Saturday, July 18, 2009

Times article buys into marijuana addiction based on anecdotal evidence from idiots Sarah Kershaw and Rebecca Cathcart drop a load in the New York Times Fashion and Style section: Marijuana Is Gateway Drug for Two Debates IT was as if she woke up one day and decades of her life had disappeared. Joyce, 52 and a writer in Manhattan [...] "I would come home from work, close my door, have my bong, my food, my music and my dog, and I wouldn't see another person until I went to work the next day," said Joyce [...] "What kind of life is that? I did that for 20 years." [...] Smoking pot, she said, "was a slow form of suicide." What? This is the fault of pot? This sounds like an idiot who had no ambition. The pot wasn't the problem - she still managed to hold down a job and keep her dog alive. She simply made a choice that wasn't in anyway dictated by pot. As one commenter noted: It's not "as if" decades of Joyce's life had disappeared. Those decades have indeed disappeared, plain and simple. All of us who have reached a certain age are familiar with this fact, whether we smoke dope, drink booze, or get high on nothing but pure spring water, and whether we spend our nights listening to music with our pets, parenting and grandparenting children, partying with friends and lovers, or fulfilling vows of prayer and silence as monks. It sounds to me as if Joyce liked her life well enough until, after decades of it, she didn't. It happens all the time. Why blame marijuana? At one point, the article reaches an amazing low with the addition of National Institute of Drug Abuse's Dr. Nora Volkow, who complains that people don't take marijuana addiction seriously enough. With marijuana, "it's going to take some real fatalities for people to pay attention," Dr. Volkow said. "Unfortunately that's the way it goes." Only after the basketball player Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose in 1986, and the crack epidemic began, did the government start a campaign to warn of cocaine's dangers. Marijuana fatalities? What the hell is she talking about? And the nonsense about Len Bias' death leading to something positive? Try learning the true history of the hysteria. This entire Times piece is embarrassing, made only a slightly bit better by the fact that the graphs accompanying the article contradict the thrust of it. 6:34:42 PM | drug policy | Related  | permalink | comment []

Walter Cronkite I'll miss him. I grew up watching Walter, whether he was reporting the news or helping us be a part of the great and terrible moments in history, from the Apollo missions to the tragedies of the day. But he did more than report. He was a classic journalist -- he wanted to really know, so he could do his part to pass on the truth -- not a he-said, he-said political beltway mouthpiece (that dominate network and cable news today), but real journalism. It's no surprise that he was considered the most trusted man in television. Many years later, I got a chance to see a rare interview with Walter on TV. Catherine Crier was talking to him one-on-one on the relatively new Fox News channel. Ironically, he was just getting into talking seriously about the dearth of real reporting today -- how the networks and cable cared only about bottom line to the detriment of the news -- and you could see Crier frantically signaling offstage to let the interview run and not cut to commercial... but he was cut-off mid-sentence for a commercial break, and when they came back he was gone. In his later life, Walter discovered the truth about the drug war, and came out as a passionate reformer, working with Drug Policy Alliance. Here's Allen St. Pierre's recollection, along with Cronkite's "Drug war is a war on families" OpEd from 2004. Walter Cronkite: On America's "Disastrous" War on Drugs Part one: Part two Part three Part four Part five Part six An earlier post of mine about Walter, including the letter he sent me. 10:42:15 AM | drug policy | Related  | permalink | comment []