evidence that marijuana was medically useful, he was emphatic. “No, none at all.  There are hundreds of studies that indicate that it isn’t.”^[10] Yet any eighth-grader with access to the internet could find evidence to the contrary just a mouse-click away on the World Wide Web. There you could read of reports like “Inhalation Marijuana as an Antiemetic for Cancer Chemotherapy” from the New York State Journal of Medicine,^[11] and discover that the General didn’t know what he was talking about. McCaffrey, an exemplary soldier, was undoubtedly just repeating information he’d been given, but one wonders how he would have reacted in Vietnam if he’d discovered his staff officers were producing phony maps.

If you had just arrived from Mars and were trying to make some sense out of the furor surrounding the medical usefulness of a local herb, you would probably wonder why nobody had bothered to do a definitive test. The problem is that marijuana is not just a controlled substance, it is totally illegal—not even available to qualified medical researchers.  Investigators could always buy a stash from their students, but that’s not how scientific research is done. You must apply instead for special dispensation from the government, and for the last 20 years, the government has said No. Anyone who challenged this position was invited onto a labyrinthean bureaucratic game board with constantly moving goalposts.

The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 labled marijuana a drug of maximum danger and no redeeming value. This classification was immediately challenged by the National Organization for the Reform of Marihuana Laws, but the government simply refused to discuss it. In 1986 the DEA finally decided to hold the public hearings that the U.S. Court of Appeals had ordered seven years earlier, and the resulting parade of doctors, patients, professors and lawmen left a two-year court record that is the most thorough review of the evidence in our time. In 1988,