The head of a longtime program to track the potency of marijuana seized by law enforcement—the federal contract for which was cut earlier this month by the federal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—says it’s still possible his work could limp along until funding resumes.
He says that if the samples stopped flowing into his Mississippi laboratory, decades of THC measurements in illicit U.S. marijuana supply would soon be over.
Last week, the Trump administration announced that the University of Mississippi would no longer be awarded the contract for testing. The school has been the only federally-authorized marijuana cultivator for decades.
Since the 1970s, the potency monitoring program tests marijuana samples seized from the Drug Enforcement Administration and other law-enforcement agencies. Its findings support claims made by media, politicians and public health officials, that the potency of cannabis has increased in the last few decades.
In fact, the data collected over the course of the program show that THC has steadily increased (with little or no change to CBD content) in the last 30 years. For example, in 1995 samples had an average content of 3.96 percent, but by 2022 it has increased to 16.14 percent.
Mahmoud elSohly (the Ole Miss pharmacologist and head of the Marijuana Research Project) told MEDCAN24, in an exclusive interview, that he had received a notice to terminate the contract with DOGE.
“I read through it, and it basically said, ‘You need to stop doing stuff except for things that are already in progress; finish what you have in progress,'” he said. Do not request new samples or analyze them.
Even though the researcher has been given specific instructions to follow, he is still struggling to see if a portion of his work could continue.
ElSohly noted that the notice stated “other activities can be carried out, but they have some conditions attached to them.” “One of those those conditions is if termination of that activity would be detrimental or have negative impact, loss to the government—something to that meaning.”
ElSohly is hoping that DOGE canceling the immediate contract won’t stop samples from reaching his laboratory, even if testing temporarily stops. The program had a funding shortfall about a decade earlier, and was able avoid major interruptions.
He said that even after they stopped paying for the project, we still received samples. “Not too long after that, they decided, ‘Oh, this thing really needs to be taken care of.'”
DOGE, as you know, in the past months has canceled certain funding programs to save money for the federal budget, but then reversed course to reinstate the contracts.
ElSohly, who told MEDCAN24 he couldn’t reach the contracting agent for the program on the phone sent an e-mail arguing that cutting this program would actually be detrimental to government.
“I said I really need—at no additional cost to the government or NIDA [the National Institute on Drug Abuse]—I need to continue to receive the samples through law enforcement,” he explained. When you are ready to pay for the analysis, I can send the samples.
If I didn’t obtain the samples or if the DEA labs and law enforcement disposed of the samples, he continued, “then the information would be lost forever.”
ElSohly, who has worked on the project monitoring since 1976 and became director of the project in 1981 when his predecessor quit to be a Reagan Administration drug policy adviser, began to oversee the project after the departure of the previous.
He was reached on his family vacation last week and said the final decision to continue the monitoring of potency rests with government. He emphasized, however, the importance of the program. Noting that the findings had been used for decades by many government agencies and politicians who have linked marijuana’s increased potency with issues such as emergency room visits and other health problems.
He said that it also allows his University of Mississippi research team to create marijuana products for use in their studies which are more similar to those found on unregulated markets.
ElSohly said that although most Americans are now buying marijuana products which have been lab-tested and tested for potency by the government, this program is still a good way to find out what ingredients may be in illegally produced cannabis.
It’s important to monitor what you see. The fact that regulations may change in one direction or another does not mean the illegal market will follow the regulations.
ElSohly may believe that the findings of the illicit marijuana potency program offer a valuable insight into the THC content in America’s cannabis supply. However, other experts in the marijuana industry say this effort is not essential.
Paul Armentano is the deputy director for the advocacy group NORML. He described the program’s intentions as “perhaps well-intentioned”, but added that it “often provided limited data that were more likely to have been used in order to further political agendas than legitimate scientific goals.”
He told MEDCAN24 via email that “in the infancy of the program researchers had only access to marijuana samples degraded and artificially low in potency.” “In the 1980s and 1990s, samples included feral ditch-weed—which skewed the program’s overall results. Recent budget cuts forced investigators, due to a reduction in the number of total samples being tested, to lower the amount of tests. It was difficult to assess trends at a national level or compare year over year.
Armentano explained that the limitations of data generated by this program were always significant. The U-Miss Program has become almost obsolete due to the introduction of state-specific potency tests for cannabis. These allow state-licensed scientists to test a much larger variety of samples of cannabis for potency and purity than ever before.
According to USAspending.gov, $30,155.76 of the total $142,839.00 contract amount has already been outlaid to the university.
As part of “the president’s Department of Government Efficiency” cost-efficiency initiative, “the government spending site” says that the contract will be terminated as of 1 May “for the convenience of all parties involved”.
The contract cancellation comes about two months after DOGE separately promoted the end of a grant meant to fund a study examining cannabis use risks among LGBTQ+ individuals, non-binary people and heterosexual women.
Elon Musk, his DOGE team, and many cannabis advocates had hoped to reduce costs, not by limiting research on the drug, but rather, by focusing their efforts against agencies like DEA, which have criminalized marijuana.
Instead, DEA has ramped up recruitment—recently urging people to join them on the frontlines of the “war on drugs,” even if they currently work as a “coffee barista” or otherwise have a non-law enforcement background.
It was also recently revealed that “marijuana” is one of nearly two dozen “controversial or high-profile topics” that staff and researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) are required to clear with higher-ups before writing about, according to a leaked memo from within the federal agency.
Musk said that DOGE is pushing for massive government cuts.
In response, a Democratic congresswoman filed a bill that would require Musk and other DOGE workers to submit to drug testing to maintain their “special government employee” status.
While DOGE has made cannabis research-related grant cuts, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) recently announced that it’s looking for contractors to analyze and explain scientific evidence on medical marijuana to clinicians and the general public as part of its Systematically Testing the Evidence of Marijuana (STEM) project.
Trump’s VA secretary meets with a psychedelic therapy advocate to discuss expanding access for military veterans
National Institute of Standards and Technology.