A bureaucratic obstacle to marijuana research in the U.S. has just dissolved into thin air, as of Monday. The Obama administration’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) removed the Public Health Service review, which had previously impeded copious amounts of research from obtaining marijuana and moving forward with their studies.

The Public Health Service review had previously required researchers to submit your proposal to the FDA, which would review it for “scientific validity and ethical soundness.” Then the proposal would have to go through the Public Health Service board, and researchers would have to obtain a marijuana permit from the Drug Enforcement Administration, and then get the medical marijuana itself — all of which is nearly impossible to accomplish due to rules and regulations.

“The Obama administration has actively supported scientific research on whether marijuana or its components can be safe and effective medicine,” ONDCP spokesman Mario Moreno Zepeda told The Huffingon Post. “Eliminating the Public Health Service review should help facilitate additional research to advance our understanding of both the adverse effects and potential therapeutic uses for marijuana or its components.”

Marijuana is a Schedule I drug, meaning it’s classified by the government as a dangerous substance, right next to heroin and other hard drugs. This classification has prevented an enormous amount of research from being completed on the medical benefits of cannabis — many of which have already proven to exist for conditions like chronic pain, cancer, and epilepsy.

Researchers and medical marijuana advocates hope that this latest step will pave the way for scientists to finally go ahead with research that has been held back for years.

"The president has often said that drug policy should be dictated by unimpeded science instead of ideology, and it's great to see the Obama administration finally starting to take some real action to back that up," Tom Angell, a member of Marijuana Majority, told The Washington Post.