The chief medical correspondent for CNN has used his influence for years to argue that marijuana is bad, bad, bad and it should be illegal, illegal, illegal. Dr. Sanjay Gupta even wrote this piece for Time a few years back called "Why I would vote no on pot." Basically, marijuana was so unhealthy, he argued, that it's better to let people go to jail for it than to legalize it:

Well, I am here to apologize.

I apologize because I didn't look hard enough, until now. I didn't look far enough. I didn't review papers from smaller labs in other countries doing some remarkable research, and I was too dismissive of the loud chorus of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved on cannabis.

Instead, I lumped them with the high-visibility malingerers, just looking to get high. I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof. Surely, they must have quality reasoning as to why marijuana is in the category of the most dangerous drugs that have "no accepted medicinal use and a high potential for abuse."

They didn't have the science to support that claim, and I now know that when it comes to marijuana neither of those things are true. It doesn't have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works.

It's an elegant mea culpa.