The Goof Heard ‘Round the World
In case anyone needs proof of the mass media’s tendency to repeat government pronouncements without bothering to check their accuracy, here’s a small but telling example:
Inexplicably, when the U.S. Department of Justice issued a memo last month explaining that it would generally refrain from prosecuting medical marijuana activities that are clearly legal under state law, it mistakenly indicated that there are 14 medical marijuana states. DOJ’s goof was to include Maryland, where medical marijuana is not actually legal, but where state law provides for reduced penalties to patients who successfully present a medical-necessity defense.
DOJ’s goof has now traveled though most of the known universe, repeated by credulous news media. The Associated Press, after talking to MPP, at least included an explanatory note about the discrepancy, but others just repeated the mistake with no explanation, including Katie Couric of CBS, the Washington Post, Voice of America, the Guardian of London, and even the editorial page of the New York Times.
C’mon, guys, tell me that fact-checking isn’t entirely dead. Kudos to those media outlets that got it right, including CNN.
November 16, 2009 13 Comments
The Show Your Friends and Family Must See

“The best gardeners of my generation are not hybridizing roses, are not working with orchids. They are working with this incredibly valuable and incredibly interesting plant called cannabis.”
–Michael Pollan
Before Michael Pollan’s best-selling books about food and the food industry, he wrote a fascinating volume about humanity’s symbiotic relationship with plants, called “The Botany of Desire.” That book is now a PBS special, airing for the first time this week, on October 28 at 8 p.m. If you have friends, family, coworkers, etc., who’ve never thought about our relationship with marijuana beyond the latest hysterical news story, this is the show they need to see. [Read more →]
October 26, 2009 37 Comments
Washington Post: It Just Gets Worse
About the same time as I was posting about the Washington Post’s refusal to run MPP’s response to Charles Lane’s preposterous anti-medical-marijuana diatribe, the Post allowed Lane to strike again, with yet another online column filled with distortions and misstatements. I’m old enough to remember when the Post was a great newspaper. Yesterday I was angry; now I’m just sad.
October 23, 2009 22 Comments
The Column the Washington Post Refused to Run
On Oct. 20, the Washington Post published an inaccurate and arguably libelous anti-medical marijuana diatribe by Charles Lane on its Web site. After a deluge of complaints, the version now posted is cleaned up slightly: shorn of an offensive reference to Supreme Court medical marijuana plaintiff Angel Raich as a hypochondriac and with a feeble “clarification” appended. But it’s still a cascade of distortions and inaccuracies. Since the Post declined to print MPP’s reply, we thought we’d share it with you:
Setting the Record Straight on Medical Marijuana
by
Bruce Mirken and Mike MenoCharles Lane’s column, “Medical marijuana is an insult to our intelligence,” (Oct. 20) was riddled with inaccuracies. Had Mr. Lane bothered to review the medical literature, he would have found not “hokum” and “snake oil,” as he calls it, but a small mountain of published, peer-reviewed research documenting that medical marijuana is a safe, effective, and sometimes even life-saving medication for many seriously ill Americans. [Read more →]
October 22, 2009 25 Comments
Patients in Pain Are Not a Joke
Just two days after the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review proclaimed that the mainstream media are “are acting less childish about pot,” along comes the New York Daily News to prove that childishness is alive and well.

On Wednesday, MPP began airing two new TV ads around New York state in support of medical marijuana legislation. The spots feature real patients talking about the severe pain they suffer every day and how medical marijuana helps them. Amazingly, these serious and sober ads were rejected by three New York City TV stations.
The Daily News found it all quite amusing: “Just say yes! That’s the message a national pro-pot group is taking to New York’s airwaves,” the paper wrote. After quoting me about why we did the campaign, the story concluded, “The city’s ABC, CBS and Fox affiliates harshed the group’s buzz by declining to run the ads, Mirken added.”
Uh, no, I actually didn’t say anything remotely like that. But what I really said wasn’t nearly as cute.
September 17, 2009 42 Comments
Better Late Than Never: Marijuana/Schizophrenia Link Questioned
At least some in the international news media have belatedly discovered a study casting doubt on the purported link between marijuana use and schizophrenia. I say “belatedly” because the study was published online back in June, although the print version came out this month.
A group of British researchers examined a rather basic notion: If marijuana use causes schizophrenia, then a major increase in marijuana use should lead to an increase in schizophrenia diagnoses in the following years. In an enormous sample of some 600,000 Britons, no such thing occurred – indeed, a spike in marijuana use beginning in the mid-1970s was followed by rates of schizophrenia that either remained stable or declined.
Of course this is not the first time that a lack of connection between marijuana use rates and schizophrenia incidence has been noted in the scientific literature. For example, a 2006 review in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry noted that “the treated incidence of schizophrenia did not obviously increase during the 1970s and 1980s when there were substantial increases in cannabis use among young adults in Australia and North America.” (Alas, that rather important discussion isn’t mentioned in the summary linked above, which is all you can get for free).
Overall, the evidence strongly suggests that marijuana may worsen or trigger schizophrenia in a few individuals with a pre-existing vulnerability, but that it is not a significant cause of mental illness in healthy people. That rather nuanced reality tends to be a bit too complicated for many in the media.
September 1, 2009 23 Comments
More Evidence That Marijuana Prevents Cancer
Among the more interesting pieces of news that came out while I was on vacation the first half of August was a new study in the journal Cancer Prevention Research, which found that marijuana smokers have a lower risk of head and neck cancers than people who don’t smoke marijuana. Alas, this important research has been largely ignored by the news media.
While this type of study cannot conclusively prove cause and effect, the combination of this new study and existing research — which for decades has shown that cannabinoids are fairly potent anticancer drugs — raises a significant possibility that marijuana use is in fact protective against certain types of cancer. [Read more →]
August 18, 2009 33 Comments
MPP’s Rob Kampia on Fox Business News Friday
TiVo alert! MPP executive director Rob Kampia will be on the Fox Business News program “Happy Hour” this Friday, July 24, discussing the economics of taxing and regulating marijuana. The show airs from 5 to 6 p.m. Eastern time.
July 23, 2009 45 Comments