Today's Stories

January 16-18, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to the Chief

Jeffrey St. Clair
High Plains Grifter: Geo. W. Bush, a Concise Biography

January 15, 2009

Pam Martens
Wall Street Powerhouses Invested Alongside Madoff

Karl Grossman
Obama and the Military - Industrial - Scientific Complex

M. Shahid Alam
Gaza's Shattered Mirror

Jules Rabin
Gaza Besieged, Gaza Mauled

Alan Farago
The Nail-Gun Bailout

Ron Jacobs
The State of Black America: From Oscar Grant to Barack Obama

Timothy Seidel
Just Violence in Gaza? The Calculus of Proportionality

George Ochenski
Why No Montana Wilderness?

Todd Chretien
Taking a Stand for Justice in Oakland

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Marijuana Prohibition Acid Test

Website of the Day
Uranium Watch

January 14, 2009

Henry A. Giroux
Killing Children With Impunity

Kathy Kelly
Cease Fire, Cease Siege

Franklin Lamb
A Second Front? Hezbollah Militants Chafe as Gaza Burns

Mike Whitney
The Big Contraction: Why the Stimulus Alone Won't Work

Paul Craig Roberts
The Humiliation of America

Glen Ford
Sullying Dr. King's Legacy: the Congressional Black Caucus and Israel

Aditya Chakrabortty
The End of Property Porn

Dave Lindorff
Fattening the Rats: Feeding at the Bailout Trough

Jonathan Cook
Israel Bars Arab Parties From Elections

David Swanson
Conyers Explains Why He Didn't Push Impeachment

Martha Rosenberg
Fragile: Handle with Risperdal

Website of the Day
Report of a Red Cross Worker in Gaza

January 13, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Facts About Hamas and the War on Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Is Israel Using Experimental Weapons in Gaza?

Michael Neumann
Hamas and Gaza: Slave Revolts and Passionate Evasions

Coleen Rowley /
William John Cox
No Victors in the War on Dissent

Robert Sandels
Cuba and the Obama Administration: Subversion Through Trade?

Saul Landau
The Changeling: an Obama Nightmare

David Swanson
What to Ask Eric Holder

Wajahat Ali
Waltzing with War Crimes

Sam Bahour
No Other Option? A View From the West Bank

Stanley Heller
Why It's Useless to Lobby Congress on Gaza

Robert Jensen
Beyond Grief and Rage

Robin Mittenthal
Eating Away at the Land That Feeds Us

Website of the Day
The 50 Most Loathsome People in America

January 12, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Blood-Stained Monster Enters Gaza

Paul Craig Roberts
Our Collapsing Economy

Mike Whitney
Israel's Moral and Political Insanity

Ewa Jasiewicz
Oh, Quiet Night: Only Six Homes Were Bombed

Bill Quigley
A Day in Gaza

Dave Lindorff
From Vietnam to Gaza

Bill and Kathleen Christison
Blowback From a Tragic Error: a Message to Barack Obama

Jonathan Cook
Israel Ponders the Third Stage

Andy Worthington
Seven Years of Guantánamo

Kara N. Tina
Oakland on Fire

Brenda Norrell
Palestinians and American Indians: Russell Means Breaks the Silence on Obama

Nour Kharma
A Plea From a Teen in Gaza: "Will I Die, Too?"

Website of the Day
The Villages Group: an Antiwar Alliance in Sderot

January 9/11, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Israel's Onslaught on Gaza: Criminal, for Sure; But Also Stupid

Kathy Kelly
Tunnel Vision: Report from Arish, Egypt

Bill Quigley
Report From Rafah: Doctors Stopped at the Border

George Ciccariello-Maher
Oakland's Not for Burning?

Elaine C. Hagopian
Gaza: History Matters

Mike Roselle
Drowning in a Toxic River: What Can be Done to Save Appalachia?

Steve Hendricks
The Torturer-Elect?

