Edgewood Arsenal Chemical Corps was tasked with ensuring that America was prepared with adequate counter-tactics if needed and that it could mount its own psychochemical retaliatory strike against the USSR if necessary.

Government funding for continued military development of synthetic cannabis was lacking and the cannabinoid research program was indefinitely suspended along with the rest of the Edgewood Arsenal experiments in the late 1970s for a variety of reasons.

[9] DMHP and its O-acetate ester were extensively investigated by the US military chemical weapons program in the Edgewood Arsenal experiments, as possible non-lethal incapacitating agents.

However, DMHP had the disadvantage of sometimes producing severe hypotension at pre-incapacitating doses, which did not occur with the more widely studied and publicized belladonnoid anticholinergic agents, such as 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate (BZ), which was discovered and subsequently weaponized.

[12] Military applications of synthetic cannabinoids were limited because the drug was both illegal and politically toxic to study via laboratory administration to enlisted servicemen.

Both EA-2233-2 and the red-oil THC distillate predecessor, EA-1476, received limited budget and resources compared to the study of other incapacitating agents of BZ derivatives and LSD, (which was widely believed at the time to be a viable mind-control and truth serum useful in a variety of Cold War applications).

[8] Initially, the 8 stereoisomers of EA-2233 could not be separated; later, two of the individual isomers of EA-2233 were isolated and tested, but were found to cause both orthostatic hypotension and minimal effects on performance at the very low doses used.

EA-2233 did not seem to have sufficient potency to be of military interest, since an oral dose of 60mcg/kg caused a maximum decline of only 40% (at most) in performance at language and number processing tasks.