{"id":116007,"date":"2014-05-02T19:44:27","date_gmt":"2014-05-02T19:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=116007"},"modified":"2014-05-02T19:45:07","modified_gmt":"2014-05-02T19:45:07","slug":"corporate-media-journalists-perpetuate-lies-misinformation-drugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/corporate-media-journalists-perpetuate-lies-misinformation-drugs\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Corporate Media and Journalists Perpetuate Lies and Misinformation About Drugs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maia Szalavitz
\nRINF Alternative News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Journalists are no less likely to take drugs than anyone else\u2013indeed, in my admittedly anecdotal experience, they\u2019re\u00a0more\u00a0likely to use. You\u2019d think that this would make us especially skeptical both about federal policies that failed to prevent our own drug-taking and about extreme claims about drug users.<\/p>\n

But the press may actually be one of the biggest obstacles to reform. Instead of asking tough questions, reporters tend to simply parrot conventional wisdom\u2013and reinforce the idea that the drug war is the only way, even when drug warriors\u2019 claims contradict the evidence of the writers\u2019 own lives.<\/p>\n

In the last month alone, we\u2019ve seen several particularly egregious examples of mindless reporting\u2013including one that is explicit in propping up longtime racist stereotypes about drug users. If we want better care\u2013and, especially, less incarceration\u2013for addicted people, we can\u2019t just sit by while the media stirs up frequent drug panics. If we don\u2019t challenge the stale formula that \u201ccrackdowns\u201d are the best response to drug-related harm and that \u201ctypical drug addicts\u201d are black, reform will remain marginal, at best.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s examine the problem in some recent stories. Here\u2019s NBC, in part of a network-wide series on heroin. In a lead-in to a\u00a0video report<\/a>\u00a0headlined \u201cWill the Rise of Heroin Mean the Fall of Pot?\u201d (see the video below) the website says:<\/p>\n

In the 1960s, the wide acceptance of marijuana paved the way for a heroin problem in America and the War on Drugs. Today, with two states legalizing marijuana, could this happen again?<\/p>\n

Re-read that first sentence: \u201cThe wide acceptance of marijuana paved the way for a heroin epidemic\u201d is a claim that is stated as fact. But is it true? The report provides no sources or statistics\u2013and while it\u2019s obviously an argument that some anti-drug conservatives have long made, the claim is not backed by strong scientific or historical evidence. And it\u2019s certainly not widely accepted enough to be stated in a way that implies causality and \u201cobjective\u201d truth.\u00a0Whether the intent is to bolster the long-debunked \u201cgateway\u201d theory that marijuana puts users on the road to heroin hell or to claim that relaxing laws on one type of drug use inevitably produces increases in them all, it\u2019s simply not an accurate statement of fact.<\/p>\n

Just because A follows B, it doesn\u2019t mean that A\u00a0caused\u00a0B\u2013and there were many other things besides a liberalization of attitudes toward marijuana going on in the 1960s and 1970s. In the video, however, the narrator says:<\/p>\n

American drug culture is always in flux. A decade ago, even two years ago, marijuana was banned and heroin was an out-of-sight small problem. Now marijuana is sold like beer and heroin is ravaging a whiter, younger, more suburban crowd. But hold on a minute, haven\u2019t we seen this episode before? In the late 1960s, reformers launched a massive push for the acceptance of marijuana. We ended up with a heroin plague\u2026.As marijuana acceptance spread, heroin pushed out of the ghetto and into white suburbia and the armed forces.<\/p>\n

Note the sly mention of \u201cthe armed forces.\u201d Do you notice anything missing? If you are of a certain age or just even have a rudimentary knowledge of history, you might recall that there was a little war in Southeastern Asia going on during these same decades, one that was opposed by some of the same people who wanted marijuana reform. And while this could, of course, be sheer coincidence, that conflict took place in an area of the world quite relevant to the supply of heroin. It seems that NBC, however, didn\u2019t think Vietnam was worth mentioning\u2013perhaps because including it would make viewers question its entire thesis connecting marijuana to heroin.<\/p>\n

The narration continues, describing how President Richard Nixon made political hay by declaring war on drugs:<\/p>\n

[This] allowed President Nixon to treat numerous middle-class concerns\u2013crime, race riots, braless women, dirty-haired kids\u2013as one addressable issue: drug abuse.<\/p>\n

As the word \u201ccrime\u201d is spoken, a clip of a black man appears, followed by one of black rioters. While earlier in the piece, the narrator noted that \u201cmore than 80% of the new mainliners, just like today, were white,\u201d it apparently never doubted that viewers would share its own assumption that most heroin addicts are black. If heroin \u201cpushed out of the ghetto\u201d on the wings of marijuana in the 1970s, are we to conclude that the war on drugs worked, and did so by cracking down on pot? What, then, would account for the \u201cheroin chic\u201d epidemic of Nirvana\u2019s 1990s, which occurred before marijuana legalizers gained any victories and which wasn\u2019t black, either?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another critical element missing from this story, perhaps even more important. That is, the big increase in prescription painkiller misuse since the introduction of Oxycontin in 1995 and the crackdown on prescribing in recent years. Several studies showdirect<\/a>\u00a0links<\/a>\u00a0between moves to make pain drugs harder to get or more difficult to misuse and increases in heroin use and overdose rates. And yet NBC blames heroin on marijuana.<\/p>\n

