POT POLITICS

In opposing the medical use of marijuana, the Food and Drug
Administration ignores mountains of credible research and joins the
Bush administration's war on science.

The war on drugs is an attack on rationality. Reason lost yet another
skirmish when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on
April 20 that "no sound scientific studies" supported the medical use
of marijuana. The announcement flatly contradicts the conclusion of
virtually every major study on the efficacy of medical marijuana,
including two performed by the government. In a New York Times
article, Dr. Jerry Avorn of Harvard Medical School said, "This is yet
another example of the FDA making pronouncements that seem to be
driven more by ideology than science."

Avorn's criticism is one regularly leveled at the Bush
administration--that it is using politics to trump science. Last year
the American Civil Liberties Union released a report titled "Science
Under Siege" that detailed efforts by the Bush administration to
hamper scientific inquiry in the name of ideology and national
security. The report found the that administration has censored and
prescreened scientific articles before publication, suppressed
environmental and public health information, and increased
restrictions on materials used in basic scientific research.

For two years the Union of Concerned Scientists has circulated a
petition statement which now contains the signatures of 9,000 U.S.
scientists, including 49 Nobel Prize winners and 63 National Medal of
Science recipients. The statement complains that the Bush
administration advocates "policies that are not scientifically
sound," and sometimes has "misrepresented scientific knowledge and
misled the public about the implication of its politics." This comes
on the heels of a host of other accusations against the
administration--charges of censoring a NASA scientist on issues of
global warming and burying data on the morning-after Plan B contraceptive.

But the FDA announcement on marijuana is perhaps the most blatant
effort to ignore scientific reality. Critics charge that it was
issued to undercut medical marijuana initiatives that have passed in 11 states.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and John P. Walters, the
director of national drug control policy (the Drug Czar), oppose the
use of medical marijuana. The

Times quoted Walters' spokesman Tom Riley, who said the FDA's
statement would put to rest what he called "the bizarre public
discussion" that has helped legalize medical marijuana. But Riley
failed to note that some of that discussion was sparked by an
exhaustive DEA investigation into cannabis (the scientific name for
marijuana) from 1986 to 1988. That study examined evidence from
doctors, patients and thousands of documents regarding marijuana's
medical utility.

Following a hearing on the study's findings, the DEA's administrative
judge Francis L. Young released a ruling in 1988 that noted, "Nearly
all medicines have toxic, potentially lethal effects. But marijuana
is not such a substance " Marijuana in its natural form, he said, "is
one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By
any measure of rational analysis, marijuana can be safely used within
a supervised routine of medical care. ... It would be unreasonable,
arbitrary and capricious for the DEA to continue to stand between
those sufferers and the benefits of this substance."

The New England Journal of Medicine , the American Academy of Family
Physicians, the American Public Health Association, AIDS Action
Council and dozens of other medical groups have endorsed medical
marijuana. Despite this and a growing wealth of new information about
the therapeutic value of pot and its analogues (particularly new
research on cannabanoid medicine by Dr. Raphael Mechoulam of Hebrew
University in Jerusalem), the U.S. government refuses to alter its
prohibitionist restrictions on marijuana use or research.

Isn't it a sign of mental disorder when distorted reasoning is
unchanged by empirical evidence? What is it about marijuana that
drives our politicians insane?

Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times, and an op-ed
columnist for the Chicago Tribune.