Inside, marijuana buds are packed into thousands of baggies filed in bankers boxes. Fifty-pound barrels are brimming with dried, ready-to-smoke weed. Freezers are stocked with buckets of potent cannabis extracts. Large metal canisters sit, crammed full of hundreds of perfectly rolled joints.
The vault even has boxes of "marijuana trash" — contaminated garbage that a crafty pothead might try to steal for a cheap high.
It is one of the nation's most impressive stockpiles of marijuana — and probably the most controversial.
What makes the cannabis here on the campus of the University of Mississippi unique is that it is grown, processed and sold by the federal government. The stockpile represents the only source of pot allowed for researchers who want to conduct Food and Drug Administration-approved tests on using marijuana for medical purposes.
Researchers can't get anything from the 46-year-old Marijuana Research Project at Ole Miss unless the Drug Enforcement Administration gives the go-ahead. A panel on which the National Institute on Drug Abuse is represented often must sign off too. Some prominent researchers complain approval is unreasonably tough for scientists whose work aims to find beneficial uses for the drug.
That has made Mahmoud A. ElSohly, the scientist who heads the team here, a favorite boogeyman for legalization activists and some researchers.
"It is a bizarre situation," said Orrin Devinsky, director of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at NYU Langone Medical Center. "The DEA is acting like this is 1935 and cannabis is this extremely dangerous substance."
Indeed, under federal law, the government classifies marijuana as a more dangerous substance than cocaine, one that has no medical use, even as consumers in 21 states and the District of Columbia can legally light up. The DEA guards the stockpile here as if it were plutonium.
Devinsky, for example, is pursuing research involving a chemical in marijuana, known as CBD, which has recently shown promise in suppressing certain types of seizures. The storage vault here contains marijuana with high levels of the substance. But physicians can't easily get at it — nor can their patients, Devinsky said.
Meantime, patients in states with dispensaries can walk up to a counter and buy pot, but with no good information about whether it includes a lot of CBD or a little.
