On Monday two marijuana smokers in Colorado filed a lawsuit against a pot business they said used unhealthy pesticide to grow their weed. Which just might be the first product liability claim in the nation involving the marijuana industry.

And as legalization continues to spread around the country, marijuana issues are being treated more often as what they have become: run-of-the-mill law claims. But right now it’s a bit of a bizarre double standard. Legal recreational marijuana is typical law right up until it brushes against federal law, which at this point it’s hard not to.

Photo Credit: garritron  cc
Photo Credit: garritron cc

But given how little we know about marijuana and its effects, cannabis could use with a little more normalcy—and, no surprise, that comes from the federal government.

The pesticide in question is approved for certain edible crops, but it can become dangerous if heated, and thus is prevented from being used on tobacco products. And, consequently, should probably be banned from pot products. As the suit progresses, it will probably fold itself nicely into your average product liability proceeding, with the small twist that it’s of a legally-sold federally-prohibited substance.

That is, after all, what happened with Coats v. Dish Network, in which a Colorado court unanimously upheld the firing of an employee for off-the-clock medical marijuana use. Viewing it strictly from an employment law point of view, medical marijuana—even when used exclusively at home—can get you fired, because right now it isn’t covered under Colorado’s off-duty statute.

As many know, marijuana remains largely inexplicably, a Schedule I drug, a classification reserved for the most dangerous drugs out there which makes it incredibly hard to get to. Even for researchers trying to understand it better, as Alison Malsbury writes for Canna Law Blog:

A number of states forbid marijuana producers, processors and retailers from claiming that marijuana has any curative or therapeutic effects, whether on packaging or in other advertising. The rationale is that there are not enough legitimate scientific studies upon which to base claims about the health benefits of cannabis…The federal government will be the final hurdle to gaining approval to conduct these studies. University-based researchers must get approval of any cannabis funding from the federal government, because without it, they put their own federal funding at risk. Whether researchers will be able to get the necessary federal approval remains open.

Scientific studies are a critical step in legitimizing the cannabis industry, and — more importantly — in ensuring that cannabis consumers and patients are able to make informed decisions regarding marijuana use. Call us old fashioned, but we simply prefer to let science decide these questions rather than myth.

So while legalized cannabis spreads, in one form or another, through the country and becomes more commonplace, the restrictions placed on it—both in researching important questions about the health repercussions and the heavy jail time for transgressions—have failed to evolve. And since legislators want more scientific evidence before they proceed, it’s a vicious cycle that makes it really hard for that anything to change, or for our knowledge to grow. Does the pesticide in the recent case harm users if it’s ingested in an edible? At this point no one’s sure.

So in many ways, normalcy around marijuana is quite welcome. Treating it as just another employment or liability issue is treating it how it’s seen by a growing amount of the population: completely within the status quo. But so long as marijuana and federal policy is like oil and vinegar, there’s going to keep being loopholes that marijuana falls into that can potentially harm people. Otherwise marijuana standards and understandings are just going to keep being hazy.