{"id":7200,"date":"2006-04-21T10:40:22","date_gmt":"2006-04-21T14:40:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7200"},"modified":"2006-04-21T10:40:22","modified_gmt":"2006-04-21T14:40:22","slug":"bushs-war-on-science-continues-this-time-on-marijuana-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/bushs-war-on-science-continues-this-time-on-marijuana-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Bush’s war on science continues — this time on marijuana research"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story<\/a> from the New York Times is a terrific case study on why the [tag]Bush administration[\/tag]’s approach to [tag]science[\/tag] and academic [tag]research[\/tag] is so painful. As the article explains, a panel of “highly regarded scientists” conducted thorough research on using [tag]marijuana[\/tag] in some [tag]medical[\/tag] [tag]treatment[\/tag]s and found that the drug can benefit certain patients. Yesterday, Bush’s FDA ignored those results<\/a> and said that “no sound scientific studies” supported the medical use of marijuana<\/p>\n

The Food and Drug Administration statement directly contradicts a 1999 review by the Institute of Medicine, a part of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s most prestigious scientific advisory agency. That review found marijuana to be “moderately well suited for particular conditions, such as chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting and AIDS wasting.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bush administration officials? Manipulating science for [tag]political[\/tag] purposes? You don’t say<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The NYT article also noted that the [tag]FDA[\/tag] insisted that marijuana treatments were subjected to “rigorous scientific scrutiny,” but scientists who specialize in this research have found that the FDA has discouraged studies, blocked funding, approved poor-quality marijuana for FDA-backed research, and rejected legitimate applications to pursue the science in earnest.<\/p>\n

A professor in the division of plant and soil sciences at the University of Massachusetts explained, “The reason there’s no good evidence is that they don’t want an honest trial.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This story from the New York Times is a terrific case study on why the [tag]Bush administration[\/tag]’s approach to [tag]science[\/tag] and academic [tag]research[\/tag] is so painful. As the article explains, a panel of “highly regarded scientists” conducted thorough research on using [tag]marijuana[\/tag] in some [tag]medical[\/tag] [tag]treatment[\/tag]s and found that the drug can benefit certain patients. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}