Archive for the ‘The Media’ Category
“Cannabis Should Be Sold In Shops Alongside Beer And Cigarettes, Doctors’ Journal Says” – The Daily Telegraph, 11th October 2010
Yes, this is The Daily Telegraph here. Yes, this concerns an article published in the BMJ here.
There are distinct signs of sanity on the horizon. Is it money driving this new reality because we waste £19 billion per annum on the “war on drugs”? Or is it that Proposition 19 in California and the clash between UK and European law over medicinal cannabis is revealing the absurdity of prohibition?
Cannabis should be sold in shops alongside beer and cigarettes, doctors’ journal says
An editorial in the British Medical Journal suggested that the sale of cannabis should be licensed like alcohol because banning it had not worked.
Banning cannabis had increased drug-related violence because enforcement made “the illicit market a richer prize for criminal groups to fight over”.
An 18-fold increase in the anti-drugs budget in the US to $18billion between 1981 and 2002 had failed to stem the market for the drug.
In fact cannabis related drugs arrests in the US increased from 350,000 in 1990 to more than 800,000 a year by 2006, with seizures quintupling to 1.1million kilogrammes.
The editorial, written by Professor Robin Room of Melbourne University, said: “In some places, state controlled instruments – such as licensing regimes, inspectors, and sales outlets run by the Government – are still in place for alcohol and these could be extended to cover cannabis.”
Prof Room suggested that state-run off licences from Canada and some Nordic countries could provide “workable and well controlled retail outlets for cannabis”.
Prof Room suggested the current ban on cannabis could come to alcohol prohibition, which was adopted by 11 countries between 1914 and 1920.
Eventually it was replaced with “restrictive regulatory regimes, which restrained alcohol consumption and problems related to alcohol until these constraints were eroded by the neo-liberal free market ideologies of recent decades”.
The editorial concluded: “The challenge for researchers and policy analysts now is to flesh out the details of effective regulatory regimes, as was done at the brink of repeal of US alcohol prohibition.”
Campaigners criticised the editorial. Mary Brett, a retired biology teacher, said: “The whole truth about the damaging effects of cannabis, especially to our children with their still-developing brains, has never been properly publicised.
“The message received by children were it to be legalised would be, ‘It can’t be too bad or the Government wouldn’t have done this’.
“I know – I taught biology to teenage boys for 30 years. So usage will inevitably go up – it always does when laws are relaxed.
“Why add to the misery caused by our existing two legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco?”
Earlier this year, Fiona Godlee, an editor of the Journal, which is run by the British Medical Association, endorsed an article by Steve Rolles, head of research at Transform, the drugs foundation, which called for an end to the war on drugs and its replacement by a legal system of regulation.
Dr Godlee said: “Rolles calls on us to envisage an alternative to the hopelessly failed war on drugs. He says, and I agree, that we must regulate drug use, not criminalise it.”
Rebecca
Someone, I can’t remember who, taunted me to write about The X Factor, so here I am.
I wish I’d done it before because we’re all in the “I told you so” business and it’s true, I promise, I’m hardly an ITV dot com type but I was looking up Rebecca last week. She has a rare authenticity that moves me and I believe in.
I think she’ll go far.
Norman Wisdom
1915 - 2010
A huge talent, born of a different age yet able to touch anyone, of any age, with humour and honesty.
This is a man who will be sadly missed.
The Pope’s £838,000 Spin Doctor
Monsignor Media
It isn’t even the Pope paying his salary. It’s the British public. It isn’t even his air time he’s giving away. It’s the British public’s.
The BBC’s Absurd Level Of Coverage Of The Pope
This has been another grave error of judgment by the BBC.
According to the 2001 census there are 4.2 million Catholics in the UK. According to the 2005 Church census, just 887,000 are regular worshippers. Does this justify the absurd level of wall to wall coverage we have had to endure over the last four days?
It looks totally disproportionate to me. More like some sort of subversive attempt by religious zealots to impose their superstitious beliefs on the rest of us.
If any other group can prove nearly a million regular supporters in the UK will the BBC guarantee equivalent coverage?
