Federal Money To Go Toward New Marijuana Research Center: Is The Sum Enough?

The top national medical research center is reviewing ways to help researchers studying cannabis overcome challenges imposed by federal prohibition.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued a notice on Thursday seeking a qualified entity to oversee a new Resource Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research via a cooperative agreement, reported by Marijuana Moment.

The news comes on the heels of the Department of Health and Human Services disclosing a heavily redacted letter sent to the DEA concerning its recommendations for marijuana rescheduling.

The new centralized cannabis research center would “address challenges and barriers to conducting research on cannabis and its constituents,” the agency said in the notice, adding that it would “enable researchers to successfully generate more rigorous scientific evidence across a variety of research domains in both basic and clinical research.”

Over Million Of Dollars In Funding, But Is It Enough?

The center will receive $1 million in fiscal year 2025 from the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) to cover all costs. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute on Aging (NIA) will both contribute $100,000 each for co-funding, whereas the National Cancer Institute (NCI) will provide $200,000 for the same cause.

The contribution from NCI builds on its recently announced $3.2 million funding of research on the effects of cannabis use in oncology patients who receive immunotherapy.

“Seed funds are intended to support non-research regulatory activities to reduce barriers to conduct future research projects within the field, in line with the stated interests of the NIH partner ICs. Regulatory requirements often impede the progress of research proposal development,” the agency said. “Seed funds, therefore, provided by the Research Support Core, must serve to reduce barriers to research within the field.”

Although the initiative from NIH is a "step in the right direction," one researcher told Benzinga, they added that the "dollar amount of funding is really weak." State governments are more generous.

For example, the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) revealed earlier this year that it has garnered as much as $9.5 million from the California Department of Cannabis Control (DCC) in 2022 to fund cannabis research, including the potency and effects of cannabis products on the financial health of the state’s cannabis market.

UCLA is not the only academic institution in the Golden State to get funding for marijuana research. DCC said in April that it has awarded $20 million in research grants to 16 academic institutions. The funds were aimed at supporting scientific research on the impact of cannabis on the mental health of young people, novel cannabinoids like Delta-8 and Delta-10 THC, and a first-of-its-kind study of California’s legacy cannabis genetics intended to preserve the history, value, and diversity of the communities that steward them.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden officially signed a marijuana research bill into law in December 2022, making history by enacting the first piece of standalone federal cannabis reform legislation in U.S. history.

Now, it’s on the government agencies to follow suit and follow through with what their leader has started.

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