Research Cannabis License

“The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.”

Norm Chomsky

Prologue

What if it was clinically and scientifically shown that addiction is not a disease and not a conscious choice because addiction is dissociation, and dissociative experiences are the result of unresolved trauma (O’Brien, 2023a; O’Brien, 2025)? What if this were true: that traumatology (the research and science of trauma) found dissociation to be a normal and expected response to a normal event, AND that addictionology and recovery research showed that the unconscious conditions surrounding drugs and drug use create traumatic memories that trigger dissociative states of awareness? These states, in turn, may promote both healing and addictive reenactments as part of a process through which memory reconsolidation, and healing, can happen (O’Brien, 2023a)?

What if the “disease” of addiction is caused by the inability to heal because the system chooses to outline terms using definitions that are self-serving, implicitly biased towards their greater good, and fail to serve the need and will of the citizenry? The science they follow and who advertises, approves, and conceptualizes this science seems to be relevant to the peer review process and government oversight. Rather than following common sense and a recovery standard of moral character, they tout laws and ethics to citizens, as if we do not already know what and who is moral. What if common sense shows that dissociation and addiction are not diseases or disorders, but rather, they are recovery solutions waiting for a sick system that does not know what it is creating by trying to fix itself? What if the “disease” of addiction is what causes the inability to heal due to direct and indirect causes?

What if it was proven that the past is still here and the future will never understand because they do not know why? What if all sciences were legally permitted to practice their professions without the demand for guarantees, outcomes, or tangible products in the present moment? The legal implications would be immense, but since the field of psychology has to justify itself to the law, the law learns what to do, what to ask, and what to know. Our observation of the law’s moral and cognitive development, and which science citizens are morally required to follow, seems to be contradictory to established psychological research (O’Brien, 2025). Therefore, our central question for this work centers on the legal requirement that private citizens, licensed professionals, and businesses have a state-approved license before conducting an independent (and independently funded) cannabis study AND why any licensed profession legally needs the State to approve any research study when they have an independent Institutional Review Board (IRB). This is a continuation of the addictive pathology of professions who suffer from undiagnosed addictions (“absolute power corrupts absolutely”) that are not identified in the current DSM because living in a state of denial is addictive; therefore, current research, the field of psychology, and the institutions that conduct the studies it is based on are all questionable.

This work concludes that science needs independence to be free. Whether or not a person knows this, plant, children, citizen, and consciousness rights are all one and the same; therefore, we must ask, why would political, governmental, and industrial science require a license to study naturally-growing plants that have been consumed as foods for generations? Ones that have been shown to support our immune system, already be in our immune system, have positive psychological effects, and not be deadly compared to state-sanctioned prescribed medications that are not plant derived. When anyone can freely consume these plants without knowing whether they might be harmful to them, why do citizens need a license to medically consume them and why do licensed professionals need a license to study them? And why do they not need to justify their reasoning with research to support their version of political science? Why would a fully credentialed and licensed professional need an additional license and the state to approve their study for something that is so natural to us as human beings? Additionally, why would the government require a license to conduct cannabis research, but not to market cannabis products? Is there a difference in how government culture values qualitative versus quantitative research? Why are professionals not required to hold a license to study or market alcohol, opioids, psychiatric medications, Aspirin, Tylenol, or melatonin—especially when medical and qualitative research shows that cannabis is less dangerous than most of their over-the-counter drugs and medicines? Want to know how they are less dangerous? Because they are foods that support the endocannabinoid system, like how Vitamin D can supplement the sun (and interacts with DMT in the pineal gland; e.g., third eye).

There is no legitimate reason to prohibit anyone from using a food that is directly related to the body’s natural healing system; this is why they are making cannabis and other psychedelics available for over-the-counter use. Cannabis is not the trauma-creating drug they made it out to be, so why is it federally legal for a state government to require citizens to obtain a license to medically consume or study it? Our independent and peer review research (O’Brien, 2023a; O’Brien, 2025) sees that it is the potency, route of administration, and unconscious circumstances of dissociative experiences (e.g., unconscious informed consent) that can make a drug use traumatic, not the drug itself. We see that medical science (de facto psychology as a subservient profession to the medical model) also understands why it has failed to recognize addiction as dissociation and the physical body as the psychological unconscious (O’Brien, 2024c). Because psychology has also failed to preserve their own integrity and moral character by following medical models and the minds of legal and political science, we must object to the idea that citizens need a license to consume medical cannabis or that a psychological researcher needs a license to perform their own research; particularly when marketing research does not. In full transparency, marketing has done more damage than the system is ready to admit. The State of New York requiring a research license to study something like CBD speaks to their credibility and knowledge base, and represents bureaucratic overreach of research, citizenry, and human integrity (i.e., level of moral character). We have written about different professional fields and their shortcomings, and we will continue to provide more context that explores the implications of the meta-cognitive analysis of our doctoral work as we are confronted with their ignorance to addiction and dissociation (O’Brien, 2023a).

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