The Drug Enforcement Administration seems, these days, to be speaking from both sides of its bureaucratic maw when it comes to cannabis. Even while its acting director derides the idea of medical marijuana as “a joke,” the administration itself has been working to remove bureaucratic barriers to research into the medical value of cannabidiol — CBD.

Canna Law Blog, as usual, has a cogent analysis of the effects of the new CBD policies announced just before Christmas, and points out that the rule changes apply only to researchers conducting CBD-focused clinical trials — which in the US means GW Pharmaceuticals, the corporate giant which received approval to conduct trials of their CBD extract Epidiolex on US children in late 2013. The new DEA rule eliminates some of the paperwork around expanding the scope of a CBD clinical trial in progress, so that researchers who already have permission from the feds to give CBD to research subjects will find it easier to get more approval to administer more CBD for more purposes than they originally proposed.

A cursory read of the tea leaves would therefore seem to suggest that GW Pharm believes that CBD could have medical applications beyond the current scope of their trial protocols: in this case, treatment-resistant childhood seizure disorders, which are relatively rare and therefore do not present much of a revenue opportunity for the for-profit pharmaceutical maker. The DEA would seem to agree. All with good reason: preliminary research has suggested CBD as a treatment for diabetes, nicotine cravings and much more, but to date no human clinical trials have confirmed these early theories.

There is also probably at least a smidgen of political misdirection at work, a variation on the playbook created around Marinol (synthetic THC in a pill) in the 1980s. At that time, before the nuances of the endocannabinoid system and entourage effect were well understood, measured oral doses of the “active ingredient” of cannabis (THC) were given out in human trials in an attempt to separate “true” medical marijuana from the masses of stoners looking to get high. And indeed many promising leads were found this way, but most patients found the side effects intolerable and went back to herbal cannabis.

So it could be that the DEA is uncharacteristically revising rules to make it easier to give out cannabis on the theory that CBD-rich medications could serve the political purpose Marinol never could. CBD, from this point of view, is like THC but better: it shows just as much promise as a medicine, but does not cause potent psychotropic effects to dissuade patients from taking it. The DEA may see in CBD a political foil which can finally defuse the medical marijuana narrative which has been so damaging to the drug war’s premises for decades: a pharmaceuticalized product to which they can point and say this is medical marijuana, and no other.

GW Pharmaceuticals sees dollar signs.