UMASS LOSES MARIJUANA LAB BID

The US Drug Enforcement Administration has rejected the bid of a
researcher at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who wants to
create the second laboratory in the nation authorized to grow
marijuana for medical research.

The ruling was released yesterday, nearly two years after a federal
administrative law judge recommended that Lyle Craker, a horticultural
professor who specializes in medicinal plants, be allowed to grow
marijuana for medical research. The DEA decision called the current
supply of marijuana for research "adequate and uninterrupted" and said
a second laboratory would not be in the public interest.

Since 1968, a federally approved laboratory at the University of
Mississippi's School of Pharmacy has grown nearly a hundred varieties
of marijuana plants. Access to the plants has been limited to
researchers who gain federal permits. The plants have been used for
clinical studies across the country.

Some researchers complain that access to the laboratory's supply is
thwarted by a contract it holds with the National Institute on Drug
Abuse, which must approve permits issued by the Food and Drug
Administration or the DEA in a process that can take months to complete.

Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for
Psychedelic Studies, a Belmont-based drug research group that wants to
fund Craker's marijuana cultivation, and sponsored the suit that
spurred the administrative law judge's recommendation in 2007, calls
the Mississippi lab a monopoly. He said his group will file another
suit or appeal to the Obama administration.