Sally Satel, who tends to be a drug-war hawk, is outraged by the obstructionism of the Federal government when it comes to allowing the research that might make marijuana available as a medicine. She’s entirely right.
I doubt that whole cannabis, even if its cannabinoid rations could be standardized through breeding and bledning and the lung insult of smoking largely eliminated by using vaporization instead, will ever be an important medicine. Dutch physicians don’t seem especially eager to have their patients use it. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be made a legal medicine if there are patients who would benefit from it, as there undoubtedly are. And it certainly doesn’t justify the joint efforts of NIDA and the DEA to keep us from finding out whether cannabis is medically useful, and if so to whom.
Censoring science is a nasty habit, whether the bureaucrats doing the censoring work for the Federal government or a univerity Institutional Review Board.