With 96 straight hours of guaranteed airtime, whoever you are, whatever your “act”, you’ll easily be able to fill Hyde Park and venues all over the country. You’ll make a fortune!
Spectacular Spectator Drivel On Cannabis
Melanie Phillips
A Zionist, Labour supporting, Daily Mail journalist – it’s hardly a good start is it? I should have known better than even to start reading her article in The Spectator.
This woman is a dangerous liar and propagandist. Astonishingly, with breathtaking hypocrisy in promoting the most dangerous of drugs, The Spectator describes itself as “Champagne for the brain”.
Here is her article, reproduced without kind permission of The Spectator and my letter to the editor in response.
Yesterday morning, BBC Radio Four’s Today programme broadcast an interview with a professor of neuropharmacology, Roger Pertwee. Prof Pertwee was making an eyebrow-raising suggestion – that cannabis use should be licensed. His argument was as incoherent as it was irresponsible. He maintained, repeatedly, that all he wanted to do was to reduce the harm done by cannabis – from dangers which he appeared to define merely as smoking an adulterated form of the drug, or getting lung cancer from smoking it. So he wanted to restrict it to people whom it ‘wouldn’t harm’. They would use it in other ways than smoking it, so they wouldn’t get cancer. They would go along to their GP who would pronounce them fit enough to use it.
Hello?!?
What about the harm that we know is done by cannabis itself to the brain — to cognition, to memory, to motivation, to personality? What about the tremendous increase in psychosis caused by cannabis use? What about the harm it does to other people in the user’s ambit?
Yes, said Prof Pertwee, indeed, his scheme wouldn’t reduce the harm done by cannabis itself.
What about all those millions more young people who would start using the drug and become addicted and do themselves and other people all that harm?
Yes, stammered Prof Pertwee, that would indeed be an enormous problem with his scheme. But all he wanted to do was, er, to reduce the harm. And when he’d chased his own tail round that pointless circle a few times, he fell back on ‘all I want to do is stimulate discussion’.
In short, it was a stupid and dangerous idea which even in its own terms made no sense whatever. Why on earth was this professor of neuropharmacology spouting such self-evident drivel on the BBC that even he himself had to keep demurring at his own argument?
What the BBC didn’t tell us was that Prof Pertwee was not some dispassionate expert who just happened to breeze into the studio with a cockeyed idea about turning GPs into cannabis pushers.
Prof Pertwee is Director of Pharmacology of GW Pharmaceuticals – which has a special Home Office licence to market a cannabinoid medicine called Sativex which is used to treat certain medical conditions.
His embargoed press release even said of his proposal:
‘I think this might be the way forward, but it might not work… It depends on a private company being willing to produce a branded product’.
But it’s his own company which is best placed to do just that! In other words, the Today programme – as a result of its own lazy and frivolous bias in favour of drug legalisation, which presumably meant it didn’t do due diligence in researching its interviewee because he had the Correct Opinion on drug policy – was played for a sucker by Big Pharma. It was used to give prime air-time to a piece of commercial advocacy which was passed off as a neutral policy discussion. Except that the product being promoted here wasn’t soap powder, but a drug that enslaves.
Who needs cannabis when the Beeb is so dopey already?
—– Original Message —–
From: Peter Reynolds
To: letters@spectator.co.uk
Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2010 11:20 AM
Subject: Melanie Phillips, The Dopey Beeb, 15th September 2010
Dear Sir,
The disgraceful display of ignorance and propaganda about cannabis by Melanie Phillips cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged.
Her biogtry plumbs new depths of scandalous nonsense.
In the 1930s they used to say that cannabis makes white women promiscuous with black men. Ms Phillips continues on this shameful path of crass misinformation. She needs to do some research before inflicting her ignorance on readers any further.
I agree that Professor Pertwee was incoherent but he is an academic, not a professional communicator. At least he was dispensing facts. Ms Phillips’ diatribe was, to say the very least, economical with the truth.
Cannabis does not harm the brain or damage cognition, memory, motivation or personality – at least no more than breathing oxygen does and a whole lot less than any other recreational drug. The phrase “tremendous increase in psychosis” is just a bare-faced lie and that it harms “other people in the user’s ambit” is the very worst sort of journalistic hogwash.
