The ONDCP Makes a Cheerful Pie Graph From Your Medical Records

The ONDCP just released what it calls a "sourcebook" on marijuana, complete with quite a few charts, graphs and photographs intended to support the overall federal policy on marijuana. Just one of the many intriguing charts is the following, intended to support the assertion that people who use medical marijuana aren't "really" sick enough to need it:

As you can see, it's a statistical analysis of the medical conditions of patients who were obtaining medical marijuana from San Diego dispensaries. As you can also see if you click on the image to enlarge it, the caption on the bottom cites as a source "unpublished tabulations based on 3,636 dispensary records seized from October 2005 through July 2006."

So, to be clear, the federal government is not only ignoring the text of California's own Compassionate Use Act, which has been in place for 12 years and does not require patients to have AIDS, Glaucoma or Cancer, it's also seizing medical records and poring over them, violating basic privacy rights in order to produce charts 'n' graphs to prop up its own vision of how it wishes California law operated. The Compassionate Use Act, just to clarify, states that individuals can use medical marijuana pursuant to a doctor's recommendation for "any" illness "for which marijuana provides relief."

Isn't it strange how this graph implicitly acknowledges what the ONDCP constantly denies, namely that that marijuana does indeed provide relief for some serious medical conditions? It shouldn't make any difference, from the ONDCP's point of view, whether people use marijuana for glaucoma or hangnails, because they purportedly believe that it has no medical value for any condition whatsoever. But obviously it does matter to them, at least when they can use the distinction between conditions to score points for their own agenda.

It is, to say the least, a frightening thought to suppose that some bureaucrat in Washington D.C. is sitting at a computer making pie graphs that purport to tell the entire country what medical conditions are and are not serious enough to warrant relief from suffering.

Comments

[Sunil]

Love that typo: "Over 60 or unkown"
on the bottom pie chart. I'm sure most info about cannabinoid medicines are totally "unkown" by this crew, a la "my mind is made up, don't confuse me with the facts." When facts do present themselves, spelling certainly gets confus-ed.

Great post.