Gary Leupp
Revisiting the Tale of Samson

Jonathan Cook
Outcry Over Israel's War Crimes

Karim Makdisi
The Ceasefire Plan: the UN Finally Acts, But Does It Mean Anything?

Rannie Amiri
Livni's Big Lie

Peter Morici
In the Jaws of a Depression

Peter Montague
Can Chemicals be Regulated?

Ralph Nader
Move Fast to Restore the Rule of Law

Andy Worthington
The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials

Nadia Hijab
A Music School Silenced in Gaza

Dan Bacher
Unholy Alliance: Nature Conservancy Backs Schwarzenegger's Big Ditch

Catherine Fenton
The American Peace Movement and Israel

David Macaray
Wal-Mart Caught Stealing

Valia Kaimaki
Why Greek Youths Took to the Streets

Richard Morse
Haiti's Gas Gang

David Yearsley
To Gotham City with Dexter Gordon

Charles R. Larson
The Horror, the Horror

Richard Rhames
Gaza and the Goon Squad Meet the Wizard

Stephen Martin
Meltdown Memo to Come?

Lorenzo Wolff
What They Sing About When They Sing About Love

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Beatty and Valentine

Website of the Weekend
Gaza Protest

January 8, 2009

Jean Bricmont /
Diana Johnstone
Gaza Seen From Paris

Franklin Lamb
How Dershowitz Misstates, Misrepresents and Misapplies the Law

Paul Craig Roberts
The Difficulty of Being an Informed American

Kevin Alexander Gray
Give Burris His Seat

Chris Floyd
The Enduring Priorities in Obama's Time of Change

Ewa Jasiewicz
Riding on Fire in Gaza

Steve Conn
Sanjay Gupta and Obama

Harvey Wasserman
Kill the Nuclear Stimulus!

Wayne S. Smith
An Opening to Cuba?

Linda Mamoun
Re-settling Gaza: the Real Goal of the Israeli Invasion?

Adam Turl
Unions and Young Workers

Chris Papaleonardos
Mourning Maria Dimitriadi

Website of the Day
On the Wing

January 7, 2009

Saree Makdisi
What Kind of Security Will This Barbarism Bring Israel?

Franklin Lamb
Bend Over Professor Dershowitz, It's Time for Your Check Up

William Blum
America's Other Glorious War

Belén Fernández
The Trauma Vortex: Israel's Monopoly on Psychological Suffering

Lawrence Davidson
What is New About Gaza?

Allan Nairn
Adm. Dennis Blair and the Church Killings in East Timor

Jonathan Cook
What is Israel's Objective?

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Watching the War on BBC

Deepak Tripathi
Bush, as He Leaves

Cal Winslow
Now is the Hour to Defend Democracy in the Labor Movement!

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Students Planning Careers: Be Mindful

Dr. Hannah Safran
No More Recycled Military Solutions

Website of the Day
CNN: Israel Broke the Ceasefire First

January 6, 2009

Pam Martens
It's All One Big Lie

Victoria Buch
Real Estate War in Gaza: the History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing

Neve Gordon
Israel's New War Ethic

Tami Sarfatti /
Yonatan Mendel
What Silence Says: Gaza is Still Waiting on Obama

Mike Whitney
The Gaza Bloodbath

Alan Farago
After the Fall

Gary Leupp
A Hamas Coup d'Etat in 2007?

Larry Everest
Silent Partner: the US-Backed War on Gaza

Ron Jacobs
The New Iraqi Sovereignty

David Macaray
Union-Busting is Alive and Well

Stephanie Basile
Where's Anna's Money?

Stacey Warde
An Uncle's Unrest

Website of the Day
Israeli Refusenik on Gaza

January 5, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Will There be a Recovery?

Sousan Hammad
Phoning Home to Gaza

Wajahat Ali
Flying While Brown

Mats Svensson
Longing in Gaza

Jen Marlowe
Abeer's Baby

Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Gaza Phone Tag

Brian Cloughley
Israel is Immune From Criticism

Faheem Hussain
Gaza and India: a View From Pakistan

William Cook
Consider the Realities of Gaza

Dr. Trudy Bond
The Madness Among Us

Christopher Ketcham
The Revenge of the Blogger at the National Press Club: a Rotten Washington Interlude

Steve Early
Who Rules SEIU?