Drug panics don\u2019t just sell newspapers or get ratings or clicks\u2013they are clearly linked repeatedly to both racism and bad policy decisions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ok, I\u2019m not going to pick on this pathetic excuse for \u201cjournalism\u201d any further. You could argue that it\u2019s just one misstep, and not representative.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the release of a\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0last week purporting to show that casual marijuana use causes brain damage shows that this is not an isolated incident. Here are just some of the headlines, as gathered by one of the few skeptical\u00a0articles<\/a>, written by John Gever forMedPage Today:<\/p>\n

\u201cMarijuana News: Casual Pot Use Impacts Brains of Young Adults, Researchers Find\u201d\u00a0(The Oregonian<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\u201cStudy Finds Brain Changes in Young Marijuana Users\u201d\u00a0(Boston Globe<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\u201cCasual Marijuana Use Linked to Brain Changes\u201d\u00a0(USA Today<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\u201cEven Casually Smoking Marijuana Can Change Your Brain, Study Says\u201d\u00a0(Washington Post<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\u201cStudy Finds Changes in Pot Smokers\u2019 Brains\u201d\u00a0(Denver Post<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\u201cRecreational Pot Use Harmful to Young People\u2019s Brains\u201d\u00a0(Time<\/a>)<\/p>\n

So, what\u2019s the problem here? Although the\u00a0press release<\/a>\u00a0that accompanied the study implied otherwise, the research itself is completely mischaracterized in these stories.<\/p>\n

For one, it doesn\u2019t really include \u201ccasual\u201d marijuana smokers\u2013the average marijuana smoker smokes once a month, while the 20 who participated in the study typically smoked 11 joints\u00a0a week. Second, it doesn\u2019t show that marijuana \u201cchanges\u201d the brain\u2013the methods used by the authors can\u2019t determine whether marijuana caused the brain differences it found between users and nonusers or whether those brain differences cause people to like to smoke cannabis.<\/p>\n

Finally, as I\u00a0pointed out<\/a>\u00a0in the\u00a0Daily Beast,\u00a0the study doesn\u2019t show that even this level of use is \u201charmful.\u201d The participants were only included in the research if they were not experiencing signs of addiction, psychiatric disorders or any other detectable drug-related problem. In other words, they were normal\u2013so it\u2019s not even clear whether the brain changes that were detected are at all meaningful. As Carl Hart, a Columbia University associate professor of psychology and psychiatry, told me, there are detectable brain scan differences between men and women, but we don\u2019t call women \u201cimpaired\u201d as a result.<\/p>\n

\"negro-cocaine-fiend-1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times saw \u201cNegro Cocaine \u2018Fiends\u2019\u201d fit to print.\u00a0Photo via<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

While the media does seem to be improving in some ways\u2013now, in\u00a0our heroin panics<\/a>, we do get coverage of overdose prevention and calls for evidence-based treatment\u00a0like maintenance<\/a>\u2013these examples show that journalists still have a long way to go.<\/p>\n

Of course, sensationalist coverage of drugs has been with us perhaps as long as we\u2019ve had journalists\u2013it has certainly accompanied every single drug policy debacle, from the initial criminalization of narcotics to the \u201cReefer Madness\u201d that led to the crackdown on pot in the 1930s to the mandatory minimum insanity of the 1980s cocaine era. But drug panics don\u2019t just sell newspapers or get ratings or clicks\u2013they are clearly linked repeatedly to both racism and bad policy decisions.<\/p>\n

As a reminder, here\u2019s a\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0headline<\/a>\u00a0from 1914, the year federal drug prohibition was enacted: \u201cNegro Cocaine Fiends Are a New Southern Menace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps 100 years later, we can finally learn our lesson and not repeat history again. Perhaps in 2014, reporters and editors can show a bit more skepticism\u2013so that the headlines and articles they write will not be as ignorant and inflammatory as the\u00a0Times\u2019.\u00a0Then, for perhaps the first time ever, we might actually get intelligent drug policy.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Maia Szalavitz is a columnist at\u00a0Substance.com.\u00a0She is also a health reporter at\u00a0Time\u00a0magazine online, and co-author, with Bruce Perry, of\u00a0Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential\u2013and Endangered\u00a0(Morrow, 2010), and author of\u00a0Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids\u00a0(Riverhead, 2006). This\u00a0article first appeared on\u00a0Substance.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maia Szalavitz RINF Alternative News Journalists are no less likely to take drugs than anyone else\u2013indeed, in my admittedly anecdotal experience, they\u2019re\u00a0more\u00a0likely to use. You\u2019d think that this would make us especially skeptical both about federal policies that failed to prevent our own drug-taking and about extreme claims about drug users. But the press may […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":107100,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-116007","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116007\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}