Radley Balko calls Carmona out on his own tendency to distort science:

One issue Carmona didn’t address is medical marijuana. Last year, the FDA put out a baldly political press release claming that “no sound scientific studies supported medical use of marijuana for treatment in the United States.”

This is flatly wrong. A wide-ranging 1999 Institute of Medicine report actually did show medical benefits from smoked marijuana while also finding minimal harmful side effects. The FDA press release was right in one respect: There have been no conclusive studies since. But there’s a good reason for that: The federal government won’t allow them.

Carmona didn’t mention medical marijuana in his list of grievances because Carmona isn’t any more interested in actual science on the medical marijuana issue than the Bush administration is. When the New York Times asked him his position on the issue, he gave the odd reply that he was against medical marijuana because, “Smoking is bad for you.”

In other interviews, Carmona has said medical marijuana is a “science issue, not a political issue,” which would be a great answer had Carmona actually looked at the science during his tenure and not merely at the political landscape.

And this:

Last year, for example, Carmona boldly claimed that America’s weight problem was a “terror within,” and that the threat posed by obesity would “dwarf 9/11, or any other terrorist event.”

Carmona trumpeted claims from the Centers for Disease Control that obesity kills 400,000 Americans each year to support his bizarre and completely out-of-context comparison, despite claims from critics that the 400,000 was exaggerated and flawed by poor methodology.

The CDC later admitted its obesity mortality estimate was off by a factor of 15.

Read the whole thing. Don’t expect the left to have hamsters over this they way they do about global warming. Because distorting the facts and politicizing science is only an issue for Republicans. It’s fine when Democrats and nanny-staters do it.