F.D.A. joins the fight against humane medicine and common sense

Not surpriseingly at all.
The F.D.A. has come out on the side of the D.E.A. and the supreme(Rightwing) court in the fight against the people of the United States who wish to smoke a weed that humans have smoked for thousands of years and has no deaths attributed to it. The Federal government refuses to allow studies of marijuana because they know exactly what those studies will show. I've never really been able to figure out the exact reasons for the Fed's continuing and increasingly hysterical war on pot. Personally the best I can come up with is actually a number of reasons. The war on drugs is BIG business, for cops as well as corporations, prisons as well as all the assorted profit making links. Loyalty to the pharmaceutical companies and their immense profits and copywrited drugs. The confiscation of property laws pulls in an immense amount of money to national and local law enforcement. Loyalty to the oil companies who don't ever want to compete with hemp as a bio-fuel. I could go on those are just reasons I've come up with off the top. The war on marijuana is a federal holding action against a harmless drug that would be of immense help to millions of people in so many ways, some that we don't even know of because as you know we're not allowed to study it.
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"Dr. Daniele Piomelli, a professor of pharmacology at the University of California, Irvine, said he had "never met a scientist who would say that marijuana is either dangerous or useless."

Studies clearly show that marijuana has some benefits for some patients, Dr. Piomelli said.

"We all agree on that," he said."
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From The New York Times:
F.D.A. Dismisses Medical Benefit From Marijuana
GARDINER HARRIS

WASHINGTON, April 20 — The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that "no sound scientific studies" supported the medical use of marijuana, contradicting a 1999 review by a panel of highly regarded scientists.

The announcement inserts the health agency into yet another fierce political fight.

Susan Bro, an agency spokeswoman, said Thursday's statement resulted from a past combined review by federal drug enforcement, regulatory and research agencies that concluded "smoked marijuana has no currently accepted or proven medical use in the United States and is not an approved medical treatment."

Ms. Bro said the agency issued the statement in response to numerous inquiries from Capitol Hill but would probably do nothing to enforce it.

"Any enforcement based on this finding would need to be by D.E.A. since this falls outside of F.D.A.'s regulatory authority," she said.

Eleven states have legalized medicinal use of marijuana, but the Drug Enforcement Administration and the director of national drug control policy, John P. Walters, have opposed those laws.

A Supreme Court decision last year allowed the federal government to arrest anyone using marijuana, even for medical purposes and even in states that have legalized its use."
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"Dr. John Benson, co-chairman of the Institute of Medicine committee that examined the research into marijuana's effects, said in an interview that the statement on Thursday and the combined review by other agencies were wrong.

The federal government "loves to ignore our report," said Dr. Benson, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. "They would rather it never happened."

Some scientists and legislators said the agency's statement about marijuana demonstrated that politics had trumped science.

"Unfortunately, this is yet another example of the F.D.A. making pronouncements that seem to be driven more by ideology than by science," said Dr. Jerry Avorn, a medical professor at Harvard Medical School.

Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, a New York Democrat who has sponsored legislation to allow medicinal uses of marijuana, said the statement reflected the influence of the Drug Enforcement Administration, which he said had long pressured the F.D.A. to help in its fight against marijuana."
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