You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (54 page)

Second, the government controls the dissemination of this information. It spends billions on snazzy anti-drug ads,
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and spoon-feeds its spin to the popular media, which promptly gives it headlines. The Office of National Drug Control Policy’s presentation of drug statistics has been so contrived over the years that the exposure of its chicanery fills an entire 2007 book—
Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics
.
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An example of this dog-and-pony show is the recent propaganda over marijuana. Marijuana is more potent than years ago and the government has sprung on this (result of criminalization) to make absurd claims and outright lies. For example, a DEA chief was quoted in an AP article as saying, “This ain’t your grandfather’s or your father’s marijuana. This will hurt you. This will addict you. This will kill you.”
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,
13

The fact that marijuana is more potent does not make it more harmful. If anything, it makes it healthier, because users have to inhale less of the carcinogenic
smoke to get the desired effect. However, the increased potency also allows the government to trot out all their fallacious claims anew.

Two of the more craptastic claims are the high numbers of marijuana users in treatment centers and emergency rooms.
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Marijuana users do fill treatment centers, but that is because almost all of them were caught with marijuana and forced to get treatment for their “addiction” by the criminal justice system. As for “marijuana-related” emergency room visits, patients are asked to mention any recent drug use
regardless
of whether it has anything to do with their visit. A marijuana smoker bitten by a cat qualifies as a “marijuana-related” visit.

The relatively few who are there because of marijuana itself are frequently there for paranoia.
¹⁵
There isn’t anything actually wrong with them. An example is the Michigan police officer in 2007 who baked himself pot brownies with confiscated marijuana and called 911 because he thought he was dying. Initial anxiety plays a large part in panicked drug reactions.
¹⁶
Where are novice marijuana users getting this initial anxiety? The same place the officer got the silly idea that marijuana could kill him.

The journalist John Stossel has called it “junk science and junk reporting.”
¹⁷
Scientists have an incentive to find something dramatic against drugs because it is easier to get published and funded. Reporters are clueless about science and are looking for a good story.

Some of the recent asinine headline-grabbers are the claims that marijuana use causes schizophrenia and marijuana use shrinks your brain.
¹⁸
To understand how they can get away with saying this, one must first understand the difference between correlation and causation.

For example, I would assert that a thirteen-year-old kid who comes from a troubled background is more likely to have difficulty in school, have mental health problems, have a bad diet, curse, trespass, make prank phone calls, have B.O., and smoke marijuana. All of these things are correlated. Common sense and studies indicate it is the troubled background that causes all of these things.
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,
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Assuming marijuana causes the kid’s mental health problems based on the correlation is as
faulty as saying marijuana causes prank phone calls, or cursing causes B.O. This erroneous reasoning inundates illegal drug research.

A cabal of scientists received a lot of press coverage in 2005 for claiming that marijuana causes schizophrenia. Other scientists have pointed out the numerous flaws in their research,
²¹
however, the criticism rarely gets coverage.
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Nor do reporters point out the most obvious counterargument—one that is obvious to those who actually smoke it, not just study it—where are all the marijuana psychotics? Where are all these shrunken-brained marijuana smokers? Despite steep rises in marijuana usage in past decades there has not been a change in the incidence of schizophrenia.
²³

With the spigot of research funding wide open the negative marijuana studies are never-ending. Junk science can trash almost any substance, food, or activity. The caffeine business is well aware of this fact. (High caffeine intake correlates with psychosis as well.)
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In the 1970s caffeine came under attack from reformers when junk science linked it to pancreatic cancer. In response, Coca-Cola and other companies created the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) to protect their “interests from those meddlers, newborn in every generation, who would use the law to control what ostensibly free adult citizens are allowed to eat or drink.”
²⁵

ILSI funds researchers who see caffeine as beneficial and publicizes their findings. Its efforts have had an impressive effect. Caffeine articles emphasize the “legal high,” and the benefits of moderate use, not the crash and the fallout of extreme intake.
²⁶
A study exonerated mild caffeine use but found that high daily intake (over 687 milligrams) increased the risk of cardiac arrest.
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The ensuing headline was not “Caffeine Kills” but “Caffeine Cleared of Cardiac Arrest Charges.”
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A study of Starbucks coffee found a Venti-sized cup (twenty ounces) of Breakfast Blend can sometimes break 700 mg of caffeine.
²⁹

Magazines, newspapers, and television lap up whatever bogus stats are thrown their way, and fearmonger even in those rare instances when government officials do not. Articles and television spots from otherwise objective news sources are almost always unabashedly misleading.

Here are some common characteristics of a drug article:

Crazy Quotes
—The focus is on attention-grabbing quotes. These are put in big bold text boxes or make the headlines themselves. For example, a 2002
Newsweek
PCP article’s headline reads, “I Felt Like I Wanted to Hurt People.” The text box quotes Jim Parker of the Do It Now Foundation: “PCP users ‘become like a grenade with the pin missing. Any increase [in its use] is cause for alarm.’”
³¹

Newsweek
does not mention that a review of over 350 journal articles documenting PCP use found that “assumptions about PCP and violence are unwarranted.”
³²
Apparently, peer-reviewed medical journal articles are irrelevant when one has a quote from an employee of a drug-rehabilitation company.

