Politics
Trump White House Drug Official Claims Marijuana Is Killing People, Calling It ‘The Number One Drug Of Addiction’
An official in the Trump administration’s White House drug office claims that “the number one drug of addiction is marijuana”—arguing that it is important to “remember the victims of marijuana, the people who’ve died from marijuana harms.”
Roneet Lev, who serves as the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy’s (ONDCP) chief medical officer, made the comments on the Drug Free America Foundation’s Pathways to Prevention podcast last month.
The Trump administration drug official said that she surrounds herself with pictures of people who have “tragically died” as a result of drugs, saying she “doesn’t want them to die in vain” and uses their stories as a way to remind herself of the importance of ONDCP’s work.
“At first it was the parents who’ve lost children from the oxycodone and pain medicine epidemic and then fentanyl,” Lev said. “And we also remember the victims of marijuana, the people who’ve died from marijuana harms as well—or any drug. It doesn’t matter what drug. These are all potentially preventable deaths.”
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), however, says that “no deaths from overdose of marijuana have been reported”—though the ONDCP medical official may have been referencing people who died as a result of car accidents involving drivers who were under the influence of cannabis, for example.
In the new interview on the prohibitionist organization’s podcast, Lev also said that people who are experiencing addiction should seek treatment “no matter what drugs they’re addicted to.”
“And the fact is that the number one drug of addiction is marijuana. And for the first time ever in the history of the United States, the rate of substance use disorder is over the amount of alcohol use disorder—because of marijuana,” she said. “So people are suffering in our country and our strategy acknowledges that and directs efforts toward treatment.”
A new federal study released last month found that Americans are now more likely to use marijuana nearly every day than they are to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes on a daily basis.
“If people have a marijuana use disorder and they have an addiction, they should be able to stop,” Lev said. “And we should be even if there’s not a medicine for it. There’s plenty of people who stop smoking cigarettes without a medicine, right? And there are medications for nicotine use disorder, but many people are able to quit and with the guidance. And we want that ability for people who have a marijuana use.”
The ONDCP official also said the federal government wants people “to make informed decisions and understand the dangers.”
“For example, there are hundreds of medications that interact with marijuana,” she said. “So, if you’re using marijuana and you’re also on a blood pressure medicine or a blood thinner or on psychiatric medications, you should look it up and put we have in our prevention framework we have in there. One of the tips is to use drugs.com and put in ‘cannabis’ or ‘marijuana’ or ‘cannabidiol’ for CBD, and checking that against your medications or grandpa’s medications so you make an informed decision and then you can decide for yourself if you want these and be alerted to the potential side effect.”
Lev also noted during the podcast that “people are buying marijuana or hemp products or psychedelics or whatever it is that’s in the smoke shop these days.”
“None of that has gone through any type of testing and you really don’t know what you’re buying,” she said. “You can’t count on the labels being correct.”
Legalization advocates say that the policy change should be accompanied by regulations mandating that products be tested and labeled for ingredients, something that isn’t possible when drugs are illegal and unregulated.
Lev—an emergency medicine and addition physician—previously linked marijuana use to suicide, advocated against a Florida legalization measure and criticized health agencies’ move to reschedule cannabis.
She has also said it is an “insult” to refer to cannabis as “medical.”
In one episode of her own High Truths on Drugs and Addiction podcast from June 2024, she dedicated over an hour to a discussion with prohibitionist advocates about the marijuana rescheduling process that was initiated under the Biden administration, making clear she strongly disagrees with the top federal health agency’s recommendation to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).
She said that people who are accepting the scientific findings that led to the recommendation,”including some in the medical community,” are “drinking that same Kool Aid again” with marijuana as they did with prescription opioids. And she claimed that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) produced a flawed report on cannabis, with mistakes in “like every single sentence.”
“When it comes to marijuana, the harms are right in front of our eyes—but we ignore the data and follow the industry talking points just like we did in the oxycontin days,” Lev said during the segment, which featured prominent prohibitionists such as Bertha Madras, who also previously served as an ONDCP official.
The revised review process that HHS relied on to reach its Schedule III determination for marijuana posts a “threat to the entire way of approving medications and to the medical community at large,” Lev said, adding that her primary contention is the idea that cannabis possesses medical value.
