Last Thursday, taking what was supposed to be a big hit at the subject, the Food and Drug Administration declared that "no sound scientific studies" had found a medical value for marijuana.

Somehow, it only made the smoke thicker.

"Unfortunately," Dr. Jerry Avorn, a professor at Harvard Medical School, told The New York Times, "this is yet another example of the FDA making pronouncements that seem to be driven more by ideology than science."

For the Bush administration, complain many observers, it's becoming a very frequent drive. Repeatedly, from global warming to salmon protection to reproductive medicine, experts have charged that the administration tries to muscle scientific facts as if they were reluctant congressmen.

Over the past year, a high-ranking NASA scientist reported being told not to speak publicly on global warming, until a political appointee in the agency's public relations office was overruled. Two scientific panels at the FDA overwhelmingly endorsed the safety and effectiveness of the morning-after Plan B contraceptive, which then vanished into the political appointees' approval process.

And when an Oregon State graduate student in forestry published an article in a prestigious journal challenging the administration's position on salvage logging, the Bureau of Land Management temporarily pulled a forest research grant to the program.

This administration doesn't do well in science, but hopes it can cover that up with its performance in politics.

Next week, Rep. David Wu, D-Ore., ranking minority member of the House Subcommittee on Environment, Technology and Standards, will drop a note to the General Accounting Office asking it to "investigate significant allegations of litmus tests for appointees, manipulations of scientific findings, and censorship of scientists. . . . Despite administration assurances that these claims have no validity and that the appropriate authorities were looking into this matter, the allegations have continued."

It's not like Wu's expecting an answer by return mail -- he wrote last month to presidential science adviser John H. Marburger, and the congressman is still checking his House mailbox for a White House postmark -- but he's interested in the subject.

"It is to me a matter of looking at the proper facts, even if the facts are inconvenient," Wu said Friday. "It just doesn't seem appropriate to be asking a science adviser if he's pro-life or pro-choice. The allegations are that they've been doing that."

Wu and other Democrats on the Science Committee, including Darlene Hooley of Oregon and Brian Baird of Washington, have been complaining about the administration's approach for a while -- and sometimes Chairman Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., even joins them. They've been joined by people with letters after their names more impressive than R or D.

A petition from the Union of Concerned Scientists complaining, "When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions," has now collected 8,000 signatures, including 60 Nobel Prize winners.

In February, David Baltimore, president of Cal Tech, warned the American Association for the Advancement of Science of the administration "asserting executive hegemony over science," and trying "to choose which science is supported and which is suppressed."

Which is one thing if you're making out your high school schedule, but something else if you're investing billions of dollars.

This situation is all about Oregon, not even counting the state's voting to legalize medicinal marijuana and global warming that could move the Oregon Coast several miles inland. Wu argues that for political reasons, the administration wants to deal with the Klamath salmon issue by stopping ocean fishing -- although its own scientists argue that different river management could save many times more fish.

And then there's the Oregon State situation. "The fact that the BLM pulled the funding for even a brief period of time," says Wu, "sent a chilling message to the entire scientific community."

In an area that shapes the future, and the planet, there's a problem with an administration that considers science -- and everything else -- to be elective.

Pubdate: Sun, 23 Apr 2006
Source: Oregonian, The (Portland, OR)
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Copyright: 2006 The Oregonian
Contact: letters@news.oregonian.com
Website: http://www.oregonlive.com/oregonian/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/324
Author: David Sarasohn, associate editor