Arizona Tribune - A Christmas Message to the DEA's Diversion Anti Marijuana Cabal

As the holiday season arrives-a time traditionally reserved for reflection, humility, and compassion-we extend a Merry Christmas to the small but powerful group of Drug Enforcement Administration diversion officials whose decisions have defined the last seven years of federal marijuana policy: Anne Milgram, Thomas Prevoznik, Matthew Strait, Thomas Cook, and Aarathi Haig.

This is not a greeting of celebration. It is a message of reckoning-and, still, of hope.

For years, this group formed the core of an internal resistance that obstructed FDA-authorized medical cannabis research, despite congressional mandates, bipartisan pressure, and mounting scientific evidence. While the rest of the federal government-HHS, NIH, FDA-moved cautiously toward science, this cabal chose delay, procedural traps, and administrative sabotage.

The result was not abstract.

The result was patient harm.

Patients with Huntington's Disease, a fatal neurodegenerative disorder with no cure.
Patients with Multiple Sclerosis, enduring progressive disability, pain, and spasticity.
Patients whose physicians were ready to study standardized cannabinoid medicines-only to be blocked by an agency charged with enabling research, not preventing it.

For seven years, these patients waited while paperwork was weaponized.

The DEA demanded "bona fide supply agreements" that federal law itself made impossible to obtain. It forced applicants into an administrative law system later acknowledged by the Department of Justice to be constitutionally defective. It ignored statutory timelines measured in days, stretching them into thousands.

And while patients waited, the irony grew unbearable.

Cartels flourished.
Synthetic THC flooded gas stations.
Unregulated high-potency products proliferated.

Yet the one pathway that could have delivered pharmaceutical-grade, FDA-regulated, non-smoked cannabinoid medicine was deliberately stalled.

This Christmas season, President Trump's executive action to advance rescheduling and medical research has finally exposed the truth: the DEA marijuana obstruction was never about public safety. It was about ideology. Control. And a refusal to accept science that challenged long held dogma.

So yes-Merry Christmas.

And we sincerely hope that the spirit of the season does what bureaucratic power never could: soften hardened positions.

We hope it brings reflection on what it means to deny research to dying patients.
On what it means to delay medicine while claiming to protect health.
On what it means to wield authority without accountability.

History is already rendering its verdict. The federal government has now acknowledged accepted medical use. The research will proceed. The medicine will be studied. The patients will no longer be ignored.

Redemption, however, is still available.

It begins with acknowledging harm.
It continues with humility.
And it ends-perhaps-with an apology not to companies, but to patients.

From those who have spent years fighting for science, for law, and for people suffering in silence:

Merry Christmas.

May the season bring the healing that policy long denied.

MMJ is represented by attorney Megan Sheehan.

CONTACT:
Madison Hisey
[email protected]
203-231-8583

SOURCE: MMJ International Holdings