Your correspondent is planning to say something like this at today’s meeting of the Medical Board of California:

In its December 13 issue, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a letter from the Society of Cannabis Clinicians exposing duplicity on the part of the Federation of State Medical Boards —along with a duplicitous reply by FSMB president and CEO Humayon Chaudhry, DO. 

The SCC letter was written in response to a “Viewpoint” op-ed by Chaudhry entitled “Medical Board Expectations for Physicians Recommending Marijuana,” published online June 22 and in the print edition of JAMA August 9.

The SCC opposes several key provisions in the “model guidelines” that the Federation wants the state medical boards to adopt. These provisions would:

• trigger investigations of cannabis clinicians based on how many patients they approve and how many plants they authorize patients to grow.

• constrain cannabis clinicians from using cannabis as medicine themselves.

• prevent cannabis clinicians from conducting research in concert with dispensaries.

Dr. Chaudhry addressed only the last point in his reply:

“The FSMB model guidelines do not prohibit and are not meant to impede physician association with dispensaries for research purposes. The policy states: ‘A physician who recommends marijuana should not have a professional office located at a dispensary or cultivation center or receive financial compensation from or hold a financial interest in a dispensary or cultivation center. Nor should the physician be a director, officer, member, incorporator, agent, employee, or retailer of a dispensary or cultivation center.’”

Which sounds very reasonable— because Chaudhry has simply omitted his concluding sentence: “The physician should not be associated in any way with a dispensary or cultivation center.”

If the editors at JAMA had compared the text of Chaudhry’s December 13 letter to his June 22 Viewpoint (published in the August 13 print edition) they would have caught the whopping lie of omission.

The FSMB honcho also wrote, sneakily, in his December letter: “Our Viewpoint was not intended as a substitute for the model guidelines, but as a general summary.”

A summary is supposed to make a document more succinct —not to conceal or reverse its meaning.

Chaudhry and the FSMB lobbyists who helped draft his response to the SCC were again trying to pull a fast one, hoping no one would notice and/or care.  The JAMA editors didn’t.

Will members of the Medical Board of California reject Chaudhry’s tainted product? Who wants to be associated with such crude hucksterism?