Archive for the ‘The Media’ Category
Smoking Weed and Watching the West Wing
It’s my new favourite thing
I’ve watched it before, of course but then it was sporadically, just as I managed to catch it. This time, though, I’m going through religously, episode by episode and there are more than 20 episodes in each season.
It’s hypnotic. The characters are wonderful. It’s production values stand up very well for a show that is 20 years old. It has that great appeal of being about real life, real issues and events that I remember clearly but all woven into a gripping fictional narrative. The TV equivalent of a ‘page turner’.
But the thing that has really hit me, assisted by the insight that cannabis facilitates, is that this is a fantasy. A wild, outrageous fantasy that has very little relationship to real life. It portrays politicians and those who work in politics as noble, with great integrity, high ideals, wonderful ambitions, most of all, principled. And this, of course, is nonsense.
It’s taken me more than 40 years working with politicians, mostly in the UK but the last seven or eight in Ireland as well, to finally accept the truth. With a handful of exceptions from the hundreds that I have met, they are sordid, self-serving and worthless. Our political system in the West is a waste of time and resources. It has created terrible wars, injustice and achieved very little. Any good that mankind has achieved is despite politics, not because of it. I see this more clearly now than I ever have before.
Football Bores Me Silly and Until This Week, So Did Gary Lineker
Good for him. His principled and dignified stance totally defeated the disgraceful attacks on him by hard right, authoritarian Conservative MPs and a weak, bullied BBC management compromised by the corrupt Conservative crony, Richard Sharp.
Of course, his tweets were factually accurate. The disgusting language of several Conservative ministers is an exact match for words used by German politicians in the 1930s. Several prominent Holocaust survivors have said the same thing.
The reaction of the increasingly extreme British press is predictable but no less reprehensible. I have voted Conservative for 45 years but the lurch to the hard right and the total incompetence over Brexit has made the party a danger to Britain. It has to go and if it wants to survive it needs to rid itself of the self-serving, bickering fools who are, yes really, letting it descend towards fascism.
I’ll go further than the comparison Lineker made. This useful table shows just how deep into the gutter the Conservative Party has sunk.
Our Streets are Ruled by Violent Drugs Gangsters, Yet Neither Government nor Media will Address our Failed Drugs Policy
Apart from mindless drug war rhetoric, being ‘tough on drugs’, ‘clamping down on dealers’, or. most mindbogglingly-stupid-of-all ‘tackling the scourge of middle-class drug takers’, our so-called ‘leaders’ don’t want to talk about drugs.
Politicians do all they can to avoid the issue. Both BBC and ITV treat the subject of drugs as unacceptable viewing. Reckless use of alcohol is OK but consumers of other drugs are always portrayed as degenerates. Acres of newsprint and hours of TV and radio are devoted to issues such as trans rights, affecting just 0.5% of the population, while 30% of the population consumes prohibited drugs at some time in their lives but we can’t talk about it.
This is the subject that they dare not speak of. Murders, shootings, knife crime, innocent bystanders killed in gang wars, these are almost always driven by criminal drugs markets. It’s not the drugs, it’s the criminal markets through which they are produced and distributed. So while presenters, journalists, MPs and commentators wring their hands in despair, never ever will they discuss why, what can we do about it, how could we do things differently, what would progressive, evidence-based drugs policy look like?
All the Conservatives have been able to come up with is their ‘Swift, Certain, Tough’ idea for harsher punishments including the probably unlawful threat to confiscate passports and driving licences. The word is that the public consultation has delivered almost nothing but withering criticism of the ideas and nobody in the Home Office knows what to do next.
The Labour Party, to its everlasting shame, is just as out-of-touch with the public. Opinion polls show that around half the population supports reform of the law against cannabis and less than a quarter oppose it but baby-faced Wes Streeting is even toying with the idea of prohibiting cigarettes! Keir Starmer, despite his experience as Director of Public Prosecutions, thinks our drug laws are “about right”. He’s way out of step with his learned friends at the bar then, because most of them think our approach to drugs is idiotic, as do most criminal solicitors, court officials and even many judges.
It’s all too difficult for our precious politicians, so they simply ignore it. Our drugs policy continues exactly the same as it has for over 50 years. Drug deaths rise inexorably to record levels. Dealers run rampant throughout our communities, increasingly exploiting children through county lines. Rates of drug consumption are higher than ever.
Cannabis is ubiquitous and the police really can’t be bothered with it unless there’s something else involved or its big time dealing or cultivation. Taking ecstasy on a night out or at a festival is simply normal for most young people and it’s a very good job it’s such a safe drug. Considering it’s completely unregulated, of unknown strength and purity, the death rates are very low, much lower than for over-the-counter painkillers. Millions of tablets are taken every weekend and we get about 50 deaths a year. If the product was properly controlled. with known strength and uncontaminated, probably noone would die at all. It would be as safe as a cup of tea.
