Stop the Insanity!

So, yesterday, politics trumped science yet again. The FDA rejected medical marijuana, again. I'm sure the FDA's decision to say so on April 20th is entirely coincidental.

The Times has an excellent summary, and you can read the FDA's original press release here.

In essence, the FDA appears to be throwing a very clean baby out with slightly dirty bathwater: It says smoking marijuana is harmful, and then somehow leaps from there to the blanket statement that marijuana, regardless of administration method, has no medicinal use whatsoever.

This is a well-worn issue, and there's not really much that's new to say in defense of the FDA's anti-marijuana position, or the War on Drugs in general. In contrast, there's tremendous evidence that cannabis is in fact a beneficial medicine for a few illnesses - see my earlier post.

Tags

More like this

Ding, ding: Look, I don't know what happened to these explosives, and I'm pretty sure Ed Brayton doesn't either. But my point was not about what happened to them. My point was about whether it is fair to declare this as an example of alleged incompetence in the White House. Once again, without…
by Kim Krisberg For years, Peter Rosenfeld was looking for an effective way to treat what doctors had diagnosed as severe and intractable migraines. He'd heard of medical marijuana, but thought it was a joke — that it was just a way for people to justify their marijuana use. Then in 2000, the New…
You gotta love this article in Slate about the failure of government anti-pot propaganda. Since 1998, the federal government has spent more than $1.4 billion on an ad campaign aimed primarily at dissuading teens from using marijuana. You've seen the ads--high on pot, stoners commit a host of…
After re-reading my post on the latest Plan B foolishness, I think I might have been too angry to make my point clearly. I'm still pretty damn pissed off, but I'm going to give it another shot. There's little about this thing that doesn't make me mad, but right now I'm angriest about the FDA's…