cannabisnews.com: Drug War!





Drug War!
Posted by FoM on May 10, 1999 at 09:58:56 PT
Source: Boston Phoenix
There's a thick cloud of smoke trailing US drug czar General Barry McCaffrey these days: a recent government-funded report on medical marijuana that concluded, among other things, that marijuana possesses "potential therapeutic value" for people suffering from cancer, AIDS wasting, and other serious illnesses.
Released in March, the $896,000 report, directed by the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine and authorized by McCaffrey himself, was widely seen as embarrassing to the drug czar, who had previously derided medical marijuana as a "cruel hoax that sounds like something out of a Cheech and Chong show."D'oh. After piling on the rhetoric, General McCaffrey, whose official title is Director of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, now finds himself spinning and backpedaling at the same time. While gently praising the IOM report, he plays down its conclusions about therapeutic effectiveness, and continues to insist that medical marijuana is a "peripheral issue" in the national drug-policy debate."I think he's shuffling pretty fast," says Tom Clark, an epidemiologist with Health Addictions Research, Inc., a Boston-based drug-abuse research group. "He's poking his way around various minefields, because the IOM report's findings are not what he wanted to hear."Click the above link to read the whole article!Just a note! Some links are removed by the news web site very soon, so it is best to read the article when it is posted if you want too!
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