Dave Lindorff
When It Comes to Terrorism and POW Cases, Equal Justice Under Law is a Joke

Website of the Day
The Endangered Fish of the Colorado River Basin

January 2 - 4, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Diary of 2008: an Incredible, Hope-Filled Year

Uri Avnery
Molten Lead in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of the Gaza Assault

Paul Craig Roberts
Whatever Happened to Western Morality?

Brian Eno
Stealing Gaza: an Experiment in Provocation

Ralph Nader
America Must Stop Shirking Its Responsibility on Gaza

Omar Barghouti
UN Complicity in Israel's Massacre in Gaza

Graham Usher
Where Pakistan's Generals and the ISI Draw Their Lines

P. Sainath
The Economy is Worse Than It Appears

Belén Fernández
Pardon Our Dust: Israel's PR Campaign for Gaza

Deb Reich
Shiv'a in Gaza, December 2008

Gary Leupp
Defacing Mr. Jefferson's Wall: Preachers and the Inauguration

Michael Yates
Top Chef or Top Wage Thief? Tom Colicchio and the Economics of Restaurants

Joanne Mariner
How to Close Guantánamo

Seth Sandronsky
Funding the Israeli Military: the US Pipeline

Cynthia McKinney
We Lived to Tell the Story

Sonja Karkar
Israel's Dogs of War

Deepak Tripathi
Gaza in Perspective

Robert Fantina
Obama, Afghanistan and Israel

John Ross
The Year No One Can Remember

Norm Kent
The Heat on Duval Street: Why Head Shop Raids are Unfair and Unjust

Larry Portis
Syria and the Arab Barbie Doll--Before the Deluge

Richard Rhames
Is Conscience Dead?

Dee C. Lubell
We Come From the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright

David Yearsley
A Gay German at the Courts of the Medici and Hanover, and of Course the BBC

Lorenzo Wolff
Joe Ely, the Fighting Rooster of Rock

Marc Catone
Looting Lennon's Legacy

Poets' Basement
Five Poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski

Website of the Weekend
Earth in High Rez

January 1, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
If Hamas Did Not Exist

Oren Ben-Dor
The Self-Defense of Suicide

Wajahat Ali
The U.S. Response to the Gaza Crisis: Unfair and Unbalanced

Saul Landau
In Cuba No One Man Could Steal $50 Billion From Other People

David Michael Green
What to Expect While We're Expecting

Website of the Day
Morbid Anatomy

December 31, 2008

Pam Martens
Wall Street's Collapse and the Ownership Society

Neve Gordon /
Jeff Halper
Where's the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?

Ted Honderich
The First Casualty of Israel's War

Brian Cloughley
Five Little Girls on a Sofa: Gaza's One-Sided Images

Ron Jacobs
What is Hamas, Really?

Vijay Prashad
Hot Rod and His Sikh Warrior: Blago's Indian Connections

Franklin Lamb
Mr. Mubarak, Tear Down That Wall!

Mike Whitney
My Brilliant Career

David Macaray
What Really Killed the Auto Bailout

Richard Thieme
The Betrayal of the Commons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Who Wins What in Gaza?

Stephen Lendman
The Troubling Case of the Fort Dix Five

Worthy Group of the Day
Western Shoshone Defense Project

December 30, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
May We No Longer Be Silent

Tariq Ali
The Gaza Ghetto and Western Cant

Robert Bryce
The $775,000-a-Year GI

Jonathan Cook
Electioneering with Bombs

Gary Leupp
The Fishbarrel War

Dave Lindorff
Tough Guys Don't Walk: Will Cheney Seek a Pardon?

