Friday, April 22, 2005

Passion Thanks for all the notes and responses recently regarding a whole lot going on in the world of drug policy. On a personal note, the last couple of days have been extremely busy for me (in good ways), so I apologize to anyone who has written if I haven't gotten around to responding. I just opened a production today of Stephen Sondheim's Passion at Illinois State University (I'm most of the orchestra -- piano/conductor -- for a small student production). If you're in the area, two more performances will be held tomorrow (Saturday, April 23 at 2:00 pm and 6:00 pm) in Allen Theatre (admission is free). I've been in rehearsal four hours a night, six nights a week in addition to work. I'm also faculty advisor for a student group that's currently holding a four-square marathon (yes, four-square) for student scholarships, which is now in its 38th hour, so sleep is something I don't quite remember. I'm going to keep a close eye on the big news -- including Raich (next possible decision dates are Tuesday and Wednesday -- April 26/27). But I may miss some of the smaller stories over the next few days. 11:57:03 PM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []

HHS responds... not. OK, so Health and Human Services finally responded to the Americans for Safe Access Data Quality Act complaint regarding their information about medical marijuana (background). After several self-awarded extensions to their response, they essentially came up with a complete non-response response. Shorter version: We found a loophole that allows us, instead of actually responding as required by law in a timely manner, to provide input into another process that has almost no time limit, so we can delay telling the truth indefinitely. Here's the critical part of their response: Both the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the HHS Information Quality Guidelines provide that federal government agencies may use existing processes that are in place t address correction requests from the Public. In the case of marijuana HHS currently is in the process of conducting a review in response to the petition for change that was submitted to DEA in October 2002 by the Coalition for Rescheduling Cannabis (CRC), an association of public-interest groups and medical cannabis patients that includes the ASA. [2] In the course of the review, HHS will evaluate an the publicly available peer reviewed literature on the efficacy of marijuana [punctuation and spelling errors in original] What a load of crap. It's because the re-scheduling process has historically gone for years and years of delays that we hoped the Data Quality Act would give us some ammunition, with its specific requirement of 60 day response time. Now they're completely folding their (unspecified) response into the interminal delays of re-scheduling. Now we have to see if ASA will appeal the "response." 11:44:50 PM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []