March 21, 1998

By Jeff Meyers

The truth can finally be told: I only pretended to be one of those L.A. Times button-down corporate journalists. I was really a spy for the cannabis hemp movement. That’s right. I was a mole. In my 10 years at the nation’s largest daily newspaper, I often caught reporters and editors abandoning their usual high professional standards when it came to the War on Marijuana. Their stories lacked fairness, balance and objectivity, not surprising since they were based on government press releases, AKA propaganda.

Considering that I personally smoked pot with many Times staffers over the years, the paper was curiously naïve and disingenuous about cannabis hemp. Here’s my favorite ludicrous example: a story about Water Pipes BOOSTING the effects of marijuana. Now anyone who has ever done a bong load or taken freshman chemistry knows that water is a filtering agent, so if anything, water pipes actually DECREASE pot’s psychoactive effects by removing THC. What made this error even worse, it was the lynchpin of a front-page column one story on the booming head-shop scene in L.A. And it gave credibility to the article, which took a derisive, patronizing attitude toward these paraphernalia peddlers who were not only promoting pot-smoking but actually raising the drug’s dangerous mind-altering properties.

In a sane world, of course, newspaper articles would encourage the use of water pipes because they filter out harmful gases. And locator maps would also be printed to help consumers find their neighborhood head shop without a hassle.

As a journalist, it distresses me to know that the major media could make this a sane world overnight. All it would take is a commitment to print the truth and expose injustice. Look what the Independent on Sunday is doing in England by campaigning to decriminalize cannabis. That whole country is buzzing with healthy debate, and even the politicians are starting to listen.

But in America there is no debate because the media only prints one side of the story, either because they’re brainwashed by decades of disinformation or because they censor themselves out of blind obedience to the status quo. The media also consistently ignores the important victories scored by anti-prohibitionists, as if printing any positive pot news would be giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Just recently, England’s New Scientist magazine reported that the World Health Organization suppressed its own study showing marijuana to be less harmful than alcohol and cigarettes. Even though Reuters carried the story on the wire in this country, not one U.S. paper printed it. I guess it would have been too demoralizing for the country’s war effort.

I laugh when the media uses the term "war on drugs" and then covers the war about as aggressively as high school basketball. I mean, where are the war correspondents, the Dan Rathers in flak jackets doggedly pursuing the truth? Instead of veteran beat reporters and specialists who know the issues inside out, we get anybody who’s handy, usually a young general assignment writer who has never written a marijuana story and lacks the knowledge to ask intelligent, challenging questions. Even worse, he’ll repeat mistakes made by the previous reporter who repeated his predecessors’ mistakes, and so on down through the years, ad nauseam.

When it comes to the drug war, the media is like a mob on a witch hunt, allowing themselves to be swept up by the hysteria. Let’s examine the latest version of reefer madness. "Roofie madness." You recall roofies. They’re the notorious date rape drug that made lurid headlines a couple of years ago. Congress, wishing as usual to be perceived as tough on drugs, quickly banned roofies, costing its manufacturer millions and depriving the world of a safe sleep aid. But here’s the sad irony: last month, a respected forensic scientist released a study on 600 rape victims who’d claimed they’d been drugged before the attack. But in almost half the cases, no drugs or alcohol were found. In more than a third of the cases, alcohol alone was present. It turns out only 5 women out of 600 had actually been slipped a roofie. Less than one-tenth of a percent. That’s shocking, but even more disturbing, not one major newspaper printed the study, which apparently fell into journalism’s black hole.

I’m always asked if I think dark corporate powers are pulling the journalistic strings as a favor to their fellow conglomerates that benefit from prohibition. I’m not sure it’s all that sinister, but at least in a subtle way, corporate zero-tolerance drug policy most surely trickles down into newsroom editorial decision making. Besides, what managing editor in his right mind would want to invalidate six decades of his own paper’s reporting by publishing the real truth about cannabis hemp?

There’s already a chilling precedent out there for any mainstream journalist thinking about writing a drug-war expose. A couple of years ago a reporter named Gary Webb did a heroic investigative piece for the San Jose Mercury News on the cocaine-Contra-CIA connection, but instead of winning the Pulitzer he deserved, he was drummed out of the newspaper business. After the L.A. Times, New York Times and Washington Post ganged up on him with stories supportive of the government party line, the Mercury News backed off and even published wimpy mea culpa editorials. Webb was transferred to a suburban gulag before finally quitting in disgust.

One final irony: a few years ago, I e-mailed L.A. Times esteemed national correspondent Jack Nelson to alert him that his upcoming story on a new potent pot strain "sweeping the country" contained several errors. I suggested he call NORML to get the facts. Not only did I never hear back from him, but his story ran, errors and all. Fast forward to last month. I’m reading a story in the New York Times about the media’s coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal when I come across a quote from L.A. Times esteemed national correspondent Jack Nelson. Nelson was discussing Internet gossip reporter Matt Drudge: "You ought to have at least some standards of decency and some standards of fairness." And I thought to myself … what a bonehead.

Thank you very much for having me. It feels good to come in from the cold.