MarijuanaNews.com : The Los Angeles Times Once Again Gives Space for McCaffrey And An Aide To Lie To Its Readers.

Posted March 15, 2001
(MarijuanaNews note: McCaffrey is no longer Drug Czar, but he
hasn’t stopped lying.
See
Bizarro to Leave after the First of the
Year! Goes Out Lying.

The LA Times seems to have no intellectual or moral standards in reporting or
editorializing on marijuana prohibition. This is not the first time that they have given
McCaffrey space to lie to their readers.)
See
The Los
Angeles Times Gives Space for Drug Czar And An Aide To Lie To Its Readers
and

HREF=”http://www.marijuananews.com/marijuananews/cowan/marijuana_and_the_media_by_jeff_.htm”>Marijuana
and the Media By Jeff Meyers
A Former LA Times Reporter’s Inside Story — Exclusive to Marijuananews

From The Los Angeles Times
letters@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/siteservices/talk_contacts.htm
http://www.latimes.com/
http://www.latimes.com/discuss/

Hollywood Is Ignoring a Valid Drug War Script
By Robert F. Housman, Barry R. McCaffrey
Robert F. Housman was Assistant Director for Strategic Planning in the White House
Office of National Drug Control Policy From 1997 to January 2001. Barry R. Mccaffrey Was
Director of the Office From 1996 to January 2001
(MarijuanaNews note: Housman was one of the worst ideologues on
McCaffrey’s staff. His hostility toward the truth made him the perfect aide for
McCaffrey.)
See
“These
legalizers put American children at risk.
The Dutch government should be renouncing them, not siding with them.”
What? Oh, Never mind!

March 15, 2001

On NBC’s “The West Wing,” President Bartlet sees the fight against
drugs as a lost cause and a huge waste of money. His surgeon general
has declared marijuana less dangerous than cigarettes. His staff overwhelmingly
favors legalizing drugs. Meanwhile, in the Oscar-nominated movie, “Traffic,” the
new drug czar is so rocked by the enormity of the drug problem and his own daughter’s
addiction that he walks away from the job.

All this makes great entertainment. But it is about as accurate as saying “The Brady
Bunch” was a portrait of real life in America.

The fact is, our national strategy against drugs is working. Over the last two years,
youth drug use dropped 21%. See
The Spin Is Beginning To Wobble On The
“Latest Teen Drug Use” Survey. Czar Is “Greatly Encouraged” By Poll
Showing Heroin Use By 12th Graders At All Time High.
and
“Number
Jumble Clouds Judgment of Drug War”

Workplace drug use has fallen to an 11-year low–4.6%, down from 13.6%
in 1988.
(MarijuanaNews note: “Workplace drug use” is measured by
urine tests which do not determine that “drugs” have been used on the
“workplace.” Of course, these tests are primarily aimed at marijuana which is
much more easily detected than hard drugs, but even hard drug residues show up for a day
or so after use.)
See
Canadian Court Rules For Breathalyzer
Tests for Alcohol – Against Urine Testing for Marijuana.
and
ACLU Report
Urges End To Workplace Drug Tests;
Government Says 70 Percent Of Drug Users Are Fully Employed
NORML Weekly Press Release
and
Drug Testing
Negatively Impacts Employee Productivity, Study Concludes
and
Bill To Encourage
Workplace “Drug” Testing Funds Prohibitionist Lobbies;
Reported By Prohibitionist Propaganda

The number of murders related to narcotics laws dropped
from 1,402 in 1989 to 564 in 1999, the lowest point in more than a decade.
(MarijuanaNews note: An odd slip! These certainly were “murders
related to narcotics laws.” That is, they were caused by prohibition. In the
real world, all that this means is that the crack trade violence has declined for a
variety of reasons.)
See

HREF=”http://www.marijuananews.com/marijuananews/cowan/how_the_narcs_created_crack_by_r.htm”>HOW
THE NARCS CREATED CRACK by Richard C. Cowan
From National Review Magazine

The number of people receiving drug treatment nearly tripled between 1980 and 1998.
Neighborhoods, like New York City’s Harlem, have been taken back from the dealers and
gangs and, once again, offer safe places for hard-working families to live.
See
Giuliani’s Police State – Like
the Marijuana Prohibition That He Loves – Is A Counterproductive Fraud. 3 Articles.

