twelve years after the case first hit the docket, the DEA’s administrative law judge stunned the agency by ruling for the plaintiffs: “marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man... One must reasonably conclude that there is accepted safety for use of marijuana under medical supervision.  To conclude otherwise, on the record, would be  unreasonable, arbitrary, and capricious.”^[12]

The DEA concluded otherwise. The Administrator brushed aside the ruling, and ridiculed the very idea of medical marijuana as a “dangerous and cruel hoax.” Besides, researchers had finally figured out how to synthesize marijuana’s psychoactive ingredient, THC, and it was now available in pill form as Marinol™. Since there was obviously no longer any need for the crude natural product, DEA officials slammed the door on cannabis with finality in 1992.

Anyone who tried to approach the issue from the other flank—setting up a scientifically controlled test to see if the stuff actually worked—hit the same wall. In 1992, Donald Abrams, a professor of medicine at the University of California, designed a pilot study to compare the effectiveness of smoking marijuana with the synthetic Marinol™ as a treatment for AIDS-related weight loss.  The plan for the study made it past each hurdle in turn—the University of California’s Institutional Review board, the State examiners, the Food and Drug Administration—and in 1994 Abrams applied to the National Institute for Drug Abuse, the country’s sole source of legal marijuana, requesting a supply from the government’s plot in Mississippi. NIDA deftly moved him back to square one.  They questioned the basic design of his study, and each answer he gave just provoked another question. Years later the project was still in limbo.

On the flip side of this issue, any researchers who were willing to delve into the dangers of cannabis and search for its harmful effects found funds and assistance raining down from government and private institutions. But even this kind of enforced academic tilt did not always produce the desired results.