Benjamin Wagner, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California, for instance, denounced "Large commercial operations" that "cloak their moneymaking activities in the guise of helping sick people when in fact they are helping themselves." Laura Duffy, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California, was equally forceful, declaring that the medical "industry is not about providing medicine to the sick. It's a pervasive for-profit industry."
What turned a bunch of lawyers for the Obama administration into radical leftists adopting rhetoric that wouldn't be out of place at the Occupy Wall Street protest? Pot. As Reason's Jacob Sullum notes, they weren't talking about the medical industry writ large, or the major pharmaceutical and insurance companies that stand to gain from the health care law their boss, President Obama, signed into law in 2010, but rather California's medical marijuana industry.
Turning a profit is immoral, you see, when it threatens the profits of more politically connected players in the drug industry: the likes of Merck and the Miller Brewing Company.
