January 23, 1998

The federal government's primary witness at the 1937 Marijuana Hearings was a Treasury Department bureaucrat named Harry Anslinger, the nation's first drug czar. Anslinger testified that all the world's marijuana experts agreed: this "vicious drug" could induce a murderous rage. And damn quick. "One cigarette would develop a homicidal mania," Anslinger told the House Ways and Means Committee. "Probably some people could smoke five before it would take effect …. it's entirely the monster Hyde."

As absurd as Anslinger's statements sound today -- they were taken as Biblical truth 60 years ago, enabling Pot Prohibition to sail through Congress. Despite opposition by the AMA -- which saw great promise in cannabis -- the bill was passed unanimously in both houses, deliberation lasting a scant 92 seconds. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it into law on Aug. 3, 1937. Pot was outlawed. Medical research was banned. It was now legal to hunt down and imprison pot-smokers. Specifically, Negro musicians and Mexican immigrants. Most white people hadn't even heard of marijuana. It wasn't until the '60s that they turned on and got arrested in mass numbers. In just the last 30 years, over 11 million people of all races and creeds have been arrested on marijuana charges.

Like Congress in 1937, the media of the day swallowed Anslinger's rendition of "Reefer Madness." Not one newspaper bothered to investigate his sources or check his dubious facts. If anything, big city papers embraced his fiction and even embellished it, terrifying Middle America with lurid, and patently false, horror stories. While Hearst's San Francisco Examiner sounded the alarm for parents with headlines like "Marijuana Makes Fiends of Boys in 30 Days," other papers fanned the flames of racism with similarly outlandish tales of pot-crazed Mexicans committing acts of depravity.

For six decades, mainstream media continued to shape the public's perception of marijuana by promoting every myth and scare tactic supplied by the government. Pot leads to violence. Pot leads to lethargy. Pot leads to hard drugs and death. Pot is a hard drug. Pot kills brain cells. Pot hooks our children. Pot grows breasts on boys. Pot has no known medical use.

Although today's major newspapers and TV networks are far more circumspect than their predecessors thanks to the medical marijuana issue and California's Proposition 215, they still don't get it right. Far too many government spokesmen and press releases continue to be handled with kid gloves. And too much erroneous anti-pot rhetoric still gets published and aired, while an inordinate amount of pro-pot news is left out. The public is not being told the whole story.

My hobby is tracking marijuana news worldwide on the Internet. Every day I read news stories, letters-to-the-editor, editorials and op-ed pieces in foreign and U.S. papers. I monitor pot stories on TV. I also know the issue from the inside, having worked 10 years as a staff writer for the L.A. Times.

I saw how marijuana myths become institutionalized. Any Times reporter today who researches pot in the paper's online library will ingest a lot of mistakes and exaggerations. Articles written in the last few months have reported that the passage of Proposition 215 "may have contributed to the increase in marijuana use by our youth," that "this is not the marijuana kids smoked in the '60s," that "we see people involved in much more dangerous drugs who were involved in marijuana first," that bongs "increase the effect of marijuana." Since no corrections or clarifications accompanied the stories, these "facts" are assumed to be correct by the reporter who looks them up online and they get passed on once again to the reader.

When I was a news reporter for the Times' Ventura County Edition a few years ago, I made the mistake of pitching an anti-DARE story to the city editor. I told him DARE was wasting taxpayer money. I said reputable studies show that DARE not only has no effect whatsoever on whether kids do or don't do pot, but it may also be counterproductive. Red-faced, he marched me into his office, closed the door and directed my attention to a framed certificate hanging behind his desk. It was a DARE commendation for his cooperation in helping save children from the scourge of drugs.

I was frustrated in my efforts to educate editors at the Times. Not one top editor was willing to let me write a balanced, objective, fair pot piece despite my reporting credentials (numerous front-page stories and Sunday Magazine covers). Even worse, editors allowed mistakes to get into the paper even when I e-mailed warnings in time to make the corrections. Nobody wanted to believe there was another side to the story.

I continually read stories in the New York Times and Washington Post that expose the gullibility of these pillars of journalism. Last summer, a NIDA press release heralded two NIDA-sponsored rat studies suggesting that marijuana may be as addictive as heroin and cocaine and leave users "primed" for other drugs of abuse. The lead paragraph in the New York Times article was almost a carbon copy of the NIDA press release. The Post also acted like the government's lap dog, trumpeting that "marijuana may be a far more insidious drug than generally thought."

Neither paper had sought out experts with opposing viewpoints - something cub reporters are taught the first day of J-School. It was up to the alternative media to carry stories on the flaws in NIDA's spin, pointing out that the studies actually proved marijuana is NOT an addictive substance. Neither the New York Times nor the Post ran a follow-up amending their original story.

What defines the media's bias the most is what doesn't get into the paper or on the air. Such as any good news about pot. In late October, an L.A. Times science writer was in New Orleans covering a medical convention when researchers announced the results of a startling new pot study. As he reported, the scientists have shown that THC "could serve as an effective remedy for the millions who suffer serious pain, without the unwanted side effects of more traditional morphine-like drugs …. it is not addictive, nor does it appear to carry the risk that patients may develop tolerance for it and require increasing doses."

Although the study was done using synthetic pot (research with the real stuff is still highly restricted), it still scientifically verified marijuana's medical value, dealing a major blow to the Feds by undermining their bedrock reason for keeping marijuana a Schedule I drug: They claim it has no known medical use. I turned on the tube that night expecting to see the story on the networks. Nothing. Not on the L.A. stations. Not CNN, usually the most diligent media source when it comes to pot news. I scanned newspaper sites on the Internet the next day. Even though the Associated Press sent out its version of the story, most papers had closed their eyes

and plugged their ears. Including the Seattle Times -- which was in the midst of an editorial campaign against a Washington State initiative that would legalize marijuana for medical use (the initiative failed).

The media makes little attempt to cover marijuana as thoroughly as other beats. Pot is hot in many countries today, especially Canada and in Europe, where decriminalization movements have begun reaching critical mass, but the story goes unreported in America. Not even marijuana atrocities in this country have gotten the media's attention. In 1997, an Oklahoma father of three was sentenced to 93 years in prison for growing pot to use medicinally for rheumatoid arthritis.

He was arrested when Tulsa police busted in his door on a bogus tip that he was dealing methamphetamine. They found none and only $28 in the house. But in a small basement room, they discovered a few dozen pot plants, many of them seedlings. Will Foster, a 38-year-old computer dealer and ex-Army MP who had never been in trouble with the law, now sits in a Texas jail cell for the rest of his life. Americans are unaware of his story because the mainstream media have chosen not to cover it.

The great shame of American journalism is that we condemn China for human rights abuses but ignore Will Foster and the rest of the victims of this country's War on Marijuana.

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