And How It Informs About Who Supports Cannabis Prohibition…

“Supporting marijuana use is an example of domestic terrorism—it puts the public at great risk and threatens the very fabric of our society.” -Ron Brooks, President of National Narcotics Officers’ Association, 4/11/08

In my many annual public appearances and media interviews advocating for cannabis law reforms, the question will often arise ‘if NORML and the other drug policy reform groups are right that there are safe and viable alternatives to cannabis prohibition laws, who then opposes you in trying to amend current state and federal laws?’

The recent political endorsement given to former Republican congressman and ardent drug warrior Doug Ose by the National Narcotics Officers’ Association (NNOA) provides a handy opportunity that helps reveal exactly who are America’s prohibitionists and what are their motivations against ending cannabis prohibition.

Who Actually Supports (Or Profits From) Cannabis Prohibition?
At this juncture having worked over 17 years at NORML/NORML Foundation, my standard reply, without achieving doctoral dissertation length is 1.) There are five basic subgroups of Americans who strongly oppose any reforms in cannabis laws, and 2.) These subgroups constantly seek to deepen and enhance prohibition laws, i.e., politically and culturally oppose citizens and organizations who don’t favor prohibition laws; advocate for greater criminal sanctions and fewer civil liberties (more penalties, longer prison sentences, higher fines, and more of the ‘Big Three Ps’: police/prosecutors/prisons) and civil penalties (forfeiture, drivers license suspension, loss of child custody for parents who consume cannabis, denial of college loans to students busted for pot, removal from public-assisted living housing, etc…).

The Five Pillars Of Pot Prohibition
For all intent and purposes, in my opinion, educators, religious leaders, health organizations, military leadership, business and insurance institutions, and economists are not rabid supporters of cannabis prohibition per se. However, the five subgroups of Americans who do support rigorous cannabis prohibition laws and penalties are:

Full Story

Wow! You know there’s something to this story when it’s the journalists themselves espousing it.

Writing Wrongs
via The Philadelphia Weekly

Bad journalism is to blame for marijuana prohibition. … The truth is, most people who use drugs — both legal and illegal — do so responsibly and without any noticeable detrimental effect. [Yet,] since the 1980s, drug policy — with the help of the press — has demonized drug users.

… Scientific studies are frequently reported in the media without the reporter having read more than a press release, and without any regard to sample size.

… In other cases, the news media ignore important drug–related stories — such as the federal government listing cannabis as Schedule I, alongside heroin and LSD; or that the past two presidential administrations have arrested patients authorized by states to use medical marijuana.

… It’s sad how long people have been pointing out this bad journalism, and how little anything seems to change.  

Back in March I wrote an essay for Alternet.org dissecting how the mainstream media falsely reported that inhaling cannabis poses a greater cancer risk than smoking tobacco — based on a study that concluded the opposite result. More recently, I lectured on this topic before attendees at the Fifth National Clinical Conference on Cannabis Therapeutics. It’s a subject worth revisiting.

So why does the media consistently ‘get the story wrong’ when it comes to pot? While I don’t believe there’s any grand conspiracy going on, I do believe that journalists in general engage in several bad habits that negatively skew their cannabis coverage.

First, beat writers too often base their pot-related health and science stories on press releases rather than actual data.

Second, the mainstream media often chooses to selectively highlight data implicating cannabis’s dangers while ignoring data implicating its relative safety.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, mainstream news stories about pot seldom make references to previously published research (research that typically disproves the crux of the media’s latest scare story) or place new data in context.

Writing in the journal Science nearly 40 years ago, New York state university sociologist Erich Goode aptly observed: “[T]ests and experiments purporting to demonstrate the ravages of marijuana consumption receive enormous attention from the media, and their findings become accepted as fact by the public. But when careful refutations of such research are published, or when latter findings contradict the original pathological findings, they tend to be ignored or dismissed.”

How little has changed.

Seventy-five years after the American people and its representatives in government rejected prohibitionists’ ‘great social experiment’ by repealing alcohol prohibition with the passage of the 21st Amendment, one of the leading anti-libation organizations of that era these days espouses Reefer Madness and pseudo-science.

According to WCTU: “Perhaps the greatest tragedy in the use of marijuana is the fact that the harm is so subtle that it is not realized by the user until severe damage has taken place.”

OK….

Full Story

NORML’s letter to the editor of New York Times, April 15, 2008:

The April 15, 2008 article ‘Marijuana Smokers Were Poisoned With Lead In Leipzig’ is informative and perfectly underscores the need to legally control cannabis via regulation and taxation, rather than failed prohibition policies.

Seeking even higher profits in the already lucrative, prohibition-fueled business of cannabis distribution, untaxed and unregulated cannabis sellers in Leipzig Germany apparently added lead particles to their bags of cannabis to increase the product’s weight and value. This is hardly a surprise to observers of prohibition economics.

Full Story