Yet consumption of the most dangerous drug of all, alcohol, is celebrated, promoted and politicians use taxpayers’ money to subsides their own consumption of it in Parliament’s bars. They delight in having their photographs taken in drug consumption rooms, otherwise known as pubs but they refuse to allow overdose prevention centres, claiming there is no evidence they work, despite New York’s facilities halting over 700 overdoses in just one year.
This is one of the biggest issues of our time and politicians should, of course, be addressing it. I’m not letting them off the hook but actually I think our broadcasters bear the heaviest responsibility. The press is a caricature of itself on the subject. We can expect nothing serious or balanced from the Daily Mail or the Telegraph and they do rake in £800 million per year in alcohol advertising so perhaps it’s no surprise. But the BBC is letting us down. It is timid to the point of being irresponsible in its lack of coverage and debate. Until the issue is given the prominence it requires, it is easy for politicians to do nothing except tell us how tough they are.
Of course the problem is that any rational investigation of the subject is bound to conclude that legally regulated markets and accessibility based on scientific assessments of harm have to be the answer. While the people are ready for this, our luddite, regressive establishment isn’t.
A Small Victory Against Misleading Reporting on Cannabis in the British Press
The peculiar relationship between drugs policy and evidence in Britain is caused largely by inaccurate, misleading and sensationalist reporting in the press. Our politicians’ inability to deal with this subject, even to engage in serious debate about it, is all about their fear of being dubbed ‘soft on drugs’ by the newspapers.
At last, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) has upheld one of my many complaints about inaccurate reporting. This was a particularly egregious example of distortion and twisting of facts to suit a newspaper’s anti-cannabis agenda.
In January 2021, the Daily Telegraph published an article headlined “’Super skunk’ cannabis led to surge in mental health crisis”. This old trope, that cannabis causes mental illness, is now confined almost exclusively to our corner of North-West Europe. The Irish also suffer under this myth and to a lesser extent, so do Australia and New Zealand but everywhere else in the world a far more balanced and realistic view is taken.
There is no evidence to support it as a direct causal effect, only that it may, in some instances, be one of a number of component factors. Science shows that cigarette smoking and traffic pollution may be far more potent factors, not to say general adolescent angst and many other issues of modern life.
Nevertheless, in Britain, the press and therefore our politicians are obsessed with the idea and regard it as fact. It is this wicked prejudice that for decades has held back access to cannabis as medicine and still does so today. Our most senior clinicians have shown themselves incapable of separating fact from fiction and in a wider context, this myth is probably still the most important factor in holding back general drugs policy reform. Because of politicians’ weakness in the face of newspaper sensationalism, they have enabled a massive £6 billion market to develop under the control of organised crime which now causes enormous harm throughout society.
My complaint read as follows:
“This article asserts that “cannabis has contributed to a record 100,000 people admitted for NHS treatment for drug-related mental health problems”
In fact, in deliberately misleading and sensationalist fashion, figures for primary diagnosis and secondary diagnosis have been combined. Total figure for primary diagnosis in relation to all drugs is 7,027, secondary diagnosis accounts for the other 93,000+ and means that for 90% of these admissions, the primary reason may have been nothing to do with drugs.
The 100,000 figure is clearly associated with cannabis yet the actual figures for cannabis show a decline from 1135 in 2018/19 to 1087 in 2019/20.
It is crystal clear that this presentation of the data is deliberately designed to mislead and sensationalise.”
What has always surprised me in running many of these complaints is the vehemence with which the newspapers have tried to defend what are nothing more than lies. The Daily Telegraph did exactly the same this time, trying to adduce a large volume of irrelevant information that had nothing to do with its inaccurate journalism but was just about pushing its anti-cannabis agenda. As I wrote to IPSO at one stage:
“The Telegraph is entitled to publish as much one-sided, cherry picked evidence as it wishes except that if it does not do so accurately or distorts it to the point that it is misleading, it is in breach of clause 1 of the Editors’ Code.
I have no doubt that the newspaper will continue its current policy until the flood of money into the cannabis sector reaches such a level that it will be acting against its own self-interest. That day is now very close and then the Telegraph will face the challenge of explaining to its readers why it has misled and deceived them for so long.”
So, IPSO has upheld my complaint and its full decision can be seen here. On the face of it, the result will just be another small correction that few people will read. But I hope that the time and money it has cost the Telegraph to deal with this might have some impact in future.
I’ve just heard that the Telegraph has appealed against IPSO’s decision which demonstrates just how keen it is to continue misreporting about cannabis!
If the Mobs on Twitter and Facebook Want to Persecute Someone, Why Don’t They Choose a Deserving Case?
