Dear friends,
You have probably seen the bombshell news that landed in our issue this week, but I thought I’d write about it just in case. Sanjay Gupta, the chief medical correspondent for CNN, came out strongly for medical marijuana, in advance of his new documentary “WEED,” which premiers tonight at 8:00pm EST on CNN.
When I say [Sanjay] Gupta came out strongly, I mean he sounds like one of us. He wrote: “We have been terribly and systematically misled [about marijuana] for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my role in that.” He slammed the DEA as lacking the science needed for its claims justifying the medical ban on marijuana — that it has high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use — saying that neither of those claims is true. And he cited highly compelling stories of patients suffering with severe medical problems that marijuana and nothing else helped with, as well as the existence of research he found while working on the documentary.
Gupta is arguably the nation’s best known physician, and was offered the Surgeon General job by President Obama at the beginning of his first term.
I have a blog post up about it at http://stopthedrugwar.org/speakeasy/2013/aug/08/huge_sanjay_gupta_apologizes_ant, which highlights some key text from Gupta’s commentary, as well as a preview of the documentary. There are also a number of interviews Gupta did with various CNN hosts that can be found by searching on cnn.com. In at least one of them that I haven’t found online, (Wolf Blitzer, possibly?), he declined to explicitly stake out a position and said he feels the two issues should be separate, but made remarks that to my reformer ears at least imply likely support for legalization.
There is lots more going on, of course — check our newsletter at http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle if you haven’t lately — but I thought I’d write to highlight that particular item. On medical marijuana specifically, our category feed for that topic at http://stopthedrugwar.org/taxonomy/term/6 reports lots of other big news too.
David Borden, Executive Director
StoptheDrugWar.org
P.O. Box 18402 / Washington, DC 20036
