The Washington Post ran a story today about a new legal strategy being adopted by Americans for Safe Access, a group wanting to ease restrictions on medical marijuana. They are launching a new intiative the uses the Data Quality Act to charge the Department of Health and Human Services with “spreading inaccurate information about the drug’s medical value.”

The Data Quality Act was written by a tobacco industry lobbyist, and has been reviled by consumer justice organizations. It is more-or-less designed to let industry challenge the government whenever an agency finds that a particular chemical or product causes negative health impacts and needs regulation.

This story seems part of a larger trend of progressive groups using legal tools developed by corporations. Environmentalists, for example, are using the NAFTA-created Commission on Environmental Cooperation to challenge the United States for failing to reduce mercury emissions from power plants. Other analysts predict that foreign countries will use the WTO to argue that the US is providing unfair subsidies to American businesses by allowing them to emit unfettered levels of the pollutants that cause global warming.

If you’ve heard other examples, or have opinions on these strategies, please post a reply. It’s an issue I’d like to hear more about.

–Arthur Stamoulis, Economics Editor

This entry was posted on Monday, October 4th, 2004 at 3:56 pm by josh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.