For instance, what about Professor Finbar O’Callaghan, who has prevented children having access to cannabis medicine for epilepsy while making his living running £ multi-million clinical trials of pharmaceutical drugs?
These are the sort of people who should be hunted down and villified, not some weird eccentric who is a behind the scenes political adviser making private decisions about his own family.
Facebook Moderation and Censorship AKA ‘Community Standards’ Going Haywire
It may be automated systems going wrong or it may be another misguided crackdown on legitimate
posts but as usual with Facebook it’s impossible to get any answers, explanation or guidance.
The CLEAR team has run a Facebook page now for 10 years. According to Facebook data it’s the second most ‘liked’ page on cannabis and drugs policy and its ‘engagement’ is usually in the top three of all similar pages worldwide.
We’ve experienced everything crazy that Facebook has thrown us over those 10 years. But in the past few weeks the inexplicable and quite ridiculous censorship has reached new levels.
Over the years, our page has been hijacked three or four times by breaches in Facebook’s (not CLEAR’s) security. On each occasion it has taken up to a month to regain control which has involved endless unanswered messages and emails. Most recently Facebook has required notarised statements and evidence to restore control to our admins even though they have 10 years history on record. On one occasion, whilst the page was out of our control, Facebook took no notice at all of a stream of hardcore porn videos that were posted day after day.
Facebook’s attitude to cannabis and drugs policy is wildly inconsistent. It goes through periods of not taking any notice at all to what’s happening at present, which is where even the most innocuous mentions get sanctioned. Even links to academic, scientific and medical papers or research get removed on the basis that they are ‘promoting drug use’ or even more absurd, ‘selling drugs’.
Today, it has removed one post in which Lisa Quarrell has been told that the NHS will not pay for her son’s medicinal cannabis because she had previously ‘gone private’ to obtain it and it would be an ‘improper use of NHS funds’. It has also removed a post about a designer who has been ordered to pay Starbucks $500,000 because he designed a bong that looks like a Starbucks coffee cup.
Peter Reynolds was recently blocked from posting, first for three days and then for seven days for posting a meme inviting subscriptions to our email newsletter, the CLEAR Daily News. This, apparently, is ‘selling drugs’. We’ve been posting exactly the same meme regularly for over two years with no problem at all.
What’s really worrying is that two long online ‘chats’ with Facebook concierge support (available to advertisers) achieved nothing except for mindless repetition that the post ‘goes against community standards’. These are real people constrained to the role and inteligence of a bot, unable to think or exercise any discretion.
Meanwhile the endless, lunatic, conspiracy theories on vaccines, Bill Gates, 5G, coronavirus, etc. fill up the newsfeed. Reports indicate that child porn, fraudulent scams, misuse of celebrities’ images, terrorist ideology and violence are still not under control.
Facebook is an essential tool for any business, NGO or campaign. You simply have to be on it. It’s a monopoly that is out of control. In reality it seems to have more power over governments and regulators than they have over it. It needs to be broken up. The fact that it is also Instagram and WhatsApp is a ridiculous state of affairs. How have Zuckerberg and his bots been able to get away with this? Their ‘community standards’ or at least the enforcement are clearly an abuse of US constitutional rights and that is the only jurisdiction of which they take any notice.
CLEAR has put many tens of thousands of pounds into Facebook advertising. Pages now have to pay if they want to reach their followers. Before the algorithms changed all our posts would reach thousands of people, sometimes hundreds of thousands. In the last couple of years in many instances that has gone down to single figures. All the time, money and expertise we have invested in Facebook is being wasted. We have been cheated out of it by this out-of-control, arrogant monolith. As of this week our executive committee has stopped all Facebook advertising for good. It’ll make no difference to Facebook of course, until thousands of others do the same thing but we are not going to give them any more of our members’ money.
We will continue to do our best to bring our followers the news in the face of this draconian censorship. All our posts are also on Twitter which is in many ways (not always!) a better and more adult forum but, of course, it’s very unfocused and inflexible. The minute that there is a viable alternative to Facebook, CLEAR will be off. It’s a phenomenon that has run its course. We need more intelligently managed and properly regulated online media to communicate through.
BBC Horizon to Ramp Up Discredited Kings College ‘Skunk Scaremongering’
Dr Marta di Forti. Scientist or Skunk Scaremonger?
Tonight’s BBC Horizon is going to follow the long-established BBC policy of overstating and exaggerating the potential harms of cannabis.
From clips already released it is clear the programme is to promote as gospel truth the hysterical scaremongering and fanciful statistical projections coming from Dr Marta di Forti at King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry. This so-called scientist and her colleagues base all their conclusions on profoundly unscientific methods, false assumptions, bizarre statistical trickery and the misuse of the tabloid term ‘skunk’ as if it actually means something.
