Occasionally, the Drug Enforcement Administration makes sense.

Next year, they're planning to grow five times as much marijuana.

At the same time, they plan to pump out fewer opioids.

This fits the times.

Marijuana flourishes, and research finds CBD/THC treatments for everything from multiple sclerosis to addiction.

Meanwhile, opioids shred, as overdoses kill more people than cars or guns.  

It makes sense to use more drugs you think help, and less drugs you think hurt. Doing anything else is the behavior of an addict.

For marijuana, the DEA is authorizing 5,400 pounds grown for research, up from the 1,000 they allowed grown in 2018. And they plan to let more people grow marijuana.

At the same time, with opioids, the DEA is targeting the six drugs folks get addicted to the most: oxycodone, hydrocodone, oxymorphone, hydromorphone, morphine, and fentanyl. They're asking for about 10 percent fewer of those pills in 2019.

Attorney general Jeff Sessions, famous for hating marijuana and also being the model for a number of your grandmother's ceramic elf figurines, recognized reality with these moves.

“The opioid epidemic that we are facing today is the worst drug crisis in American history,” Sessions said in a press release. “President Trump has set the ambitious goal of reducing opioid prescription rates by one-third in three years. We embrace that goal."

The DEA is an enforcement arm of the Department of Justice, part of the White House, and it's been behind some of the most fabric-ripping moves in the history of the world, from filling prisons with folks who never hurt anyone to burning cropland in foreign countries. But the DEA is run by real people, and they sometimes make decisions that aren't insane. For instance, they tried to outlaw the drug kratom, but backed off when folks said it helped them, or when they held off prosecuting people for selling CBD, one of the medicinal parts of marijuana, even though they could probably legally put every 93-year-old nana with a CBD joint cream into Supermax.

Sometimes, America is great.

[Cover photo from Shutterstock.]