It is true that the number of people arrested for drug crimes has grown, arguably one
reason why drug crimes are down.
(MarijuanaNews note: There is no data to support the view that
increasing the number of marijuana arrests has reduced crime. In fact, wasting police
resources on marijuana users has probably increased crime.)
See
NORML Reports: In 1999, A New Record for
Marijuana Arrests! 4,175,357 Americans Have Been Arrested During the Clinton
Administration.

However, at the same time, we have dramatically increased the number of diversion programs
to break the cycle of drugs and crime. These programs, such as drug courts, offer
nonviolent, drug-addicted offenders supervised treatment in lieu of jail. Ironically, the
actor who plays President Bartlet, Martin Sheen, is one of the nation’s leading advocates
for drug courts and against legalization; he believes that the threat of jail time helped
his son break free of addiction.

Contrary to the prevailing wisdom you may see on movie and TV screens, with exceedingly
few exceptions, we are not locking people up for simple possession of marijuana. During
fiscal year 1998, only 33 federal defendants were sentenced
to jail for base offenses involving less than 5,000 grams of marijuana.
(MarijuanaNews note: The federal government almost never handles
small cases unless the arrest happened on federal property. His use of that number is
deliberately misleading. No one is claiming that the federal government is jailing
marijuana smokers.)

At the state level, more than 70% of drug offenders were incarcerated for drug trafficking
as opposed to possession. An overwhelming majority of the total state prison drug offender
population had prior criminal histories, a quarter of which were
violent.
(MarijuanaNews note: Then three quarters were
non-violent.)

Along these same lines, “The West Wing’s” surgeon general would be
wise to consider new research out of UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center suggesting
that marijuana users may be at higher risk for cancer than
cigarette smokers.
See
Claim Three: “Smoking
Marijuana Can Lead To Abnormal Functioning Of Lung Tissue.”
New Scientist Special Report
and
Johns Hopkins Study Finds No Link Between
Marijuana Use and Head, Neck, or Lung Cancer. There Was Also No Link Between This Study
and Media Coverage.
and
What If Marijuana Could Cure Cancer? One
More Reason Marijuana Prohibition Is Murder.
(MarijuanaNews note: From the Czar’s own IOM report
“Although cellular, genetic, and human studies all suggest that marijuana smoke is an
important risk factor for the development of respiratory cancer, proof that habitual
marijuana smoking does or does not cause cancer awaits the results of well-designed
studies.”

THC, the active component in marijuana, has been shown to cause
cancerous tumors.
(MarijuanaNews note: I don’t know where they got that one, but
there is no human data to support this claim and [synthetic] THC is an FDA approved drug.)
See
Two Days After
The Medical Marijuana Initiatives
The DEA Proposes Making Marinol A Schedule III Drug!! “Like Codeine With
Tylenol.”
More Like Cynicism With Desperation

Marijuana deposits four times more tar in the respiratory tract than cigarette
smoke.
(MarijuanaNews note: That is not what Donald Tashkin, the leading
NIDA sponsored researcher on this subject says. He says that marijuana joints yield up to
three times the tar of cigarettes because they are more loosely packed and don’t have
filters. The second reason is that marijuana smokers inhale more deeply and hold their
breath longer. “We actually quantified this and found that the breath-holding time
was increased about fourfold,” says Tashkin. “That resulted in about a 40 per
cent greater deposition of tar.”

In other words, much of the difference comes from the way that marijuana is
smoked. What is being compared is smoking legal cigarettes and marijuana under marijuana
prohibition.

