False equivalency, the 'climate change' debate is big coal (anti) and big oil (pro) fighting with each other, the whole process is corrupt and it's all political and money driven bullshit. I mean for fucks sakes, learn the history! BP and Dutch Royal Shell sat in on the original meetings with Clinton and Gore in the 90's!

Forget marketing muscle, I know droves of researchers who would gladly conduct research to demonstrate the beneficial effects of marijuana use.

The problem for actually doing studies is getting IRB approval, legal approval, and funding in one swoop; and each of these steps takes a very different skillset to obtain.

Usually you have to be well-off enough to afford a lawyer/politician for the second step, and a skilled researcher for 1 and 3, which is typically the type of person -against- legalization.

What these paid spokespeople are doing is going on air and stating obvious facts with vague terminology to get a rise of public opinion from people who don't know any better.

While No, we don't know if marijuana would cause "wide-ranging and public health issues" because:

1. We haven't done many studies on it because of the difficulty in doing them.

2. What "wide-ranging public health issues" means is in itself vague. He's basically just stating there will be an effect, which is a no shit kind of statement.

You would think, but it probably isn't profitable enough for them. With patented medicine they get control of their niche and can charge what they want, but with Marijuana they can't patented it so they have to compete which drives the price to low and makes the low profits less attractive.