Marijuana.
The burning weed with its roots in hell.
All wars have their propaganda front,
and the war on drugs is no different.
Throughout its 100-year history, large sections of the media
have acted more as campaigners for the drug war
than as reporters of actual evidence and truth.
And this isn’t just about ridiculous drugsploitation movies.
America’s public enemy number one is drug abuse.
When Richard Nixon first declared his war on drugs in 1970,
he explicitly asked American news networks to warn our youth
constantly against the dangers of drugs.
When Reagan wanted to ramp up the drug war in the 80s,
he claimed that, “The newsrooms of our media centers
have a special opportunity to send alarm signals across the nation.”
And all so often, newspapers and networks were happy to oblige
because scare stories around drugs generate newspaper sales
and drive online traffic.
The media has a drug problem,
and we need to stage an intervention.
[The War on Drugs Show]
[The Media Has A Drug Problem]
Phillis’s case is typical.
Most teenagers start off with marijuana.
Then they decide to see if heroin has any kick.
It does.
[Media Panic: Gateway Drug]
One of the great myths of the war on drugs
is the idea that cannabis acts as a gateway drug.
These claims have been parroted by media outlets for decades,
that something in weed makes people more likely to try
potentially dangerous, addictive drugs like cocaine or heroin.
This idea has been kicking about since the 1930s,
but was really popularized in the 70s by people like Robert Dupont,
Richard Nixon's drug czar,
who declared that marijuana
was actually the most dangerous drug threatening America.
Tonight in our Marijuana 101 series,
we ask if marijuana is a gateway drug.
Now, many believe that smoking pot
actually leads to using harder substances.
The problem with all this is that the entire gateway drug theory
has been pretty much completely debunked by the scientific community.
The majority of people who try cocaine
will have smoked marijuana before,
that is true.
But the fact is, the majority of people who have done marijuana
do not go on to use heroin or cocaine.
So we can say the majority of people who have done heroin,
they’ve also done milk,
they’ve also brushed their teeth.
What we have is a confusion between correlation and causation.
In fact, one can probably take this argument further
and suggest that the reason so many people who use harder drugs
have also used cannabis
is the simple fact that all drugs are illegal.
Basically, if you go buy some weed from your dealer,
they might also try to sell you cocaine, MDMA, or ketamine.
If these products were legal
and you bought them all at different places,
that crossover would probably never even occur.
Which means maybe the real gateway might just be
the war on drugs itself.
[Media Panic: Crack Epidemic]
In 1986, Len Bias was a rising star of college basketball.
He’d just been signed to the NBA
and went out with friends to celebrate.
That night, he died of a heart attack.
This caused a media frenzy,
with the press blaming his death
on a mysterious new drug apparently sweeping across America
called crack.
[Crack Shatters Lives]
Within months, major networks were dropping shows like
48 Hours on Crack Street,
Cocaine Country,
Crack. Vials like this one are turning up empty
and discarded in the streets, in the parks,
in the schoolyards around the nation.
Members of the police department are raiding a so-called “crack house.”
We’re going to come back, we’ll see what drugs they find.
Tell the camera--
OK, good.
Newspapers were flooded with stories of a nationwide crack epidemic,
but there were big problems with this narrative.
First of all, crack wasn't a new drug.
It was just cocaine that you can smoke.
And Bias hadn’t actually smoked crack.
He’d accidentally ingested several grams of powder cocaine in a drink.
But amid the hysteria following Bias’s death,
journalists found they can make
almost any claim they wanted about crack,
and it would be believed.
There was never more than
three or four percent of the population generally
that was using crack on on a regular basis.
Even at the height of the quote unquote, “epidemic,”
it was never that pervasive.
This had a serious impact.
Riding the wave of panic around crack,
within months, the Reagan administration had passed
the Anti-Drug Abuse Act.
Under these laws, possession of five grams of crack
was treated as harshly as 500 grams of powder cocaine.
Enforcement fell disproportionately on Black and Hispanic communities,
and began the progression towards the out of control
mass incarceration we see in America today.
There was no statistical difference between Black people and white people
when it came to crack use.
It was all about media hysteria,
but it justified racially biased policing.
[Media Panic: Crack Babies]
And another issue emerged.
Ira Chasnoff, a young doctor in Chicago,
had began noticing that the babies of some women he treated
who used crack cocaine
were born with certain medical issues.
This was immediately picked up on by the media
and the myth of the crack baby was born.
The story spread like wildfire.
Across the press, the specter loomed of an entire generation
mentally and physically ruined by crack,
who would overwhelm the essential infrastructure
of American social services.
I’ve seen young mothers with babies in strollers
buying crack in the neighborhood where I live.
And of course, there was a vulnerable group
to demonize here as well:
women of color.
We went after women who supposedly use cocaine during pregnancy
because we said that these children would not be able to learn properly.
They would be a burden on society
because of the damage done by their mothers having used crack
during their pregnancy.
Laws started getting passed
that meant pregnant women who use drugs
could be prosecuted for child abuse, drug dealing, and even manslaughter,
once again, primarily affecting women of color.
The claims here proved vastly overstated, if not completely untrue.
No generation of blighted crack babies actually emerged
to overwhelm the medical and educational systems.
In fact, most of the symptoms from the original study
were actually found to be caused by the babies being born prematurely.
Those premature births were often the result of poverty,
instability, and criminalization.
Once again,
the root problem might well have been the war on drugs itself.
[Media Panic: Ecstasy]
Later in the 1980s,
a new type of dance music culture swept across the UK
as thousands of people gathered in fields to party to acid house music,
largely fueled by their favorite new drug, ecstasy.
