IN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION, THE SPIN DOCTORS SPIT ON SCIENCE

Last Thursday, taking what was supposed to be a big hit at the
subject, the Food and Drug Administration declared that "no sound
scientific studies" had found a medical value for marijuana.

Somehow, it only made the smoke thicker.

"Unfortunately," Dr. Jerry Avorn, a professor at Harvard Medical
School, told The New York Times, "this is yet another example of the
FDA making pronouncements that seem to be driven more by ideology
than science."

For the Bush administration, complain many observers, it's becoming a
very frequent drive. Repeatedly, from global warming to salmon
protection to reproductive medicine, experts have charged that the
administration tries to muscle scientific facts as if they were
reluctant congressmen.

Over the past year, a high-ranking NASA scientist reported being told
not to speak publicly on global warming, until a political appointee
in the agency's public relations office was overruled. Two scientific
panels at the FDA overwhelmingly endorsed the safety and
effectiveness of the morning-after Plan B contraceptive, which then
vanished into the political appointees' approval process.

And when an Oregon State graduate student in forestry published an
article in a prestigious journal challenging the administration's
position on salvage logging, the Bureau of Land Management
temporarily pulled a forest research grant to the program.

This administration doesn't do well in science, but hopes it can
cover that up with its performance in politics.

Next week, Rep. David Wu, D-Ore., ranking minority member of the
House Subcommittee on Environment, Technology and Standards, will
drop a note to the General Accounting Office asking it to
"investigate significant allegations of litmus tests for appointees,
manipulations of scientific findings, and censorship of scientists. .
. . Despite administration assurances that these claims have no
validity and that the appropriate authorities were looking into this
matter, the allegations have continued."

It's not like Wu's expecting an answer by return mail -- he wrote
last month to presidential science adviser John H. Marburger, and the
congressman is still checking his House mailbox for a White House
postmark -- but he's interested in the subject.

"It is to me a matter of looking at the proper facts, even if the
facts are inconvenient," Wu said Friday. "It just doesn't seem
appropriate to be asking a science adviser if he's pro-life or
pro-choice. The allegations are that they've been doing that."

Wu and other Democrats on the Science Committee, including Darlene
Hooley of Oregon and Brian Baird of Washington, have been complaining
about the administration's approach for a while -- and sometimes
Chairman Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., even joins them. They've been
joined by people with letters after their names more impressive than R or D.

A petition from the Union of Concerned Scientists complaining, "When
scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its
political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process
through which science enters into its decisions," has now collected
8,000 signatures, including 60 Nobel Prize winners.

In February, David Baltimore, president of Cal Tech, warned the
American Association for the Advancement of Science of the
administration "asserting executive hegemony over science," and
trying "to choose which science is supported and which is suppressed."

Which is one thing if you're making out your high school schedule,
but something else if you're investing billions of dollars.

This situation is all about Oregon, not even counting the state's
voting to legalize medicinal marijuana and global warming that could
move the Oregon Coast several miles inland. Wu argues that for
political reasons, the administration wants to deal with the Klamath
salmon issue by stopping ocean fishing -- although its own scientists
argue that different river management could save many times more fish.

And then there's the Oregon State situation. "The fact that the BLM
pulled the funding for even a brief period of time," says Wu, "sent a
chilling message to the entire scientific community."

In an area that shapes the future, and the planet, there's a problem
with an administration that considers science -- and everything else
- -- to be elective.