Physicist: If All Science Were Run Like Marijuana Research, Creationists Would Control Paleontology

[limpyhobbler]

In the face of obstacles to marijuana research from both the Drug Enforcement Administration and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology and one-time MacArthur Fellow is calling out the federal government on its obstruction of science.

During an address before a medical marijuana conference Friday, John H. Schwartz explained how the DEA and NIDA act as a “tag team” to censor science, with NIDA holding a monopoly over legal access to cannabis for research, and the DEA refusing to reconsider the drug’s designation in the Controlled Substances Act as a dangerous substance with no medical value on the basis that sufficient research does not exist. He alleges that the government has blocked research even though it has long been aware of marijuana’s potential to serve many medical benefits including shrink aggressive cancer cells is because it might “send the wrong message to children”:

...

As a physicist, I can assure you that this not how physics works. … We are all expected to act like grownups and accept it gracefully as experiments prove our favorite theories are false. In physics, unlike marijuana policy, we consider the right message to send to be the message that’s true. …

Consider what American science might look like if all research were run like marijuana research is being run now. Suppose the Institute for Creation Science were put in charge of approving paleontology digs and the science of human evolution. Imagine what would happen to the environment if we gave coal and oil companies the power to block any climate research they didn’t like.

...

complete piece: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/02/25/1629721/caltech-physicist-if-all-science-were-run-like-marijuana-research-creationists-would-control-paleontology/

[Angry Dragon]

1. kick onward

[Warren DeMontague]

2. It's a classic case of "we know the answer, so how do we make the data show it"

you see it all the time, when the actual information is 'inconvenient'

[ms liberty]

3. K&R...n/t

[99th_Monkey]

4. Why can't Obama get this one right at least. sheesh.

on the WRONG side of history yet again.

[truedelphi]

5. He is very reliant on his friends at Big Pharma, who have been busy patenting

the cannibinoids. And those folks certainly don't want us granmas with MS smoking dope that we grew for free, when they can be charging us mucho mucho for it.

Then there are all those friends of Obama's in the Big Prison industry. And I have friends who are more cynical than I am, who think Obama is tied to people in the drug cartels, because when you hurt individual citizens and stop them from growing - the growing goes back to the cartels!

But it is easy to see that Obama and Eric Holder don't really truly think drugs are bad - their buddies at HSBC laundered billions of dollars of drug money, with only a slap on the hand.

[99th_Monkey]

6. Damn

Now that just makes too much sense.

Except that the genie is already out of the bottle on the pot issue.

Maybe that's wishful thinking, but I just think Obama's looking like
an utter fool being so far out there, on the wrong side of history on
cannabis & hemp issues. I worry about him that way.

[GiveMeFreedom]

7. Marking for later read K&R

[RainDog]

8. k&r for some TRUTH!

I'm so proud that this man is speaking truth to powerful bureaucracies that are fucking over the American people.

It's about time for them to stop this shit.