Brian McKenna
Ted Downing and Troublemaker Anthropology

John Walsh
The End of the Green Party

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the World

Bob Sommer
The Education of David Frost

Worthy Activist of the Day
Support Marie Mason

December 29, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's Attempted Endgame in Gaza

Neve Gordon
What, Exactly, is Israel's Mission?

Joshua Frank
Obama and the "Special Relationship"

George Salzman /
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The War Against Palestine: Exception From Humanity

Norman Solomon
A Hundred Eyes for an Eye

Ewa Jasiewicz
Gaza Today: "This is Just the Beginning"

Rob Larson
The Banks Laugh All the Way to the Bank

Kenneth Libby
Arne Duncan's Dark Years in Chicago

Robert Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008

Elsa Johnson
High Noon at Black Mesa: Bush's Farewell Gift to Peabody Coal

Nicola Nasser
Resolution 1850: Bush's Parting Gift

Belén Fernández
Hanukkah Games

Worthy Group of the Day
Nuclear Information and Resource Service

December 26-28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Medusa's Head

Dr Eyad Al Serraj
The Boming of Gaza: "An Earthquake on Top of Your Head"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Cancerous Air

Bradley Simpson
Obama's New Intel Chief, Dennis Blair, Ran Interference for Indonesia's Butchers

Ralph Nader
Government Without Laws

Gary Leupp
Obama and the Graveyard of Empires

Ellen Cantarow
Richard Falk, Israel and the NYT

Matt Landon
The Great Coal Ash Flood: a Report From Swan Pond Road

David Macaray
SAG's Terrible Dilemma

Patrick Bond
End of Neoliberalism? Sorry, Not Yet

Norm Kent
Invoking Bigotry: Obama and Rick Warren

Brian T. Ketcham
Fuel Efficiency is Easy--Just Don't Let Detroit Tell You How to Do It

Rannie Amiri
War Clouds Over Gaza

Larry Portis
Changing the Ethnic Vocabulary

Richard Rhames
Welcome to Soup Kitchen America

Stephen Lendman
29 Red Flags: Early Suspicions About Bernard Madoff

James L. Secor
Unheralded Coup

Ramzy Baroud
Iraq, the Plot Thickens

Harold Pinter
Art, Truth and Politics: the Nobel Lecture

Cpt. Paul Watson
Tracking the Cetacean Death Star

Howard Lisnoff
Nixon's Cambodian Shock Treatment

Michael Dee
The Bill of Rights, Killed in Action by the War on Drugs

Steve Conn
Eight Predictions for 2009

Poets' Basement
Valentine, Kaung, Moser and Graham

Worthy Group of the Weekend
United Mountain Defense

December 25, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
What Were Those 1960s Terrorists Thinking, Anyway?

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Sole of Christmas

Hannah Mermelstein
Caution: Settlers Ahead

Worthy Group of the Day
Citizens' Coal Council

December 24, 2008

Bill Quigley
Five Bailout Lessons From Katrina

Saul Landau
Then and Now: Venezuela and Cuba, 1960-2008

Sam Smith
Evangelism and Politics

Brian Cloughley
Torture, Slaughter and Lies

John Ross
Where's al-Zaidi's Pulitzer?

Eric Walberg
Cold War Shivers

Norm Kent
What Will Obama Do About Marijuana?

Stephen Martin
Reasons for Cheerfulness

Worthy Group of the Day
Collateral Repair Project

December 23, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Ponzi Paradigm

Michael Yates
The Tombstone Economy

Chuck Spinney
The New York Times Flames Out in Defense Dogfight

Vijay Prashad
India's Reckless Road to Washington, Through Tel Aviv

Brian Horejsi
Interior Decorating: Obama, Salazar and the Future of America's Public Lands

David Macaray
Obama's Best Pick?

Neil Watkins /
Sarah Anderson
Ecuador's Conscientious Default

David Michael Green
Hey, Reagan Democrats! Now Do You Get It?

