ProCon.org, whose goal is to “promote critical thinking, education, and informed citizenship” by presenting information on controversial issues “in a straightforward, nonpartisan, primarily pro-con format,” did an interesting experiment recently. They filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Food and Drug Administration seeking information on reported deaths due to marijuana and 17 FDA-approved prescription drugs. Five of those drugs were chosen because they are widely used and well known, while the other 12 are used to treat many of the symptoms for which medical marijuana is also used.

The folks at ProCon.org took the FDA’s figures and put them into a detailed report, and the results don’t look good for the pharmaceutical industry. [Read more →]

An FDA panel just recommended reducing the maximum dose of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. Taken by millions of Americans every day as either a stand-alone medication or as an ingredient in various over-the-counter cold remedies, acetaminophen is the leading cause of liver failure in the U.S., resulting in hundreds of deaths by overdose every year.

And they say marijuana is too dangerous to be medicine?

Medical marijuana advocates often hear that marijuana can’t be a real medicine because it hasn’t been approved by the FDA. One common response to this is that the Drug Enforcement Administration continues to block the only avenue that could produce the research needed to seek FDA approval for medical marijuana, over a year and half after an administrative law judge ruled that the project should go ahead. 

But that’s just the start. The Journal of the American Medical Association recently published a scathing critique of the drug company research that does lead to FDA approval,  demonstrating that the system is even more fundamentally rotten than most of us suspected. The author is Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, arguably the most prestigious medical journal on the planet, and now a professor at Harvard Medical School. [Read more →]