Maybe someday governments will base policy on facts and data. It sure would be nice.

Inexplicably, when the U.S. Department of Justice issued a memo last month explaining that it would generally refrain from prosecuting medical marijuana activities that are clearly legal under state law, it mistakenly indicated that there are 14 medical marijuana states. DOJ’s goof was to include Maryland, where medical marijuana is not actually legal, but where state law provides for reduced penalties to patients who successfully present a medical-necessity defense.

DOJ’s goof has now traveled though most of the known universe, repeated by credulous news media. The Associated Press, after talking to MPP, at least included an explanatory note about the discrepancy, but others just repeated the mistake with no explanation, including Katie Couric of CBS, the  Washington Post, Voice of America, the Guardian of London, and even the editorial page of the New York Times.

C’mon, guys, tell me that fact-checking isn’t entirely dead. Kudos to those media outlets that got it right, including CNN.

While we’re not used to factual accuracy from ONDCP, in this case they’re wrong not once, but twice.

First, there is absolutely no reason that plant medicines can’t be standardized and controlled for purity and potency. Indeed, the Netherlands has been doing just that for years, with medical marijuana distributed in Dutch pharmacies that is “of pharmaceutical quality and complies with the strictest requirements,” according to the Dutch government.

Second, the FDA has never said that a natural plant product can’t be a medicine. Indeed the agency has a lengthy “Guidance for Industry: Botanical Drug Products,” specifically designed to aid developers of plant medicines. The document not only doesn’t rule out plants as medicines, it even states, “In the initial stage of clinical studies of a botanical drug, it is generally not necessary to identify the active constituents or other biological markers or to have a chemical identification and assay for a particular constituent or marker.” Given that the active components of marijuana are already well-known and extensively researched, marijuana is well ahead of where the FDA says plant products need to be to start the process of seeking FDA licensing.

Yes, the FDA did put out a press release in 2006 saying that “smoked marijuana” had not been shown to be a safe and effective medicine. That statement was utterly unscientific, as we pointed out at the time, but it was absolutely not a declaration that the plant could never be a medicine.

That alcohol causes cancer isn’t really news, but how it does so hasn’t been fully understood. A new study, published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, adds an important new piece of information. Alcohol, it turns out, stimulates a type of cell transformation that turns cancer cells more aggressive and thus more likely to spread throughout the body.

As we’ve noted before, research shows that cannabinoids (marijuana’s unique, active components) interfere with tumor growth and may actually prevent cancer.

First, for reasons that aren’t clear, before performing the tests of smoking and vaporization, the researchers put the marijuana through a drying procedure that ordinary marijuana consumers don’t do. This might have eliminated some plant compounds, such as terpenoids, that are actually of interest.

A second possible flaw is that the researchers considered all “byproducts” – defined as substances other than cannabinoids –  together. They didn’t analyze precisely what they were, lumping bad stuff like the toxic combustion products contained in smoke with potentially beneficial plant compounds like those terpenoids mentioned above. That puts the finding that fewer byproducts were produced at 230 degrees Celsius than were produced at lower temperatures in a somewhat different perspective: We don’t know if the same byproducts were produced at 230 degrees as were produced at lower temperatures – and what’s in that mixture could be just as important as how much of it there is.