A Lancet article on the possible adverse effects of cannabis said, “In 1997,
Tashkin and colleagues reported that the rate of decline in respiratory function over 8
years among marijuana smokers did not differ from that in non-smokers. Both studies
showed that long-term cannabis smoking increased bronchitic symptoms.“)
See
A Mediocre Review
Called The “Adverse Effects of Cannabis” Published In The Lancet)
COLOR=”#ff0000″>

And studies show that young people who smoke pot tend to be lethargic, socially removed,
more prone to committing violent and property crimes and do worse in school. None of these
effects are equally associated with cigarettes.
(MarijuanaNews note: The reefer madness aside, the fact is that tobacco contributes to the
deaths of over 400,000 Americans a year and the federal government says that marijuana may
kill 300 per year. [I have no idea where they got that number.] That would seem to be the
best measure of the relative dangers of the two plants.
See
The Reality Of
the Marijuana Situation In Canada: Unequal Injustice.
Alcohol Costs Canadian Health Almost 100 Times As Much As Marijuana.
Tobacco: Almost 200 As Much – Article and Editorial

In any case, tobacco contains nicotine, which is very toxic and marijuana does
not. Nicotine is a powerful vasoconstrictor that causes problems throughout the body,
quite unrelated to the smoke. Moreover, according to a NIDA researcher tobacco is the most
addictive drug, while marijuana ranks with or below caffeine.)
See
The Relative
Addictiveness of Drugs According to NIDA’s Own Researcher

President Bartlet’s policy team should also take a harder look at the real
impact of legalizing drugs. Each year drug use costs the U.S. 52,000
drug-related deaths and roughly $110 billion in additional societal costs.
(MarijuanaNews note: Both of these numbers are phony. McCaffrey
keeps using the 52,000 deaths, but according to a report released March 9th by The Robert
Wood Johnson Foundation, a major backer of the Partnership for A Drug-Free America,
roughly 430,700 deaths each year are attributed to tobacco abuse. More than 100,000 deaths
are caused by alcohol abuse, and notice that McCaffrey never mentions alcohol. Meanwhile,
illicit drug use causes less than 16,000 deaths each year.)
See
Documentation on
McCaffrey’s Lies By Kevin Zeese
and
And The Czar Keeps Lying About His Own
Report.

Legalizing drugs would compound this suffering. One of the main reasons why the
majority of young people never try drugs is societal disapproval. Legalizing
drugs would make drug use an accepted behavior and, inevitably, more young people would
use them. More people using drugs would mean more addicts, more traffic fatalities,
more human and economic costs.
(MarijuanaNews note: This line is the reason that he has to lie
about the Dutch. In fact, his lies about the Dutch should disqualify him from ever being
taken seriously again, but that clearly did not matter to the LA Times.)
See
The Failure of U.S. Drug Policy –
What a Prominent Dutch Anti-Prohibitionist Thinks His Prime Minister Should Say To
Clinton.

Nor would legalization cut crime. The average drug criminal isn’t waging a turf war over
black market territory or shooting it out with the police. Most drug-related crime is
committed by addicts to get money to buy drugs–the vast majority of drug users rely to
some degree on illicit money to support their addiction. Legalization would only increase
the number of people robbing, stealing and prostituting themselves for drug cash.
(MarijuanaNews note: Excuse me, but how many people are robbing to
get money for alcohol and tobacco, which are highly addictive? The Swiss have found that
crime by addicts falls sharply when they get free heroin. However, even if it were sold at
a standard mark-up it would still be so cheap that very little money would be required. Of
course, none of this has any relevance to marijuana.)

Shows like “Sports Night,” “Dawson’s Creek,” “ER” and
“Third Watch”–some with the sponsorship of the Office of National Drug Control
Policy–have done accurate portrayals of the devastating impact of drug use on people,
families and friends.
See
Czar Defends Payola. Can Anyone Defend His
Lying?

However, when the entertainment industry takes dramatic license with the facts
about drug use, it has a real impact. Children see drugs as less risky. Parents grow less
concerned and talk to their children less frequently about the dangers of drug use. Public
support diminishes for the men and women of law enforcement who safeguard our families.
Policymakers are less inclined to do what’s necessary to fight drugs.

Walking away in disgust from the realities of drug use can add drama to a movie or a TV
script, but in the real world it is plain irresponsible.
(MarijuanaNews note: Irresponsible is too mild a word for McCaffrey,
but the editors of the LA Times should look it up.)