True or false: getting paid 3000$ a week to smoke weed

As you know, at Newsweed we like to produce quality content and only publish verified information. When Rihanna «announces» she's releasing her brand of weed, MaRihanna, Rather than dive into the subject like many of our colleagues, we put the conditional in and tried to find out if it's true. And we did the right thing, because, after confirmation, Rihanna is not getting into weed.

So when we see «Researchers pay you 3000$ to smoke cannabis» articles circulating on Facebook, we watch and wait. The articles in question told us that the US National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) had commissioned a study of effects of cannabis on the human body, and that researchers would pay 300 participants 3000$ for each week of testing. Really?

Sorry to disappoint you, but it's a fake, and here's why.

Cannabis research faces many obstacles, even in the U.S.

Just over 2 months ago, the think tank Brookings Institution questioned the US government about many obstacles to research The federal government is stifling medical research at a time when state laws are changing rapidly, with potential consequences for public health and safety. Statutory, bureaucratic and cultural barriers have crippled science and threatened freedom of research in this field.«

When a major analysis was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in June, saying that only little scientific evidence that cannabis treats the illnesses for which it is recommended, pro-legalization activists and pro-research scientists surprised everyone by endorsing this statement, and calling for more research.

«Research into the efficacy of cannabis has been systematically hindered by the federal government for 20 years,» Dr. Sisley Sue told magazine The Cannabist. She is currently conducting a study on the effects of cannabis for patients being treated for their Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, with a 2 million $ grant from the State of Colorado, but validates the difficulty of doing research in the field.

The Obama administration has slightly opened the research floodgates by easing the review processes for some proposed studies last June. But, reports the Washington Post, «there are more bureaucratic roadblocks for cannabis research than for any other drug... Heroin or cocaine remain easier to study».

Dear readers, even without knowing all this, we can suspect that such an announcement was too good to be true. The website Snopes contacted NIDA, which admitted it had nothing to do with the false news circulating on social networks. Beware of intoxication, or ask us 😉