Worthy Group of the Day
Focus on the Corporation

Weekend Edition
January 16-18, 2009

DEA Nixes Challenge to Ole Miss Monopoly

Growing Pot for Research

By FRED GARDNER

Guns blazing as they head for the exit, the Bush gang has blasted the hopes of Lyle Craker, a UMass Amherst botany professor who applied in June, 2001 for a DEA license to grow marijuana for FDA-approved medical research. On Jan. 12 Craker got a formal letter of denial from DEA Administrator Michele Leonhartt. Mahmoud ElSohly of the University of Mississippi remains America's only legal grower, as far as the feds are concerned.

Some of the destructive regulations promulgated by Bush in recent months may be reversible, but the DEA's rejection of Craker appears to be final. Lawyers are exploring the appeal options, according to Rick Doblin, who organized legal and political support for Craker. Doblin didn’t sound optimistic on the phone Jan. 13.

Prof. Craker has already won an appeal —but it didn't count, as we shall explain. His application had been rejected by the DEA in December, 2004, following a three-and-a-half year "evaluation process." With pro-bono help from DC lawyers and the ACLU, he appealed. An extensive hearing was conducted by Administrative Law Judge Mary Ellen Bittner at DEA headquarters in Arlington. Team Craker argued that "the current system does not provide an adequate and uninterrupted supply of marijuana for legitimate purposes," and "creating an alternative to the current NIDA-controlled monopoly would promote the advancement of science and research by adding competition without increasing the risk of diversion."

The DEA called ElSohly, who spent December 13 and 14, 2005, defending his monopoly. His testimony was revealing. Much of his work for the government involves testing the potency of thousands of marijuana samples seized by law enforcement agencies throughout the country. On his own time, presumably, he has patented a THC-extract suppository, which a corporation called Insys is trying to market. (Can they think of a better slogan than “Up yours, America?”)  El Sohly also has a contract with Mallinckrodt, a giant chemical company that plans to market a THC-extract pill as an alternative to Marinol (which is synthetic THC in prescribable pill form).

ElSohly testified that the marijuana he grows for NIDA meets all the needs of U.S. researchers. His most recent crop, grown in the summer of 2002, averaged about 7% THC. It was stored in drums lined with plastic in refrigerated vaults. Upon getting word from NIDA that a researcher’s request had been granted, ElSohly sends a batch to the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina to be machine-rolled into cigarettes.

ElSohly testified that marijuana higher than 8% THC would gum up the rolling machines. Moreover, he said, administrators from the University of California's Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research had advised him that patients in clinical trials could not tolerate marijuana with THC content above 8%. That's a dubious claim. In any case, one puff of an 8% THC cigarette provides the same amount as two puffs a of 4%-THC cig.  Clinical trial protocols can be adjusted accordingly.

One of the recipients of ElSohly's NIDAwanna is Irvin Rosenfeld, a Ft. Lauderdale stockbroker whose rare bone disorder qualified him for the "Investigational New Drug Program" launched by the feds in the Carter era (and closed to new patients by Poppy Bush when AIDS patients began applying en masse at the start of the '90s). "I had a strong personal interest in ElSohly's testimony," writes Rosenfeld in a forthcoming memoir. "If the quality of government-issued medicine improved, I could smoke less, and the mild side effects would be even milder.

“An aspect of medical marijuana use that the Drug Czar and other Prohibitionists won't acknowledge is: the higher the concentration of THC and other active ingredients, the smaller the amount required by the patient. If the main adverse effect is damage to lung tissue —as Ethan Russo and other researchers have found— then the less a patient has to smoke, the better. Nevertheless, the government regularly issues warnings that 'today's pot is much stronger than pot in the 1970s...' as if that made it more dangerous instead of more efficient!"

One of ElSohly's self-serving contentions was that all marijuana studies should be conducted with material similar in potency to the national average. "What makes sense," he said, "is to look at the national data for potency, for what's out there on the street, and… mimic what's out there and to do research with those kinds of materials."

