Meet
the Press Excerpt August 10, 1997
Note: all emphasis is added.
MR. RUSSERT: There's a big debate about the medicinal use of marijuana.
GEN. McCAFFREY: Mm-hmm.
MR. RUSSERT: The National Institute of Health had a study just the other day
recommending that there be more grants made available to study this issue further. Last
fall you campaigned vigorously against initiatives in Arizona and California...
GEN. McCAFFREY: Mm-hmm.
MR. RUSSERT: ...which would, in effect, allow the medicinal use of marijuana.
GEN. McCAFFREY: Mm-hmm.
MR. RUSSERT: How serious of a problem is using
marijuana for medicinal use?
GEN. McCAFFREY: Well, the California Proposition 215 and Arizona's approach we
thought were bad medicine, bad science. What we're trying to do is put this back where it
should be, with Dr. Harold Varmus and the NIH and Dr. Alan Leshner, National Institute of
Drug Abuse. They convened a countrywide assembly of scientists. They're going to look at
the question. And that's where it belongs. If it's safe and effective, then medicine and
science ought to judge it, not politics.
MR. RUSSERT: There's an initiative at the District of Columbia...
GEN. McCAFFREY: Yeah.
MR. RUSSERT: ...advocating the medicinal use of marijuana.
GEN. McCAFFREY: Yeah.
MR. RUSSERT: Would you support that initiative?
GEN. McCAFFREY: Oh, no, not at all. We've
got a national campaign by drug legalizers, in my view, to try and use medicinal uses of
drugs and legalization of hemp as a stalking horse to get in under the radar screen. So,
again, the proper place where Donna Shalala and I and others think this question ought to
be decided is by doctors and scientists, not by local politics.
The interview with the Czar continued briefly and was followed by a videotape
excerpt of a September 14, 1986 interview with Nancy Reagan introducing "Just Say
No" to the nation's intellectual leaders. This has since become the state ideology of
the United States adopted by the great broad masses of people and the editorial board of
the Wall Street Journal.
This segment was then followed by a commercial
for BAYER. (Really)
Supported