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An official in the Trump administration’s White House drug office is turning heads with some extreme throwback anti-weed rhetoric. Speaking on a prohibitionist podcast, Dr. Roneet Lev—an emergency and addiction medicine physician serving as Chief Medical Officer for the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP)—claimed that marijuana has become the “number one drug of addiction” in the U.S. and urged the public to remember the “victims who’ve died from marijuana harms.” While the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) explicitly states that there are zero recorded fatal marijuana overdoses, Lev lumped cannabis in with the opioid and fentanyl crises, arguing that weed-related traffic accidents and high-potency products are causing preventable deaths.
Lev’s crusade extends to an all-out war against federal efforts to reschedule cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III. Blasting a 90-page U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) report that recognized the plant’s medical value, Lev claimed the document was riddled with errors and accused health officials of “drinking that same Kool-Aid” as they did during the OxyContin epidemic. On her own podcast, she went as far as claiming that rescheduling cannabis violates international drug treaties, wildly comparing drug treaty compliance to global nuclear weapon agreements. In her view, calling cannabis “medical” is an insult to the medical profession, arguing that state-level programs are run by “Big Marijuana” rather than independent public health experts.
Her hardline stance routinely puts her at odds with both reform advocates and her own political orbit. Lev openly opposed Florida’s 2024 adult-use legalization initiative (Amendment 3)—a measure that President Donald Trump (R) endorsed—comparing cannabis companies to Big Tobacco and Purdue Pharma. She also warned the public about untested smoke shop products and urged users to check drugs.com for dangerous pharmaceutical interactions with CBD and THC. Ultimately, her pushback didn’t stop the federal shift: U.S. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche issued an order in April moving state-licensed medical marijuana and FDA-approved products into Schedule III, leaving her anti-weed crusade increasingly out of sync with her own administration.
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Please read the original article: Trump White House Drug Official Claims Marijuana Is Killing People, Calling It ‘The Number One Drug Of Addiction’
Original article written by . Published on August 5, 2026 by Marijuana Moment.
