Not quite. According to the CSA:
(A) The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse.
(B) The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
(C) There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.
Alcohol does have "accepted medical use in treatment in the United States", so it would not be listed as a Schedule I drug, if it were illegal, which it is not.
If, and I see that you're big on "ifs", marijuana is found to have some medical benefit, it would be rescheduled to a II, III, IV, or V drug. It's there mainly because of the "no medical use" designation.
Now, you say it shouldn't be there. Fine. I'm sure many others agree. But it is there, right along with heroin and all the others on the link I gave you. And no matter what schedule it is, it's still illegal, it was made available to a 6-year-old, and he brought it to class.
That's my point.
And on that point I will have to agree with you. Weather one likes it or not the law is the law, which is one reason I don’t use illegal substances, as I do believe in the rule of law, but certainly not the primary one. But even that being true, that does not mean that when one sees that the law is wrong, and in fact does more harm than it does good, that one should not speak up against it.
And I am aware of the other two criteria but didn’t think them really worthy of mention since their primary function is more verbose language to support the first criteria.
” Alcohol does have "accepted medical use in treatment in the United States", so it would not be listed as a Schedule I drug, if it were illegal, which it is not.”
A hundred years ago that would be true but I don’t believe that alcohol is being widely used these days for medicinal purposes. Outside of the base for some products, i.e. mouthwash, Nyquil, and as a cleansing agent, I have not recently heard of any doctors using Jack Daniels, or more appropriately Everclear, as an anesthetic. But even if it does have current day medicinal uses, does that mean that the government was willing to sacrifice the well being of it’s citizens, in it’s zeal to stamp out moral corruption during the years of prohibition? Would not the medicinal uses of alcohol been more pertinent in the 20’s than it is today? And while we are in the area, why did the government have to pass a Constitutional amendment to prohibit alcohol but can today make certain drugs illegal by simple legislative action? Did something change in the Constitution between then and now?
"if marijuana is found to have some medical benefit, it would be rescheduled to a II, III, IV, or V drug. It's there mainly because of the "no medical use" designation."
Or more specifically, it is there because the government has determined that it has no medical benefit, there are many in the medical community who would disagree. And giving the choice between what a doctor thinks is a substance medical value, and what a bureaucrat thinks it is, I would have to place more weight on the doctors opinion. But I have not spent a lot of time following the medical marijuana position in that it is somewhat disingenuous as it is an approach that recognizes the governments right to prohibit marijuana in the first place. A right I don’t believe the government has.
But to get back to the subject at hand to say that the parents in the article engaged in child endangerment by having marijuana in the house is a liberal position if I ever heard one. If one accepts that as being true, because that child might have been done some harm by coming in contact with the marijuana, although in the case as presented no harm actually came to anyone, then one would have to agree that having a loaded firearm in the house, for personal protection, is clearly subjecting the child to possible harm. I mean after all the only function that a firearm has is to kill, if the child were to somehow acquire the weapon it’s hard telling how many people could be harmed. And don’t think that the gun grabbers are above using that as an argument. No I think the true endangerment to the child here is that they could become a ward of the state. I can think of a no worse fate.