Pot must remain illegal because there’s not enough research. And, no, you can’t do any research.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration has rejected the bid of a researcher at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who wants to create the second laboratory in the nation authorized to grow marijuana for medical research.

The ruling was released yesterday, nearly two years after a federal administrative law judge recommended that Lyle Craker, a horticultural professor who specializes in medicinal plants, be allowed to grow marijuana for medical research.

Since 1968, a federally approved laboratory at the University of Mississippi’s School of Pharmacy has grown nearly a hundred varieties of marijuana plants. Access to the plants has been limited to researchers who gain federal permit….

Blocking research—except for those elusive federal permits, monopolized for government research, which don't study how all those cancer patients are surviving chemo thanks to pot—kinda kicks in the teeth of the DEA’s strongest argument. For years, whenever a DEA spokesperson, a White House appointee, or a politician is asked about support for medical marijuana, he or she says there isn’t enough evidence: “[T]here is little science,” Drug Czar John Walters said when asked if medical marijuana is safe and permissible last month in an online Ask the White House forum. “Doctors and medical experts should decide what constitutes medicine.”

“There is no convincing evidence ... to me that medical marijuana relief of pain and suffering cannot be accomplished by prescriptions from doctors,” said John McCain.

And the DEA’s official “Position on Marijuana” rests primarily on the lack of research:

The campaign to legitimize what is called "medical" marijuana is based on two propositions: that science views marijuana as medicine, and that DEA targets sick and dying people using the drug. … There is no consensus of medical evidence that smoking marijuana helps patients. Congress enacted laws against marijuana in 1970 based in part on its conclusion that marijuana has no scientifically proven medical value. … The American Medical Association has rejected pleas to endorse marijuana as medicine, and instead has urged that marijuana remain a prohibited, Schedule I controlled substance, at least until more research is done.

So what will the DEA say now that they’ve defied their own law judge and blocked the research they say we needed? Maybe, with the inauguration a week away, they could say, “Hold your breath.”