Jim Tozzi, the industry friendly lobbyist who helped create the little-known "Data Quality Act," is offering his assistance to medical marijuana advocates who are using the Act to undermine government claims that marijuana has no accepted medical value.

"The Office of Research and Development at the Environmental Protection Agency is seeking outside public relations consultants, to be paid up to $5 million over five years, to polish its Web site, organize focus groups on how to buff the office's image and ghostwrite articles 'for publication in scholarly journals and magazines,'" the New York Times reports.

Drug companies have new top salesmen: doctors. According to the Wall Street Journal, hiring a doctor to speak about drug therapies to other doctors has proven to be a "highly effective" way for the pharmaceutical industry to market its drugs. "An internal study done by Merck & Co. several years ago calculated the 'return on investment' from doctor-led discussion groups was almost double the return on meetings led by the company's own sales force," the Journal reports.