That approach would be reasonable if the focus of research was harm, not medical benefit; and indeed, almost all the marijuana research NIDA has sponsored over the years has been aimed at finding adverse effects. For those studies, using marijuana comparable to what most Americans are smoking might make sense. But for research aimed at finding beneficial effects, scientists should be provided with the highest-grade strains, not the national average.

Judge Bittner was not impressed by ElSohly's arguments. On Feb.12, 2007, she issued her opinion, which concluded that competition among producers would be in the public interest. DEA lawyers had argued that the existing arrangement involved competition because Craker (and others) could submit a bid against ElSohly every five years when the NIDA contract came up for renewal. Bittner observed, "The NIDA contract requires the contractor to analyze samples of marijuana supplied by law enforcement agencies, a separate activity from cultivating marijuana for research purposes, and a requirement a qualified cultivator may not be able to fulfill."

So Craker won his appeal… but when the name of the game is Administrative Law, nobody wins except the government agency. The judge doesn't decide how the agency must act, her opinion is merely a recommendation that the agency chief can accept, reject, or modify. DEA Administrator Leonhartt and her predecessor, Karen Tandy, sat on ALJ Bittner's opinion for 23 months, and then shot it down, along with the hopes of many drug policy reformers. The record contained letters of support for Craker from Massachusetts Senators John Kerry and Ted Kennedy and 45 members of Congress.  "As each day got closer to January 20," Doblin said ruefully, "I couldn't help thinking they might punt it over to the Obama Administration."

Granting a license to a second grower of marijuana for federally approved research seems like the kind of small step away from prohibition that the Obama Administration might be willing to make. 
As this goes off to CounterPunch Jan. 15 —the day the DEA decision re Craker was published in the Federal Register—  Rick Doblin reports that the lawyers see a ray of hope: “DEA makes a big deal in their final ruling that rejection of the FDA-approved protocols of Donald Abrams and Ethan Russo took place before the current HHS Guidelines were issued. DEA claims that since no rejections have taken place after the guidelines were in force, there is no evidence that it is difficult or impossible for an FDA-approved researcher to obtain marijuana from NIDA. The HHS 1999 Guidelines were issued May 21, 1999. Russo’s protocol was approved by FDA in September 1999 and rejected by NIDA/HHS in December 1999, with the written rejection received in February 2000. We may submit this as new evidence."

A Note on the Coverage

A brief story about the DEA turning down Craker ran in the Boston Globe Jan. 13. It made no reference to the political significance of the timing. Reporter Bina Venkataraman portrayed the whole process and outcome as quite rational: "The DEA decision called the current supply of marijuana for research 'adequate and uninterrupted' and said a second laboratory would not be in the public interest. Since 1968, a federally approved laboratory at the University of Mississippi's School of Pharmacy has grown nearly a hundred varieties of marijuana plants... The plants have been used for clinical studies across the country."

Venkataraman made Rick Doblin out to be a bit of a spinmeister: "Doblin... calls the Mississippi lab a monopoly." When one company controls all the business, it is a monopoly.  She falsely summarized and minimized criticisms of ElSohly's operation: "Some researchers complain that access to the laboratory's supply is thwarted by a contract it holds with the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which must approve permits issued by the Food and Drug Administration or the DEA in a process that can take months to complete." Months? The right word would have been "years" or "a lifetime.” And would-be researchers have many complaints in addition to the length of the approval process.

By some strange coincidence —or was it the Ol’ Miss p.r. machine, or NIDA's?— the New York Times ran a flattering interview with ElSohly on Dec. 23, shortly before the DEA announced it was upholding his monopoly. No mention was made of Craker’s application or ElSohly’s opposition to it.  I emailed the interviewer, Claudia Dreifus, to ask at whose initiative the piece was written, but didn't hear back. I met Claudia in New York in 1970. She had just published an article about A.J. Weberman, who used to go through Bob Dylan's garbage cans on MacDougal Street. One time Dylan, who had a family and his own privacy to protect, caught Weberman and dealt with him appropriately. Weberman shared his happy recollection of the encounter with Claudia: "All I could think of was 'Bob Dylan is beating the shit out of me.'" 

