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Title: Message
maybe
the teen drug use scene is linked to hopelessness do be able to change the
direction of things.
Hi all, (if anyone cares, please excuse the
cross post)-
The recent admission by US Drug Czar John
P. Walters that the ONDCP
Anti-Drug Media Campaign has been a complete
failure, perhaps even leading
US youth on to use even more marijuana, (as
though that's a minus-lol) yet
wants still more US tax money to throw away
on the very same, but enhanced,
propaganda program, should make clear just
how dogmatic these prohibitionist
drug warriors are, and how utterly
without reason or logic their entire War
is.
The
following is a letter sent me by the intrepid reporter Daniel
Forbes, who
initially broke the story of surreptitious insertions of
government
anti-drug propaganda into popular television programming, as well
as into
news articles, followed by a piece by Cynthia Cotts of the
Village
Voice.
Peace,
Preston Peet
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Editor in
Chief http://www.drugwar.com
Cont.
High Times mag/.com
--------------------------------
The beat goes
on, here in New York's The Village Voice. Gotta weigh in on
this myself
soon. For the links Ms. Cotts provides here, including to my
article
proving the fundamental political genesis of the White
House/Partnership's
taxpayer-funded media campaign:
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1057/a07.html
go to her article on The
VV's site: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0221/cotts.php
Her
piece includes a link to her 1992 article on the Partnership's (legal)
drug
industry funding.
Regards,
Dan
Forbes
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Press Clips
by Cynthia
Cotts
Here's a Downer Story for the Media
Don't Do Drug
Ads
ost people already know that anti-drug ads won't stop kids from
getting
high. But The Wall Street Journal saw the news value on May 14 when
U.S.
drug czar John Walters announced a survey that shows the
government's
anti-drug ads have completely failed to slow down teen drug
use. Over the
past five years, the feds spent $929 million to spread the
message, and what
did they get? A quarter of high school seniors still use
illegal drugs, and
after seeing the ads, some 13-year-old girls started
smoking pot. This is a
big story, one of many recent signs that the drug
war is a failure. (To be
fair, Walters thinks the answer is to spend more
money on scarier ads, like
the ones linking teen drug use with terrorism.
"Drugs are bad for you," he
likes to say. "Drugs are bad for your
country.")
On May 15, ABC, CNN, and NPR reported on Walters's claim,
and an A.P. story
landed in a few papers, including the Daily News. But the
drug news was
snuffed out, even before we learned that Bush heard early
hijack warnings.
If you only read The New York Times or The Washington
Post, you would have
missed it altogether.
So why did the Times and
Post consider this a nonstory? Is it because the
Journal is a competitor,
and editors are loath to publicize their rivals'
scoops? Or could their
silence reflect a deeper conflict of interest? When
the government started
paying the media to run anti-drug ads in 1998, both
the Times and the Post
participated eagerly in the campaign, running the
anti-drug propaganda ad
nauseam and receiving thousands of dollars of
financial credit from the
government in return. On its Web site, the drug
czar's office still boasts
of working with the Times to produce anti-drug
curriculum guides. Could
they be too close for comfort?
Lo and behold, all such conspiracy
theories appear to be unfounded! A
spokesperson for The Washington Post
says the company has no current
arrangement to run the anti-drug ads-and it
wouldn't matter if it did,
because the editorial and business sides are run
separately. Post national
editor Michael Abramowitz explains innocently,
"You have a good point. I
heard the reports and thought, Gee, that sounds
kind of interesting. It's
one of those things we ought to have done, but it
just fell through the
cracks. We've been in a very busy news
cycle."
Asked why the Times did not report on the drug ads last week,
Washington
bureau chief Jill Abramson said the story was "definitely on my
radar
screen," adding that it is Times policy not to comment on
editorial
decisions. A Times spokesperson insisted that news and business
"maintain a
rigorous separation. If the business side has received
advertising revenue
from the government, it is unlikely that the editors
are even aware of it,
and they would be justifiably insulted by any
suggestion to the contrary."
