A US Food and Drug Administration-approved botanical marijuana product could be available in the future if the Drug Enforcement Administration follows through on FDA’s recent recommendation to regulate the drug more loosely. But after decades of insistence by the federal government that marijuana lacks any accepted medical use, this change in course may come too late for the pharmaceutical industry to capture the economic windfalls.
Key Takeaways
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Trade secret protections, not patents, provide protection for companies working on botanical medical marijuana products, but they’ll have to convince the public their “recipes” are worth going the Rx-drug route if DEA follows FDA’s new rescheduling recommendation.
FDA largely relied on individual US states recent experience with marijuana to make a crucial determination needed for rescheduling: that...
