Legislative Mandates for NIH Grant Awardees

The Legislative Mandates have been issued for FY 2014.

The intent of this Notice is to provide information on the following statutory provisions that limit the use of funds on NIH grant, cooperative agreement, and contract awards for FY2014.

It contains the usual familiar stuff, of pointed interest is the prohibition against using grant funds to promote the legalization of Schedule I drugs and the one that prohibits any lobbing of the government. With respect to the Schedule I drugs issue, for a certain segment of my audience, I remind you of the critical exception:

(8) Limitation on Use of Funds for Promotion of Legalization of Controlled Substances (Section 509)
“(a) None of the funds made available in this Act may be used for any activity that promotes the legalization of any drug or other substance included in schedule I of the schedules of controlled substances established under section 202 of the Controlled Substances Act except for normal and recognized executive-congressional communications. (b)The limitation in subsection (a) shall not apply when there is significant medical evidence of a therapeutic advantage to the use of such drug or other substance or that federally sponsored clinical trials are being conducted to determine therapeutic advantage.”

I wouldn’t like to find out the hard way but I would presume this means that research into the medical benefits of marijuana, THC and/or other cannabinoid compounds are just fine. I seem to recall reading more than one paper listing NIH support that might be viewed in this light.

What I found more fascinating was a little clause that I had not previously noticed in the anti-lobbying section.

(3) Anti-Lobbying (Section 503)
…
(c) The prohibitions in subsections (a) and (b) shall include any activity to advocate or promote any proposed, pending or future Federal, State or local tax increase, or any proposed, pending, or future requirement or restriction on any legal consumer product, including its sale or marketing, including but not limited to the advocacy or promotion of gun control.”

there is also another stand-alone section in case you didn’t get the point:

(2) Gun Control (Section 217)
“None of the funds made available in this title may be used, in whole or in part, to advocate or promote gun control.”

I was sufficiently curious to go back through the years and found out that this language did not appear in the Notice for FY 2011 and was inserted for FY 2012. This was part of the “FY 2012 the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2012 (Public Law 112-74) signed into law on December 23, 2011“. I didn’t bother to go back through the legislative history and try to figure out when the gun control part was added but it looks like something similar that affected the CDC appropriation was put into place in 1996.

So I guess we should have expected the anti-gun-control forces to get around to it eventually?