Newspaper execs did not cook up this scam.
It was thrust on them by the
Partnership for a Drug-Free America, a
nonprofit group that persuaded the
government to spend a billion dollars on
anti-drug ads and that is now
spinning to cover up the alleged failure. (In
a statement posted on its Web
site last week and now removed, the
Partnership blames the bureaucracy and
says it warned about problems long
ago.)
Why is the Partnership freaking out? Most media outlets treat
the
patriotic-sounding group like a sacred cow. Even The Wall Street
Journal's
Vanessa O'Connell never explicitly identified the Partnership in
her
article, despite two references to a "nonprofit group" that supplied
the
ads.
Perhaps the Partnership is threatened by New York-based
freelancer Daniel
Forbes, who calls the feds' campaign a "political
construct" and says its
failure "calls the Partnership's whole paradigm
into question." Forbes was
puzzled by the Journal's omission of the
Partnership's name. "If it's
important enough to the story to mention it
twice, why leave your readers in
the dark?" he asks. O'Connell did not
return a call.
Writing for Salon in January 2000, Forbes exposed a
clever scheme used by
the government to encourage newspapers, magazines,
and TV networks to
support the drug war. If a media company agreed to
incorporate anti-drug
messages into its original content, the government
offered financial credit,
thus reducing the amount of advertising a
participating company was required
to provide. The feds were so keen on
crafting the message, Forbes reported,
that some networks submitted their
scripts for advance approval. The
Washington Post later revealed that the
Times, the Post, and USA Today
received $893,000 in financial credits from
the drug czar's office, a/k/a
the Office of National Drug Control
Policy.
I have my own questions about the Partnership's intentions. In
a 1992
article for The Nation, I revealed that the Partnership is a silent
partner
to the legal drug industry, condoning the use of "good" drugs by
targeting
only the "bad" ones. (Partnership ads conspicuously avoid mention
of
tobacco, alcohol, and prescription pills.) At the time, the group
had
accepted $5.4 million from legal drug manufacturers, including alcohol
and
tobacco kings Anheuser-Busch, Philip Morris, and R.J.
Reynolds.
The Partnership has stopped taking tobacco and alcohol money,
but it still
accepts donations from pharmaceutical companies. According to
the group's
1999 annual report, donors include the Bristol-Myers Squibb
Foundation,
Johnson & Johnson, Du Pont, Hoffmann-LaRoche, and the
Pfizer Foundation.
(Message to kids: Marijuana is bad. Codeine, Valium, and
Viagra are good.)
Of course, it's a worthy goal to reduce the dangers
of drug abuse. But given
the hypocrisy that pervades the drug war, it's no
wonder kids don't buy into
it. Indeed, Forbes says the true purpose of the
taxpayer-funded campaign is
not to discourage teen drug abuse, but rather
"to target adult voters and
keep them supportive of the massively expensive
war on drugs. Marijuana is
by far the most-used illegal drug and the drug
most adult voters remember
using. That's why it's the linchpin in the
struggle for opinion."
As evidence, Forbes cites his July 2000 Salon
story, which revealed that the
government decided to pay for the anti-drug
ads in direct response to 1996
referenda in Arizona and California, in
which voters approved the use of
medical marijuana. At a meeting convened
by former drug czar Barry
McCaffrey, drug warriors attributed the success
of the medical marijuana
initiatives to a $2 million ad campaign funded by
George Soros and
colleagues-and vowed to raise the money to fight back.
Partnership execs
lobbied Congress, and a year later, the anti-drug
campaign was born. (The
government and the Partnership have denied a
political motive.)
For more proof that the U.S. drug war isn't working,
just look to Europe. In
March, a British government agency recommended
reducing the criminal
penalties for marijuana possession, because the drug
"is not associated with
major health problems." Portugal, Spain, Italy, and
Luxembourg have recently
decriminalized possession and use of most drugs.
On May 3, The Washington
Post put this news on the front page. How long
before the Times gives us a
similarly honest report on which drug policies
work, and which don't?
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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