Editorial: A lesson in political science

Monday, April 24, 2006 | 7:19 a.m.

In a transparently political move, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a statement last week claiming that "no sound scientific studies" supported the medical use of marijuana, which contradicts previous conclusions by a panel of respected scientists.

According to The New York Times, an FDA spokeswoman said that the agency's Thursday statement was the result of a review by federal drug enforcement, regulatory and research agencies, which concluded that "smoked marijuana has no currently accepted or proven medical use in the United States and is not an approved medical treatment."

This, in spite of a 1999 review by the Institute of Medicine that found marijuana to be "moderately well suited" for treating conditions such as nausea and vomiting caused by chemotherapy and the wasting condition prevalent among AIDS patients, the Times reports. The Institute of Medicine is part of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's most respected scientific evaluation agency.

The FDA spokeswoman told the Times that her agency issued its statement because of "numerous inquiries from Captiol Hill," but would do nothing to enforce the ruling. That is up to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which has long opposed the medical use of marijuana, which has been legalized in 11 states, including Nevada.

Of course, by ignoring the Institute of Medicine's 1999 findings, FDA officials can be confident of finding no other national scientific reviews for medical marijuana because the federal government has thwarted most research efforts. Federal drug enforcement officials won't allow researchers to grow marijuana of a quality that is suitable for study. And the National Institutes of Health refuses to fund such research, the Times reports.

This is just another example of politics trumping science in the Bush administration's FDA, which was criticized by the Government Accountability Office last year for failing to approve the "morning after" emergency contraceptive pill for over-the-counter sales. The GAO characterized the decision as being political, rather than scientific.

The FDA's recent marijuana epiphany offers the same unscientific and politically motivated analysis that Bush administration officials have used to say that global warming is a myth and that it is safe to bury nuclear waste in Nevada. It is tragic that these cancer and AIDS patients, who already suffer daily, must endure this kind of indignity at the hands of their own government.