See if you can spot the cleverly subtle, hypocritical, puritanical, authoritarian nonsense.

Just kidding! [Because it's obvious.]

Reason Magazine - Hit & Run > Uncle Sam's Patented Marijuana Medicine:

"August 1996: Federal drug czar Barry McCaffrey tells the San Francisco Chronicle "there is not a shred of scientific evidence that shows that smoked marijuana is useful or needed," adding, "This is not medicine. This is a cruel hoax."

December 1996: Asked whether there is "any evidence...that marijuana is useful in a medical situation," McCaffrey says, "No, none at all."

February 2001: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services files a patent application for the medical use of cannabinoids, saying they are "useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases," and "are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and HIV dementia."

October 2003: The patent is granted.

...What's going on here? The government wants to draw a distinction between whole-plant marijuana, which it insists has "no currently accepted medical use," and marijuana ingredients, including THC and cannabidiol, that have demonstrated medical utility..."

So. To sum up. The logic goes like this:

"...while it is emphatically forbidden, and not at all helpful, to smoke, vaporize, or eat cannabis as a medicine, it may be acceptable to take isolated cannabinoids as a medicine once they're approved by the FDA, assuming you have a prescription. The FDA already has approved THC (in capsule form) under the brand name Marinol, and it is considering approval of Sativex, an oral cannabis extract spray. At the same time, the government does not want people to believe that anything good could possibly come from cannabis, even when it has successfully argued that very point in its own a patent application."

Cause, see, if you could grow it yourself, say, in closet or the backyard, then pharmaceutical companies couldn't make a profit, and the FDA wouldn't be able to justify its own existence.