Belated 4/20

Someone office drone in the FDA's PR office has got a fantastic sense of humor, because the agency released it's "Fie! Fie upon thee!" dismissal of pretty much every serious medical marijuana study ever undertaken on 4/20. Or else its just the sort of cosmic coincidence that makes this tried-and-true pothead say "Whoooaaa, dude."

The linked Times article is particularly depressing because it implicitly confirms UC-Irvine pharmacologist Dr. Daniele Piomelli's statement to the reporter that he'd "never met a scientist who would say that marijuana is either dangerous or useless." Given the Times' much-noted commitment to he-said-she-said-ism, it's frankly unbelievable that reporter Gardiner Harris--or else his editors--didn't go out of his way to find some whacko professor of Cellular Expansion at 700-Club U. to opine that a single toke of mary jane throws open the gates of the soul and the cells to all manner of awfulness. That the best anti-weed lines are just standard, shopworn, drugs-are-bad pablum from an agency spokesperson is pretty indicative that what the researchers say is true: there is simply no evidence that marijuana is toxic, dangerous, addictive, or causative or catalytic of other addictions.

My favorite aspect of the affair is the FDA's ongoing contention that there are no proper, reliable marijuana studies, a contention made concurrently with active discouragement and undermining of every effort to perform exactly such study.