Here she is, all these years later, a professor at Columbia University and a regular in the New York Times Science section, lobbing softballs to Mahmoud ElSohly. Comments in italics are by your correspondent.

Dreifus: What exactly does the Marijuana Project do?

ElSohly:  At this laboratory, which began in 1968, we often investigate marijuana's chemistry. We also have a farm where we grow cannabis for federally approved researchers. Our material is employed in clinical studies around the country, to see if the active ingredient in this plant is useful for pain, nausea, glaucoma, for AIDS patients and so on.

The image is of a panoply of clinical trials being conducted in the U.S. —a key point The DEA Administrator made in rejecting Craker’s application. 

Dreifus: One of the basic principles of agronomy is to start with good seeds. Where do your seeds come from?

ElSohly. That's a very good question.

Patronizing.  He realizes she's not a science whiz.

Most of the illicit material in the 1960s came from Mexico. So, in collaboration with the D.E.A. and the Mexican government, we acquired those seeds. Later, we acquired others from Colombia, Thailand, Jamaica, India, Pakistan and places in the Middle East. That permitted us to study chemical and botanical differences. By 1976, we were growing about 96 different varieties.

Interestingly, that led us to see that there was only one species of cannabis. It had always been thought that there were many. But you could see that the chemistry of this plant is the same qualitatively no matter where it comes from.

He’s claiming undue credit.  The one-species theory dates back to Linnaeus The modern paper usually cited in this regard is: Small, Beckstead and Chan. 1975. The evolution of  cannabinoid phenotypes in Cannabis. Economic Botany 29:219-232.  All three authors were based in Canada, grew their own plants and ran their own analytic lab tests.

What makes each different is the relative proportion of the different chemicals in there, which doesn't make a different species. It's really the same species, but different varieties of it. The different types of varieties hybridize very easily.

Dreifus: Does this mean that one could make genetically modified cannabis?

ElSohly: Yes. Absolutely. That actually has been the trend over the years in the cultivation in the illicit market, and also in the legal market, where we are doing genetic selection, where we select specific materials that have the genes that produce higher levels of THC or some of the other ingredients.

Apparently she means to invoke Monsanto-style Frankenfood genetic modification and he's talking about Mendelian genetics and selective breeding. 

Dreifus: So out there in rural Northern California, have they been improving their crops with modern genetics?

ElSohly: They have been doing genetic selection for years. You can see the potency keeps going up. In the 1970s, the seized marijuana had probably 1 percent or less of the active ingredient. Now, it's about 8 percent, on the average.

Some enlightened California dispensary operators have begun using an analytic test lab to determine cannabinoid levels and to check for the presence of mold. According to Steve DeAngelo of Oakland's Harborside Dispensary, "The cannabis that an experienced user would consider ordinary, we're finding, is in the 10%-THC range. Cannabis considered strong would be 20%-THC or higher."

Dreifus: How did you come to your unusual specialty?

ElSohly: The honest truth is

Don't you always tell it like it is, Dr. ElSohly?

that it began out of necessity. In 1975, while I was in my last year of graduate school in natural products chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, the Lord provided me with twin daughters...

Didn't Mrs. E. have anything to do with it?

Sorry to sound catty. I’ve met ElSohly’s family, his offspring seemed well-adjusted and gorgeous. But his defense of his monopoly has been unseemly, to put it mildly, and the role of the corporate media in upholding marijuana prohibition is reprehensible. Their basic trick is to cover the subject sporadically, assigning reporters who have to make a fast, superficial study of the subject and can barely understand, let alone convey, the connections between legal, political, and scientific developments... Note how assertions made by ElSohly to Claudia D. wound up in the reporting of Bina V... The Times owns the Globe. Maybe they’re applying economies of scale, saving money on facts.

Fred Gardner can be reached at plebesite.com

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