Bias and fear: Marijuana, science, and the media
Prohibitionists keep circulating scare stories about marijuana, and people keep believing them.
Lurid tales of insanity and murder were quite effective in the 1930s. Seen now as ridiculous; yet nonetheless, modern tales, equally ridiculous, are widely accepted.
If marijuana actually caused some trouble — health problems, madness, violence, mental deficit, lasting effects after the immediate intoxication — ask yourself: Wouldn’t it be obvious? Tens of millions of people in this country partake of it. The vast majority use it in moderation, and live fulfilling lives as bankers, doctors, and presidents. There are cultures in the world where daily, frequent ingestion of marijuana is the norm. If there was something there, we’d know it.
But as there isn’t, opponents of legalization search for more and more subtle effects. Something. Anything. They’ll make it sound dire, no matter how tiny.
Year after year, their “studies” come out to fool the gullible.
This would be laughable, if these propaganda pieces were not reported so uncritically in the media, and repeated by politicians to justify their cruel policies.
Where to begin, when taking on this problem? Well, bias is a great starting point. That should always be a major red flag. In the U.S., anti-marijuana studies are almost universally funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a federal agency whose goal is to demonize marijuana. They pay the researchers. There’s also cherry picking of data, small sample sizes, poorly designed controls, sloppy statistical methods, confounding variables, and that big bugaboo, correlation vs. causation.
A year or so ago, a big study in the news was one which correlated a heavy adolescent use with lower IQ test scores in later years. It was clearly meant to imply (and headline writers trumpeted): Marijuana harms your brain.
Even a brief deliberation will come up dozens of alternative possibilities: Maybe parents who don’t care if their kids “use heavily” also don’t instill in them a reverence for education? Maybe their socioeconomic group doesn’t excel in taking IQ tests? Maybe if you party too much, you don’t do your homework?
This year’s crisis de jour is Hans Breiter’s alarming study, “Cannabis Use Is Quantitatively Associated with Nucleus Accumbens and Amygdala Abnormalities in Young Adult Recreational Users,” which claims to have found differences in adolescent brain images after marijuana is smoked. Though the word “difference” is often replaced by the more loaded word “abnormality” when prohibitionists want to push their point. The finding has been widely reported. This kind of work is so preliminary that it would never be reported at all in any area of science where there was no political agenda involved.
It is probably too much to expect that people in the media will actually read and ponder the actual journal article they are reporting on, rather than just copying the talking points in the press release handed them by the prohibitionists. But it wouldn’t be hard at all to go to the Internet, look up “brain imaging criticism,” find an article by a real scientist, and call him for a second opinion.
Barring that, the public is just going to need to fall back on their own critical thinking skills.
You know you’re from Northampton if …
Editor’s Note: An online reader had a pretty good addition to the Advocate’s list, “32 Ways to Tell You’re a Real Northamptoner.”
Your phone has been wiretapped …
