Even a stopped clock.

Via my old buddy Erik at Fear of Clowns, I see that the NYT's resident clown, John Tierney (who James Wolcott once referred to as "the latest subtraction by addition to the New York Times op-ed page"), has a piece this morning that doesn't make me bang my head on my desk. Well, it does, but for once he and I are headbanging in unison. He's advocating, if only implicitly, making marijuana a prescription drug for the purposes of research.

Lyle Craker, a professor of plant and soil sciences at the University of Massachusetts, asked an administrative judge to overrule the agency so he could grow marijuana for F.D.A.-approved research projects by other scientists. Dr. Craker is a well-regarded agronomist who's being supported by the American Civil Liberties Union and both of his senators, Edward Kennedy and John Kerry. But for four years he's been stymied by the D.E.A., which first stalled and then finally denied his request for a permit.

There are precedents for his request, because researchers already get supplies of other drugs - like heroin, LSD and Ecstasy - from independent laboratories licensed to make them. But researchers who want marijuana have only one legal source: a crop grown in Mississippi and dispensed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Scientists say they need an alternative partly because the government's marijuana is of such poor quality - too many seeds and stems - and partly because the federal officials are so loath to give it out for research into its medical benefits.

I participated in several federally-funded marijuana studies a few years ago. They were not, of course, funded for the purposes of finding medicinal benefit, but were instead run through the division of Duke Medical Center's Psychiatry Department that deals with alcoholism and drug addiction. I will attest that the marijuana Uncle Sam grows is crap. Foul-tasting, headache-inducing crap. I suspect this story appeals to Tierney because it's one more place he can point his finger and holler, "See? The government can't do anything right." On this one, though, he's absolutely correct. A below-average college student with a closet and a grow lamp could do better than that.

It isn't that they couldn't do better. They have the freaking Department of Agriculture at their disposal, after all, and it isn't like the instructions are difficult to find. No, I think Tierney probably pegs it with this:

People with glaucoma and AIDS have sworn by the efficacy of marijuana, and there have been studies by state health departments showing that smoking marijuana is especially good at controlling nausea. Scientists would like to test these effects, but they can't do good studies until they get good marijuana.

I'm counting catches and, yep, twenty-two. Once again, science loses to politics.

Related: Denver just became the second city, after Oakland, to put a marijuana legalization initiative on the ballot.