Tell the truth, Fox News: Cannabis use does not cause violence

The war on marijuana has always been a propaganda war.

A hundred years ago, Americans learned everything they thought they knew about cannabis not from doctors, scientists, patients, scientific journals, or even enthusiasts, but from the newspapers. Specifically, those owned by OG media baron William Randolph Hearst.

On January 31, 1923, millions of Hearst readers from coast to coast woke up to the following headline:

Marijuana Turns Boys into Devils in 30 Days; Hasheesh tempts users to lust for blood

Tons of it comes into this land, the deadly, horrible poison that torments and rends not only the body but also the heart and soul of every man who once becomes a slave to it in one of its cruel and devastating forms… . Marijuana is a shortcut to the insane asylum. Smoke marijuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be just a storehouse of horrible ghosts. Hasheesh makes a killer who kills for the love of killing.

The Hearst reporters backed up their claims with oddly fictional data. His newspapers once reported that it was possible “to grow enough marijuana in one flower box to drive the entire population of the United States insane.”

For those unfamiliar with cannabis: no, it is not possible.

Today’s version of the Hearst machine

Today, the anti-cannabis propaganda campaign is a bit more subtle. But their central theme – that cannabis is responsible for a plague of violent crime – stems straight from the Reefer Madness era.

In recent years, Fox News has evolved into the modern version of the Hearst newspaper empire, with a powerful voice and a penchant for turning fictional fears into national panic.

Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson have been working overtime to link mass shootings to cannabis use. But there is no connection.

Two of the cable network’s top-rated hosts, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, have been working overtime to blame cannabis use as the cause of mass shootings.

Carlson recently included “high-quality, government-recommended weed” among the social ills he blamed for allegedly driving young men to become homicidal. For her part, Ingraham claimed that “there is growing scientific evidence linking increases in violent behavior among young people to regular, sustained cannabis use.”

Spoiler alert: there is no “evidence of assembly”.

Connection points that do not connect

In both cases, Fox News anchors clearly diverted attention from the national gun control debate by offering their viewers an alternative explanation: It’s demon weed. Every minute spent blaming cannabis is a minute not spent in a serious discussion about how easy it is for mentally ill Americans to gain access to semi-automatic guns.

Even the traditionally more respectable members of the right-wing media have begun to stir up fears of an alleged link between cannabis and psychosis. The Wall Street Journal warned its readers with an article entitled Cannabis and the Violent Crime Surge. National Review added Marijuana and Mass Shooters. The New York Times ran a tamer version of the story under the headline: Psychosis, Addiction, Chronic Vomiting: As Weed Gets Stronger, Teens Get Sick.

At best, these articles offer a hodgepodge of logical fallacies, strawman arguments, ad hominem attacks, “expert buying,” and cherry-picking statistics. At worst, they claim without a shred of direct evidence that cannabis has played a central role in horrific killing sprees – reinforcing the most dangerous types of stereotypes.

“Cropaganda” takes root at Fox News

A hallmark of propaganda is that conflicting facts and analyzes are either completely ignored or intentionally misconstrued. For example, none of the above sources mention a comprehensive study by the RAND Institute — released in 2013 by the Federal Agency for National Drug Control Policy (home of the “drug czar”) — that reviewed a decade of data and found flatly that “marijuana use” leads nowhere violent crime.”

And rarely do they take opposing viewpoints.

I had the dubious honor of discussing this topic with Tucker Carlson in front of millions of viewers. The show’s producer invited me in 2019 after I wrote a Leafly article refuting claims made by Carlson and a guest on the air. In our televised confrontation, Carlson gave no indication that he had bothered to read the article, let alone respond to my arguments in it.

Instead, he talked over me and brought out the very topics of conversation I had just carefully debunked.

To paraphrase Jon Stewart, it wasn’t debate, it was theatre.

Which brings us to the final distinguishing feature of propaganda. It is intended to serve as a sort of moral game to further a specific agenda.

In this case, that agenda is the inverse of cannabis legalization.

A crooked perspective, repeated endlessly

It is said that there is nothing more dangerous than someone who has only read one book. And for the modern anti-cannabis wreck crew, this book is unequivocally Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence by Alex Berenson.

Berenson’s book made a big splash in the media in 2019. The author hit the media hard, claiming to have found a previously unreported national outbreak of cannabis-induced psychosis. But then came the setback. People who really know what they’re talking about started interfering. This resistance culminated in a letter signed by 100 scholars and clinicians, calling the book “a polemic based on a profoundly inaccurate misreading of science.” .

“We need to have thoughtful debates about the benefits and risks of marijuana legalization, and those debates should be based on science,” said Sheila Vakharia PhD, policy manager in the Drug Policy Alliance’s Office of Academic Engagement. “Unfortunately, Berenson’s book is the worst kind of misuse of science to advance a political agenda.”

That agenda, which unfortunately was on full display last week in Washington, DC, when Berenson addressed a Senate subcommittee hearing on federal cannabis reform. He was the Republican’s choice of witness witness, despite having no credentials in science, medicine, or criminal justice.

His main qualification, it seems, is his willingness to twist the truth and misrepresent scientific research.

Cannabis legalization is not a “set law”

For the more than 40% of America’s population who live in legal states, it’s tempting to view the right to possess and use cannabis as inalienable. But there is no Supreme Court ruling or federal law that secures such a right. In fact, federal law still considers cannabis a Schedule I drug, making it technically illegal to smoke a joint even for stage 4 cancer patients in California undergoing chemotherapy.

Moreover, as recent history shows, even long-standing laws can be repealed in the blink of an eye.

So while we need not take Alex Berenson or his arguments seriously, we need to take seriously their wider acceptance by the media and the political class. Tell Your Children is not only the title of Berenson’s book, but also the original title of the film Reefer Madness.

This film was released just a year before the passage of the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act, which banned cannabis at the federal level for the first time. People like Berenson do propaganda because it works. It’s up to us to push back.

David Beehive

Veteran cannabis journalist David Bienenstock is the author of How to Smoke Pot (Properly): A Highbrow Guide to Getting High (2016 – Penguin/Random House) and co-host and co-creator of the Great Moments in Weed History podcast with Abdullah and Bean.” Follow him on Twitter @pot_handbook.

View David Bienenstock’s articles

By submitting this form, you are subscribing to Leafly news and promotional emails and agreeing to Leafly’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe from Leafly email communications at any time.