Whack Jobs and Gorefests
—After the grenade quote, the PCP article discusses Antron Singleton, who was found by Los Angeles police one afternoon walking naked down the street coated in blood. Earlier that day he had murdered his 21-year-old roommate in a gruesome manner. She had facial bite marks, a slashed cheek, and a chewed lung. Singleton had smoked PCP the night before.
Newsweek
tells us of another PCP user who bit off and swallowed his two-year-old son’s thumb in a “wigged-out” attempt to combine their DNA, and another who murdered a family of four.

In the past journalists cited similar horrors by marijuana users to blame marijuana for causing insanity and violence. This type of presentation is erroneous and misleading for multiple reasons. First, these incidents are
extremely
rare among users. Second, the media never bothers to do even a cursory investigation into whether the drug caused the actions. If they did, they would find that these “drug-possessed” actors frequently have a history of mental illness or violent tendencies.

This was the case with Singleton. Before this heinous act he had been hospitalized for psychosis three times. As for possible violent tendencies, he was also a professional rapper named Big Lurch. Here are some lyrics from his song “I Did It to You:”

Third, one could easily portray alcohol the same way. Singleton rapped about one of America’s most famous cannibals, Jeffrey Dahmer. Dahmer killed seventeen people. He ate his victims for sexual satisfaction and to make them a “permanent part” of him.
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Dahmer was an alcoholic and was so drunk during one of his initial murders that he could not remember what happened after awaking next to the corpse.

In 2009, two Russian twenty-year-old goths drowned sixteen-year-old Karina Barduchian in a St. Petersburg bathtub. They carved up her body, ate some of her, and served her meat with potatoes to an unaware woman the next day. In interrogation they said they did it because they were hungry and drunk.

In 2009 Conner Schierman stabbed a mother, her sister, and her two children to death in her home. His defense attorney argued that Schierman could not remember committing the crime because he was blackout drunk. Singleton’s attorney argued Singleton could not remember anything either because PCP had taken Singleton back to a “primal state” where he could do “acts of a beast.”
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Geraldo Rivera of FOX News called Singleton on the phone in prison so that Singleton could tell people not to do PCP.
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Rivera did not call Schierman, nor did he call Woody Will Smith, who strangled his wife to death in 2009 because of caffeine psychosis. Rivera did not call them because most people have tried alcohol and caffeine and know how dishonest it is to blame these drugs for murder.

For those who have tried PCP, blaming PCP for cannibalism is just as idiotic. Bruce Rogers, who used PCP about thirty times in high school, said that stories about “chopping your grandmother up with an axe [were] laughable because I never even saw anyone experience a psychotic episode and never even treaded near one at all dosage levels . . . It seemed more likely to calm somebody down.”
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Pictures of Woe
—Although most drug users are healthy non-addicted occasional users, drug articles almost always feature suffering addicts. The aforementioned
Newsweek
PCP article does not have a picture of the young man,
“shy” Mike, who wanted to “hurt people.” Shy Mike, a sixteen-year-old from suburban Hartford, Connecticut, is featured in the article, and a casual reader would assume it is he in the photograph. However, shy Mike probably looked too mainstream.

Instead, the article features a picture of a random PCP “addict” covering his face with grief in a messy dilapidated room. The man’s exposed arm and half his hand are covered in tattoos and his ear sports a gauge. The caption reads, “A Terrible Toll: A 28-year-old PCP addict in recovery reflects on the time he lost to the drug.”
Newsweek
does not mention that PCP is less addictive than caffeine and that users “have not shown a distinct withdrawal syndrome, even after long-term use.”
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Feature the Victims
—Journalists will only talk to someone who was addicted or was close to someone who overdosed. Despite the fact that the vast majority of users have not suffered negative consequences, none of them will be quoted or consulted. In my hometown newspaper in 2002, the front page of its “Sun Style” section featured an AP article on Ecstasy (MDMA). It featured a 3¼” by 2¼” head shot of an attractive bleached-blonde twenty-one-year-old and an immense 9” by 5½” picture of her grieving parents in their living room seated by her framed pictures. She died after ingesting Ecstasy. The headline read, “A Father’s Tears: Parents Take Grief Public in Campaign against Ecstasy.”
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The woman’s death was tragic, but the entire article was subterfuge. Ecstasy deaths are extremely rare. Even taking the highest estimation of its deadliness makes it less deadly than extended aspirin use, as shown in the table below.

Feature Idiots
—The previously mentioned PCP article features shy Mike. Shy Mike bought marijuana in the bathroom of his high school. He did not know what marijuana was supposed to smell like. The marijuana he bought had such a “strong chemical stench” that he had to hide it in the insulation of his home’s attic. Apparently, nothing tipped Mike off to something being amiss with his weed, even when he had trouble walking
the next day
. Mike’s parents eventually discovered some of his marijuana in his “reeking bedroom.” It turned out Mike’s marijuana was laced with PCP and embalming fluid. After smoking it Mike had felt like he “wanted to hurt people” and that “everybody was after him.”