Patents and Pot: Feds’ patents say medical marijuana is good, drug war disagrees

The WSJ Blog, in On Intellectual Property and Pot, reveals the federal government’s schizophrenic approach to marijuana. On the one hand, in its zeal to prevent the nose-under-the-camel’s-tent of medical marijuana, it has to deny the medical benefits of marijuana  (okay, well, granted, the medical benefit claims of inhaling smoke bearing a psychoactive drug into one’s lungs may seem a bit … counterintuitive); on the other, “the U.S. government’s own patents and research claim otherwise. … One 2009 patent application, for instance, extols the pain-relieving and “healing properties” of marijuana. The government’s own 2003 patent discusses the usefulness of “cannabinoids” in treating “ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases” as well as “Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and HIV dementia. In July, the National Institutes of Health licensed the rights of the latter patent to the pharmaceutical company KannaLife….”

As a legal brief notes, “How can the government credibly deny the benefits of medical cannabis when the government itself is funding cutting-edge research proving the medical benefits of cannabis and seeking patents based on such research?”

Well, it’s not surprising that the state is schizo on something related to patents. It’s not the first time:

• The Schizo Feds: Patent Monopolies and the FTC;
• Government Gives Samsung and Motorola Monopoly Patent Grants; then Probes them for “Patent Abuse”;
• The Schizophrenic State;
• FTC: Western Digital and Hitachi must give assets and IP rights to Toshiba: Patents, Antitrust, and Competition;
• EU newsflash: patents are anticompetitive!;
• Pro-IP Libertarians Upset about FTC Poaching Patent Turf;
• State Antitrust (anti-monopoly) law versus state IP (pro-monopoly) law;
• see also When Antitrust and Patents Collide (Rambus v. FTC);
• Antitrust vs. Trademark Law;
• Price Controls, Antitrust, and Patents;
• IP vs. Antitrust;
• Intel v. AMD: More patent and antitrust waste.