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Book charges that news reports usually get things wrong on cannabis coverage |
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Written by Tristin Coffman
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The US mass media regularly misreport stories on cannabis and drug policy, according to a chapter in a new anthology published by Oxford University Press, Pot Politics: Marijuana and the Costs of Prohibition.
Bruce Mirken, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington DC, argues in his essay that media reports on cannabis issues too often omit essential context while failing to ask the questions needed to give the public an accurate picture. This isn’t necessarily a sign of bias, notes Mirken. He writes that the demand for “clear, involving story lines that can be summed up in just a few words ... almost invariably does violence to the subtleties and uncertainties of science.”
Mirken knows something about the reporters of whom he writes, having spent a dozen years as a reporter covering health and social issues for publications such as Men’s Health, AIDS Treatment News and the San Francisco Examiner before joining MPP in 2001
{quotes}Journalists regularly report government reports and claims without bothering to include any critical voices, {/quotes}leaving readers and viewers with no hint that another point of view even exists. This can turn journalists into dupes or unwitting accomplices of officials who seek to marginalize reformers and confuse the consequences of prohibition laws with the effects of cannabis itself.
Pot Politics also features chapters by experts on biology, sociology, religion/ ethics, and even a Harvard economist. The book is edited by Mitch Earleywine, Ph.D. a prominent researcher in psychology and addictions and associate professor of psychology at The University at Albany, State University of New York. His previous book, Understanding Marijuana (Oxford University Press, 2002) is considered a landmark in the field.
With more than 20,000 members and 100,000 e-mail subscribers nationwide, the Marijuana Policy Project is the largest cannabis policy reform organization in the US. MPP believes that the best way to minimize the harm associated with marijuana is to regulate cannabis in a manner similar to alcohol. For more information, please visit http://www.mpp.org. |
Volume Two 
