FDA Opposition to Medical Marijuana Fuels Controversy

[Celebration]

http://www.forbes.com/forbeslife/health/feeds/hscout/2006/04/21/hscout532297.html

The announcement by U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials late Thursday that the agency does not support the medicinal use of marijuana quickly re-ignited controversy from both sides of the debate.

In a statement, the FDA said it, along with other agencies in the Health and Human Services Department, has concluded that "no sound scientific studies supported medical use of marijuana for treatment in the United States, and no animal or human data supported the safety or efficacy of marijuana for general medical use."

The FDA's statement contradicts a 1999 review by experts at the Institute of Medicine (IOM), a division of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which found marijuana to be "moderately well-suited for particular conditions, such as chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting and AIDS wasting."

The federal government "loves to ignore our report," Dr. John Benson, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and co-chairman of the Institute of Medicine committee that examined the research into marijuana's effects, told The New York Times. "They would rather it never happened.

[OhioNerd]

1. I was trying to figure this out.

Did the FDA actually do a study of their own, or are they just giving an opinion?

[Warpy]

3. They didn't bother to read studies others have done and they

didn't fund their own studies. They are just mouthing propaganda from the DEA and from antidrug crusaders in Washington.

It's just another example of how the FDA has been taken over by ideologues and zealots and rendered ineffective as an agency that is supposed to safeguard the US public by determining which treatments work and which do not.

There needs to be a massive fumigation at every single agency in Washington once we get rid of this administration.

[DELUSIONAL]

2. To be a valid assessment studies must be cited and compared

and then the research must be peer reviewed.

Seems to me that this was just an opinion piece typed on a FDA letter head.

The damage done to science and the sciences by the bush crime family will take decades to over come.

[NMMNG]

4. You can't patent and thereby make enormous profits from a plant

Therefore the government prefers to keep it illegal. Fighting the "war on drugs" is the only way they can keep making money off it.

[varkam]

5. There's no science because...

the feds don't want their to be any rigorous scientific investigation on the matter. Well, that's not completely true - there is some research out there (much of which was the bases for the 1999 opinion), but for the most part the government doesn't want to fund a rigororous scientific invesitagion into the benefits of smoking marijuana. Though everything I've heard supports that it does have benefits for people in pain and wasting.

Ahhh the FDA. I wonder how long it's going to take them to put the ten commandments on the front stoop?