Years later,
Kelvin Mackenzie, editor of
openly admitted to making stories up around ecstasy
and the assumption that when it came to drugs,
he could print anything— no matter how wild or ridiculous—
and it would be believed.
Yeah, you know, there was a desire for kind of shocking drug stories,
stories which would work on two levels, really.
[They’d] appeal to younger readers, who’d go, “Ah, look at this
there’s a story about tablets this week,”
and then to their parents,
who would go, “Wow, this is shocking.”
This has been a dynamic of tabloid moral panics for decades,
whipping up fear around new drug cultures
while simultaneously glamorizing them to increase sales.
In 1989, reporters from
infiltrated a massive rave in Berkshire,
where the organizers had set up little bits of tin foil
to fall from the ceiling like confetti
so it would reflect their light show,
which must have been very pretty.
But
wrappers for this terrifying new drug, ecstasy.
Of course, wrappers for ecstasy pills
isn’t the most outrageous drug lie of all time,
but it's wild to hear a journalist be so open about
the sort of misinformation they peddled when it came to drugs.
There's a whole culture of faking stories for tabloid newspapers.
I remember thinking what would make a good story would be
to link the sale of ecstasy tablets to a football tournament,
which was Euro ’96 at the time.
So I got some ecstasy tablets,
and I asked a mate of mine to paint some Euro ’96 logos on the tablets
and then presented them to the paper as these branded ecstasy tablets,
which were for sale to football hooligans.
There’s also a point at which these failures
stop being just a bit of tabloid fun
and become something much more serious.
In 1995, an 18-year-old girl named Leah Betts died after taking ecstasy.
The press seized on this tragedy,
using it to create a sense of national crisis.
Her death was being used to sell papers.
It was a good story for tabloid papers,
but it was also a good story for middle-market papers,
like
because the narrative was
the ecstasy nightmare is coming to the suburbs.
Posters started popping up around Britain
carrying the slogan ”Just one ecstasy tablet took Leah Betts,”
created by ad agencies whose major clients included
alcohol companies who saw rave culture as a threat.
It later emerged that it wasn’t actually
the MDMA that killed Leah Betts,
it was that she drank too much water after taking it
and her system collapsed.
But aside from the basic inaccuracy,
the incident highlights a major problem in how drugs are reported.
Multiple studies have shown that almost every single ecstasy death
gets extensive media coverage
compared to a tiny proportion of deaths
related to alcohol and other drugs.
News sites have a morbid certainty that stories about pills
generate interest in a way that alcohol stories just don’t,
especially when those stories involve the death of young people,
and particularly young women.
Unfortunately, what this does is create a broader sense in society
that MDMA is vastly more harmful
and dangerous than booze, which it isn’t.
In fact, the evidence shows that when used carefully,
ecstasy is considerably safer than alcohol.
But you’d never know that from looking at the news.
At the time, it fell to the anarchist band Chumbawamba
to put up their series of posters to try and counteract
the misinformation around Leah Betts.
We took the original poster, which was a picture of Leah Betts,
and it just said, “Sorted.”
What we did is, we just changed the word “sorted” to “distorted.”
Using the word “distorted” seemed like a very relevant choice of word
because the media were distorting the truth about why Leah Betts had died
and how safe or unsafe the drug was.
[Media Panic: Monkey Dust]
In the summer of 2018,
reports started flooding the British media
of a deadly new drug terrorizing the city of Stoke-On-Trent.
This had all the hallmarks of a classic hyped-up drug scare.
First off, they gave the substance a catchy new name,
monkey dust.
Then they claimed that this new drug
turned its users into murderous psychopaths with superhuman strength.
But this drug wasn’t new at all,
it was a synthetic cathinone like most other so-called bath salts,
and had been around for a few years.
And most of the lurid reports of psychotic ultra-violence
were wildly inaccurate.
Many media outlets led with a video of a guy,
apparently on monkey dust, standing on a roof,
who then jumps off and struggles with police.
Only, that video was actually from 2014,
and there’s no evidence he was on monkey dust or anything else.
Regardless, major media sites still ran the story.
Next, papers claim that monkey dust turned users into cannibals,
complete with illustrations of Hannibal Lecter.
The only problem?
This was actually a recycling of a long-debunked story from the US,
where a man named Austin Harrouff
was found chewing on the bodies of a couple he’d murdered.
Those murders had been originally blamed on the drug flakka,
but it was ultimately discovered that he just had
trace amounts of cannabis and alcohol in his system,
and that he suffered from severe mental health disorders.
Again and again, media reports describe monkey dust as an epidemic,
turning users into zombies with superhuman strength
like the Incredible Hulk,
and describing Stoke-On-Trent
as a scene from
None of these claims were properly interrogated or put into context.
They were simply published under the old rule of thumb
that when it comes to drugs,
you can say pretty much anything you want,
as long as you make it sound scary enough.
And though news sites doing a bit of sensationalist reporting for clicks
might not sound like a big deal,
there’s a really serious problem here—
if you call drug users zombies enough,
that’s how people will start to see them.
Not as vulnerable people in need of help,
but as inhuman monsters to be feared and despised.
And having the media stigmatize them is simply further cruelty,
and can very literally cost lives.
There’s mountains of evidence
the stigmatizing language used in reporting like this
affects not only how people treat drug users
but those users’ own willingness to seek help.
The war on drugs may well be coming to an end sooner rather than later,
but it’s time for a fundamental change,
not only in how we police drug use,
but in the language we use to talk about it.
We’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.