliminate some of those hurdles.

Two bills, passed unanimously in the Sen-

ate late last month and by an 82% vote in the

House of Representatives last week , would

ease storage rules, streamline application

procedures for would-be cannabis research-

ers, and allow them to

modify research protocols

more easily. The Senate ver-

sion allows universities to

grow their own plants for

research, and the House bill

allows researchers to study

products sold at dispensa-

ries in states that have le-

galized marijuana.

The two bills share a

common theme, says Rep-

resentative Andy Harris

(R–MD), a leading co-sponsor: giving re-

searchers “access to a wider range of prod-

ucts that reflect the modern marijuana

marketplace.” He predicts that House and

Senate negotiators will iron out the differ-

ences “by summer or fall” and the resulting

measure will become law. “My hope is that

[in facilitating research] we once and for all

determine whether marijuana or its compo-

nents actually have a role in the treatment

of disease,” he says.

The United States designates marijuana

as a schedule I drug, in the same category

as heroin and LSD. Researchers studying

it must win Drug Enforcement Admin-

istration (DEA) registration, an arduous

process, and keep samples in high-security

vaults or safes. Until recently, they could

only study plants from one grower, the

University of Mississippi, although DEA re-

cently registered a few additional growers.

As a result, “All that researchers can

get is cannabis that’s worse than probably

what my parents smoked in college,” says

Logan Leichtman, an attorney for canna-

bis companies in Portland. Oregon. Plants

from the Mississippi farm have far less

delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), can-

nabis’ main psychoactive ingredient, than

many products legally sold today for medi-

cal use in 37 states and Washington, D.C.

Despite the broad and growing medi-

cal usage, the U.S. Food and Drug Admin-

istration (FDA) has only approved a few

cannabis-based therapies, including two

synthetic THC-based medicines for nausea

and loss of appetite and one drug, cannabi-

diol (another chemical in cannabis), for in-

tractable epilepsies. Researchers are keen

to examine cannabinoids

as potential therapies for

chronic pain, cancer, anxi-

ety, and other conditions.

To do that, “Research-

ers need to be able to

study these chemicals that

the rest of the world can

get very easily,” says Ziva

Cooper, director of the Can-

nabis Research Initiative at

the University of California,

Los Angeles.

The House provision allowing access to

dispensary products may not survive. The

more modest Senate version “has been very

carefully negotiated to make it able to pass

by unanimous consent through the Senate,

which is no small feat,” says a policy staffer

for Senator Dianne Feinstein (D–CA), the

bill’s lead sponsor. Such unanimity could

speed final passage. “Our hope is that the

House will consider adopting a bill that

looks a lot like ours.”

The Senate bill, which has the backing of

the American Medical Association, would

also allow researchers to import cannabis

and require DEA to register companies

producing FDA-approved drugs.

Still, studying marijuana will remain

challenging because of funding constraints

and its continued U.S. criminal status, sci-

entists say. “Symbolically I think [the bills]

are really important,” Cooper says. “But

for somebody who does human research

... [studying cannabis is] still going to

be hard.” j

By Meredith Wadman

Researchers need

to study “these

chemicals that the

rest of the world can

get very easily.”

Ziva Cooper,

University of California, Los Angeles

be named, said he knows nothing about In-
ternational Publisher or its activities and that
all listed co-authors contributed to the work.
Kim-Hung Pho, a statistician at Ton Duc
Thang University who co-authored two
of the flagged studies—both published by
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities,
run by Oxford University Press—also told
Science he has no knowledge of http://www.123mi.
ru. “I don’t have any funds to do scientific
research, so I have absolutely no money
to buy [authorship in] these articles, and
there is no pressure to do this.”
In 2021, publishers retracted a record
724 articles traced to paper mills, part of
a grand total of more than 1000 such ar-
ticles retracted during the past decade,
according to a database maintained by
the Retraction Watch website. (More than
4 million scholarly papers are now pub-
lished annually.)
At least two nonprofit groups that ad-
vocate for honest practices in publishing
have issued guidance to journal editors
about how to deter purchased authorships.
The Committee on Publication Ethics and
the International Committee of Medical
Journal Editors recommend that editors
require authors who request to add an au-
thor after submitting a manuscript to pro-
vide an explanation and signed permission
from all other listed authors.
But some observers suggest journal edi-
tors should do more. If they discover pa-
pers with authors who paid to be listed,
they should flag them by attaching a writ-
ten “expression of concern” because “any
association with the mill raises some ques-
tion about the integrity of the paper,” says
Bryan Victor, who studies social work
at Wayne State University. In December
2021, he co-authored a separate analysis
of http://www.123mi.ru on Retraction Watch,
which described nearly 200 papers that
may match authorships advertised there;
subsequently he and a colleague posted a
catalog of contracts displayed on the site,
which together refer to about 1500 articles.
How editors could identify fraudulent
authors before publication remains murky.
But the papers do offer clues, Abalkina
found. For example, a few list authors in
multiple unrelated academic departments,
making it unlikely they collaborated. In
other cases, the authors’ specialties don’t
match the manuscript’s title.
To avoid scrutiny from editors, Interna-
tional Publisher appears to avoid repeat-
edly targeting the same journals, Abalkina
says. “That makes it impossible for an edi-
tor to detect some anomalies,” she says. j

Dalmeet Singh Chawla is a science journalist
in London.

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