Rolling Stone on the War on Drugs. If I were maximum dictator, I would force every newspaper editor, every magazine editor, and every television producer in the land to read Ben Wallace-Wells' 15,000-word article in the new (Dec. 13) issue of Rolling Stone, titled "How America Lost the War on Drugs." Wallace-Wells captures the complete costs of the drug war better than any journalist I've read in a long time. He documents how the federal government has dropped about $500 billion combating illicit drugs over the past 35 years. Nearly 500,000 people sit in jail or prison for drug crimes, "a twelvefold increase since 1980," Wallace-Wells writes. For all the money the government has spent and all the people it's jailed, it's still failed to make a long-term impact on the availability of drugs. The militarized drug-control techniques favored by the Bush administration, he reports, have increased violence and political corruption abroad, violated human rights, and destabilized several Latin American nations. [continues 1013 words]
Is Reuters Drinking Bong Water? Why don't the hacks who cover the illicit-drug beat just turn their keyboards over to the drug-abuse industrial complex and let them write the stories? This week, Reuters moved a story based on a government press release about marijuana potency issued by the Office of National Drug Control Policy--the office of "drug czar" John P. Walters. The press release and the Reuters story state that marijuana potency has reached its highest level since the government started monitoring it in the late 1970s. The average levels of THC in marijuana now stand at 8.5 percent. (THC is the primary active ingredient in marijuana.) This compares to a little less than the 4 percent measured in 1983. [continues 605 words]
The New York Times mixes its intoxicants and gets stupid. Not that long ago, every reporter knew his way around the bottle. He kept a pint in his bottom drawer at work, adjourned to bars for lunch, and as often as not, went to bed with a slight buzz on. But in today's puritanical newsroom, alcohol has become as verboten as methamphetamine, heroin, marijuana, cocaine, and MDMA. Reporters, who could once file dispassionate stories on the topic, have become as hysterical as 12-steppers falling off the wagon when assigned to write a booze story. [continues 808 words]
The Government And The Press Are Addicted The press goes mad for meth. The myth of the adversary press holds that reporters assume that every government statement contains at least one flagrant lie, and that before disseminating the information the press must expunge or otherwise expose the government propaganda. Nowhere does the myth of the adversary press break down more often than on the illicit-drug beat, where most government press releases receive only a gentle rewrite before publication. Today's offender, the Associated Press, took the handoff from a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration March 1 press release to produce a piece of junk journalism about an explosive increase of methamphetamine users in drug treatment. [continues 758 words]
Whenever I fall into a funk over the press corps' abysmal coverage of illicit drugs, I console myself with the knowledge that, as awful as the coverage is, it's always been that way. Then, to confirm my cynical sentiments, I pull out a monograph from 1974 titled "Major Newspaper Coverage of Drug Issues" from the drug section of my library and reread it. Robert P. Bomboy wrote the monograph for the Drug Abuse Council, a 1970s project of the liberal Ford Foundation that assessed the impact of illicit drugs and made policy recommendations. Bomboy found drug coverage to be moralistic in conception, gullible in sourcing, and formulaic in execution. [continues 803 words]
This Is Your Magazine On Drugs. Newsweek's Inside Story The leading indicator that a national trend has peaked and has begun its downward trajectory is often its appearance on the cover of one of the newsweeklies. Newsweek's current scaremongering cover story, "The Meth Epidemic: Inside America's New Drug Crisis," is a textbook illustration of the phenomenon. From its shrieking inside headline, "America's Most Dangerous Drug," to the gross-out photo gallery (a close-up of "meth-mouth," a prematurely aged meth casualty, and a burned survivor of a meth-lab explosion) the Newsweek package plays to readers' emotions. [continues 1328 words]
Two Heartbeats From the Presidency, an Absolute Nut Job. We live in dangerous times-more dangerous than you might imagine. Terrorists have marked the president of the United States for death. Heart disease has similar designs on the vice president, who's already had four heart attacks and goes into the hospital for angioplasty as frequently as some people take their cars to Jiffy Lube for oil changes. If that isn't enough danger for you, here's more: If both Bush and Cheney were to suddenly drop dead, the law would transfer the presidential powers to a man who proved himself an absolute nut job on the Aug. 29 edition of Fox News Sunday: Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. [continues 912 words]
The Speaker's Unseemly Habit of Slandering George Soros. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert stuck his foot in it while appearing on Chris Wallace's Fox News Sunday (Aug. 29), speculating that Democratic Party financier and anti-Bush 527 donor George Soros may be the recipient of illicit drug money. (For the back story, see yesterday's column, "Dennis Hastert on Dope.") Hastert states in a letter to Soros that he's being misread, maintaining that when he told Wallace, "You know, I don't know where George Soros gets his money. I don't know where--if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from," the groups he was referring to were the "Drug Policy Foundation, The Open Society, The Lendesmith [sic] Center, and The Andean Council of Coca Leaf Producers." [continues 333 words]
There's no mistaking the warning signs. Reporting so gullible you giggle. Inaccuracies so gross you groan out loud. Sourcing so hysterical you ask if it's a put-on. You look away and tell yourself, never mind, it's only a thousand-word story on Page B2 of the "Metro" section that few will read. But you force yourself to look at the page again, and you think of your professional duty. This is your mind. This is your morning newspaper. This is the Washington Post on drugs. [continues 827 words]
