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Meet the Press Excerpt

August 10, 1997

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)

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