Cannabis is “a plant with 500 different chemicals—60 different cannabinoids—many of which have not been studied, and that includes toxins and carcinogens and other things,” she said.
“I really feel sorry for the public—not just for marijuana—because if you have a 90-page document from the Health and Human Services saying, ‘this is medicine, this is safe, this is monitored’ and all the things that we see in this document, they’re false to us physicians and scientists who review this material,” Lev said. “None of the science used the high-potency products. There was no consideration to the severe mental health impacts.”
“But that’s just for marijuana. What is the public supposed to think when it comes to vaccines or COVID or any other public health,” she said. “I mean, there’s a loss of trust in medicine because of this process for politics and for money.”
She also cast doubts on the idea that the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) supported HHS’s findings, as was expressed in a letter attached to the federal rescheduling recommendation. Lev said she personally knows people at NIDA, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who oppose the rescheduling proposal.
Further, she disputed the claim that moving marijuana to Schedule III would increase research opportunities for the plant and its constituents, saying “that’s not true.”
“I don’t have hope that, if this is [rescheduled], it’ll be better regulated, because we could look at all the states now that have quote-unquote medical cannabis, and they’re run by the cannabis industry—not by independent public health people,” Lev claimed. “And we know it’s not working, because we see all the pediatric poisoning and emergency department visits and older people who are poisoned, and that those numbers are going exponentially high. And so we’ve seen that failed process.”
“I think the public has lost confidence in medicine and public health after COVID and all the vaccines—and with this, we’re going to have laws that further deteriorate public health credibility, and this is an example of that,” she said, adding that it also poses an “international threat and weakness of the United States not following international laws.”
That latter comment referenced potential violations of obligations on drug scheduling under United Nations treaties to which the U.S. is a party that some claim mandate the country keep cannabis in either Schedule I or Schedule II.
“The U.S. will be in conflict with international law. That makes things messy,” Lev said earlier in the episode. “We have the right to withdraw from the international treaty, but then if we don’t want to follow international law, how can we expect China and Mexico to follow the law and stop pushing fentanyl on the United States? If the U.S. withdraws from international drug treaties, how does that affect other international treaties like the ones for, say, nuclear weapons?”
The Trump administration has since moved forward with implementing cannabis rescheduling.
Under an order issued by U.S. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in April, marijuana products regulated by a state medical cannabis license immediately moved from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) to Schedule III, as did any marijuana products that are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). An administrative hearing is considering broader marijuana rescheduling.
On another episode of her podcast that was released in October 2024, Lev took on Amendment 3, a 2024 Florida ballot initiative that sought to legalize adult-use cannabis and that received an endorsement from President Donald Trump while he was campaigning. The measure ultimately failed to meet a steep 60 percent threshold for passage.
Despite Trump’s public endorsement, Lev said she wondered if the then-candidate “really read the amendment or really understands the impact of it.” And she said she wished she could have “two minutes with President Trump, because I feel like I could convince him on that.”
In the episode, Lev also dismissed the notion that legalization is smart, quipping that the campaign behind the Florida initiative—Smart & Safe Florida—is a misnomer and “it seems like you can’t always go by the names of these organizations.”
“We need to learn from history,” she said. “And would we want big tobacco to be in charge of the rules and marketing and nicotine potency? Would we want Purdue Pharma to be in charge of opioid overprescribing?” And if not, why are we allowing big marijuana to control the rules and regulations on public health?”
Separately, during a presentation in Missouri last year, Lev reportedly said that “it’s an insult to our profession” to call marijuana “medical.”
In 2018, Lev attended an event hosted by prohibitionist group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, tweeting a photo of herself with the group’s president, Kevin Sabet, along with the phrase “Marijuana Death Diaries.”
Other posts she made from the event said advocates “need to get message out about marijuana public health crisis” and that “marijuana victims” speaking there told “heart breaking stories.”
In 2020 she quote-tweeted a post from Sabet about a teen whose parents say he died by suicide after taking up cannabis use, adding, “marijuana hijacks your brain.”
On social media, Lev has posted extensively about cannabis laws and science, making repeated suggestions tying marijuana use to mental and physical health conditions such as schizophrenia, suicide risk, lung issues and more.
