The opioid crisis taught America a bloody lesson: never trust an “expert” who is quietly working for the industry they are supposed to be studying. Back in the 1990s, Big Pharma used doctors, paid shills, and junk science to convince the public that painkillers were a harmless miracle cure. Millions of lives were ruined.
Today, the corporate marijuana industry is running the exact same scam. And figures like Codi Peterson are playing the starring role.
Peterson relentlessly bills himself as “Dr. Codi Peterson, cannabis science expert”. Let’s look at what that actually means. Peterson is a pharmacist (a PharmD), not a medical doctor. His “science” degree is a Master’s in medical cannabis—a program consisting of mostly online classes where you don’t even need a science background to get in. He didn’t spend years in a laboratory conducting rigorous experiments. He simply took some coursework. But he slaps those titles next to his name to trick the public into thinking he is a world-class, independent researcher.
If you call yourself a “science expert,” you should have a lot of hard science to back it up. Peterson does not. He has exactly one published research paper to his name. And it wasn’t a real clinical trial where doctors carefully monitor patients in a controlled setting. It was just an anonymous internet survey. He literally just collected stories from people on social media who self-reported stomach issues from smoking weed. That is the exact kind of lazy, biased junk science that the painkiller industry used to push their pills. To make matters worse, his single paper was so sloppy it had to be corrected because a chart accidentally said “Heartburn” instead of “Headaches.”
Real scientists are independent. Peterson is a walking billboard for the weed business. He calls himself a “consultant to cannabis companies.” Even worse, he is the Chief Science Officer for a weed media website called The Cannigma. What does The Cannigma do? They sell ads, sponsored articles, and marketing campaigns to marijuana businesses. You cannot be an honest, unbiased scientist when your company’s paycheck relies on selling ads for the very industry you are supposedly evaluating. It is a massive, glaring conflict of interest.
Peterson has completely traded real science for corporate lobbying. He sits on the board of marijuana advocacy groups like Americans for Safe Access. In that role, he makes huge, reckless medical claims, pushing weed as a “game-changer” for complex issues like anxiety and cerebral palsy. The FDA says the exact opposite: there is no solid proof that everyday marijuana products safely treat those diseases.
When the government tries to step in and put basic safety rules on this wild market, Peterson goes on the attack. He actually complained that the FDA operates on “broken incentives.” Think about how crazy that is: a pharmacist—whose entire profession relies on the FDA to make sure drugs don’t kill people—is attacking the top safety agency in the country just to protect his favorite industry. When California tried to crack down on unregulated hemp products, Peterson lobbied against the ban, using stories of sick kids to defend a totally unconstrained market.
We already lived through this nightmare. We know exactly what happens when industry insiders put on white lab coats and use flimsy science to push a commercial product. People get hurt, and the executives get rich. Peterson is just an industry lobbyist playing dress-up as a scientist. We cannot afford to fall for this deadly scam a second time.
