CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta is making waves this week saying he was wrong about medical marijuana and that Americans have been “terribly and systematically misled” on therapeutic uses of the drug.
In an op-ed entitled “Why I changed my mind on weed,” Gupta writes that he is “here to apologize” because he failed to do adequate research on medical marijuana, and did not review scientific literature from abroad on “remarkable research” on it. He writes:
Dr. Wendy Chapkis, author of several books including Dying to Get High: Marijuana as Medicine and a University of Southern Maine professor, welcomed Gupta’s comments, telling Common Dreams, “It’s about time that the established medical profession” recognize the medical uses of cannabis.
Key in Gupta’s comments, Chapkis continued, was that he called out the DEA’s decades-long role in impeding scientific research on cannabis.
“For decades, our federal government has been playing a game to keep marijuana illegal,” as Mason Tvert, communications director at Marijuana Policy Project explained to Common Dreams via email. But “that game is coming to end.”
Gupta also told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer he listened to “a legitimate chorus of patients for whom not only did marijuana work, it was the only thing that worked,” and said there are some patients for whom marijuana can work better and more safely than pharmaceuticals.
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