Last week I wrote about a recent legal action by the medical marijuana advocacy organization Americans for Safe Access (ASA), who claims that the official federal position on medical marijuana relies on outdated and altogether false scientific facts about the dangers and efficacy of marijuana for medical use. Again, let’s take a look at the …
Patterns: science
Holding science hostage: part 1
On December 21, 2000, after passing through both the United States Senate and the House of Representatives, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2001 (H.R. 4577) received the presidential signature. The bill provided a detailed summary of the funds that would be available for a wide variety of federal programs during the 2001 fiscal year and, …
Psychiatry and psychotherapy: beyond good and evil?
According to research published in the latest issue of the American Medical Association’s Archives of General Psychiatry (65[8], August 2008), the past ten years have seen a tremendous decline in applied psychotherapy, a change which the authors attribute directly to “a corresponding increase in those [psychiatrists] specializing in pharmacotherapy–changes that were likely motivated by financial …
