All medicine is not the same, and medical cannabis remains a second class citizen in the world of healing. That's the work from a useful but depressing roundup of University policies in Massachusetts by the Patriot Ledger newspaper.
Massachusetts colleges insist that despite medical marijuana being legal in the Commonwealth, students living on campus at institutes of higher learning must store and use their legal medicine off campus.
Most of these excuses derive from the continuing problem of marijuana's classification under the Federal Controlled Substances act.
One school, Bridgewater State University, via campus police, evens claim that students could be federally prosecuted (how would that work?) as well as face disciplinary action by the university.
Would allowing medical weed on campus really threaten federal education funding? No one can really say.
No one at the U.S. Department of Justice, the Drug Enforcement Administration or the Department of Education, could say whether a school would lose federal funding if it allowed medical marijuana on-campus.Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), a Washington D.C.-based non-profit released a report in 2012 which states that “the Department of Education has never denied federal funds to any IHE as a result of policy change” and that the passage of more than 100 medical amnesty policies across the nation’s universities supports this notion.
It's either pure fear or simply using federal policy as an excuse to avoid backtracking on a senseless issue.
It is long past time to end Federal Classification of Cannabis as a Schedule I substance.
Because it would be someone terrible and disruptive if a student ever someone smoked weed while at school. We couldn't have that, no sir.