This is the way the BBC has always operated – to support the false narrative of the establishment about cannabis, to demonise it, to minimise if not ridicule its medicinal benefits and to cherry pick evidence and biased opinion to support its case.
Anyone with any real knowledge of cannabis who has spent any time properly reseraching the evidence will know that Dr di Forti’s projections and claims are ridiculous. This is a British phenomenom. It occurs nowhere else in the world. Every other nation’s media, scientific and medical community takes a balanced and realistic view and recognises that cannabis is largely benign and for 99% of people, 99% of the time is harmless. Perhaps most instruictive is that virtually nowhere else in the world will you hear the word ‘skunk’ used by real scientists. Originally the name of a specific strain of cannabis it is now merely a scary word used to frighten people and it has no specific or defined meaning. Its use is, in fact, the very opposite of science.
But don’t take my word for it. In a devastating critique of di Forti’s latest 2019 study, read the words of leading scientists from Australia and the Netherlands as they dismantle di Forti’s wild overclaiming and statistical trickery: High-potency cannabis and incident psychosis: correcting the causal assumption
Review. ‘Cannabis Health’ Magazine
This is a milestone in cannabis law reform. A glossy magazine, produced to the highest standard, fit to sit alongside Country Life, Cosmopolitan or Vogue. It treats the subject with intelligence, with insight and the stories it tells are told with respect, sensitivity and common sense.
It would be easy to have made this sensationalist, to have made exaggerated claims, launched strident attacks on those who still oppose consumption of the plant or fallen into the trap of folklore rather than science, magic rather than medicine. The publishers have hit the bullseye with the right tone and style and provided it reaches the right coffee tables, perhaps doctors waiting rooms, it will help to drive reform. Never before have I been moved by a magazine but this represents the achievement of a level of acceptance that sometimes I doubted I would see in my lifetime.
CLEAR was able to contribute to this first issue, introducing our members, Robert Cohen and Marie Emma Smith, whose stories of how cannabis has transformed their lives are beautifully told and I am honoured to have been interviewed as part of a feature on the campaign.
It’s intended to be quarterly but I won’t be surprised if it takes off and becomes monthly before very long. There is a huge reservoir of advertising expenditure which has been stymied by the short-sighted attitude of social media companies. It will be poetic justice if traditional publishing can do well out of the reintroduction of this traditional medicine. A free, one year, postal subscription is available to the first 10,000 people to register by emailing chloe@aspectpublishing.co.uk
There is still a logjam of prejudice and lack of understanding, particularly amongst cowardly politicians and a medical establishment that feels threatened by a subject where patients know more than doctors. ‘Cannabis Health’ wll help to break this down. The sheer weight of public support, enthusiasm and real life experience will soon leave these sceptics desperate to catch up. Get yourself a copy and enjoy quality writing about cannabis published in print rather than online. The world is changing!
‘Cannabis Law is Simply Criminal’. Letter to the Sunday Times, 26th May 2019
The Sunday Times, 26th May 2019
Thank you to the Sunday Times for publishing my letter about cannabis today.
In fact, it was orginally a comment left on this article: ‘CBD products being rated for tax — but still seized’. I received an email asking for my permission to publish it as a letter which clearly I was happy to agree to.
Obviously I accept that letters will be edited but when this is done to alter very substantially the original meaning, questions have to be asked.
Why is the Sunday Times protecting corrupt, senior British politicians from facts which are in the public domain? In the original the last two paragraphs read:
“Our politicians are incompetent, stupid and in some cases brazenly corrupt on this subject and reform is inevitable, although how long it will take remains to be seen.
While Theresa May and the Home Office drugs minister, Victoria Atkins MP, both continue to make personal financial gain from licensed cannabis production, the UK has a steeper hill to climb than Ireland. Corruption at the very top of government is difficult to overcome.”
Dr Who and Rosa Parks
I am that small child who hid behind the sofa from the Daleks. I remember it vividly. I associate it with being allowed to stay up late and having red sauce sandwiches for supper.
But since William Hartnell, no Doctor has ever charmed me. I’ve appreciated the effort and attempted humour in all of them. Some have become iconic, like Tom Baker with his long scarf but none of them ever made the show compulsive viewing for me. In fact as time went on it bored me.
Jodie Whittaker, the first female doctor, is a revelation. It was only on in the background but the writing and her perfomance are spellbinding and it captured me. That elusive humour is achieved, the wit is right on point. It is delightful.
And never has Dr Who moved me so deeply. With an elegant and perfectly judged time travel satire on the Rosa Parks story. The dramatisation that inspired tears to roll down my cheeks with a science fiction wonder, belief suspended, all my entertainment receptors tingling. It was simply the very best of television. Dont miss it, catch up here.
Peter Reynolds 