By all means, Ms Phillips, wallow in your own deluded opinion but don’t use your position to spead such wicked, dangerous nonsense. You should be ashamed of yourself!
Authoritarian scaremongers, political cowards and cheap scandal-seeking journalists have been urging scientists to prove that cannabis is harmful for well over 100 years. They haven’t succeeded yet. On the contrary, all the latest research proves that cannabis is a remarkably benign substance yet with some extraordinary medicinal properties. The endocannabinoid system, which was only discovered in 1998 is now known to be fundamental to life and good health. The only source of cannabinoids outside the body is the cannabis plant.
I used to have time for Melanie Phillips and some degree of respect for her opinion. I see now that she is just the same as any tabloid hack who cares not one jot for the truth, merely for cheap sensation and worthless rhetoric.
Yours sincerely,
Peter Reynolds
Get This Man Out Of My Country NOW!
Pointless Pompous Pontification
He is a monster, a walking, talking blasphemy and perversion of the whole idea of God.
He is not welcome.
He is not wanted.
Throw him out and kick him in the backside so that he sprawls in the gutter as he goes.
Is Prof Pertwee A Home Office Plant?
Is He A Plant?
As they say, with friends like these, who needs enemies?
Is It A Professor?
Seriously, or not so seriously, who is this bumbling old duffer wheeled out by the BBC for some terribly weak story that cannabis sales should be licensed? See here. If the BBC wants to cover this story there are at least a dozen far more expert, more eloquent, more telegenic, better informed, more sensible commentators.
Frankly, I’d rather have someone who can put a coherent argument against instead of this pathetic performance by Prof Pertwee. Seldom have I seen any argument for any idea advanced so weakly. I mean, who starts off talking about their proposal by saying “I don’t think it would work”!
It does raise the suspicion that the only people that want the cannabis argument put so badly is the Home Office. There is, quite literally, no other organisation, connected with a democratic government anywhere in the civilised world that is so backwards, regressive and out of touch with the facts than the UK Home Office. A cannabis plant would have been a more exciting interviewee than Prof Pertwee. He must surely be a plant for what Prof. Les Iversen, the government’s most senior official drugs adviser calls “the anti-cannabis brigade”.
Maybe this is a sign that common sense has got the Home Office on the run. Its tired, inaccurate, unscientific, prejudiced and short sighted attitude is on its very last legs. This is either an embarrassingly bad effort by Prof Pertwee (thanks for trying) or a desperate attempt to discredit the truth.
The fact is that the argument has already been won. I’d like to know what the “harms” are that the Professor was talking about in his interview. There’s the tired old chitchat about mental health problems. It’s just propaganda. In Israel, cannabis is now recommended by doctors to help veterans deal with PTSD. This is fact, reality, what’s actually happening, not what James Brokenshire and his cronies dream up in some bunker in Marsham Street.
I see that the story is also running in the Daily Mail. It’s remarkable how even it, the home of hysteria, has changed its attitude on cannabis in the last year or so. This is perhaps a better barometer of public opinion than anything else. When the Daily Mail starts talking common sense it must be very obvious indeed!
Even the FT is running the story. Who knows maybe it will develop into something a bit more sensible. The BBC just did a particularly bad job of covering it!
I do like Prof Pertwee’s recommendation of the Volcano vapouriser though. I concur with the Professor on this. I can tell you that after extensive personal testing I have concluded that it works very well indeed!
Vauxhall’s Ad With The X Factor
As an adman, I have to say I love the new Vauxhall commercial, the one for the lifetime warranty. I can see how it’s spot on brief, catching the zeitgeist, truly the first of a new generation of advertising with a different type of offer. It’s designed for these just coming out of recession, hovering on the edge of double dip times. It’s great.
It achieves excellence by obeying the good, old fashioned rules of good old fashioned writing. It attracts your attention, inspires your interest, builds desire for the payoff and creates action at the end. Old fashioned principles with leading edge delivery. That’s advertising at its very best.
I’ll give you an example of the opposite. The X Factor is becoming like Fox News, utterly carried away on its own hype and insensitive to its audience. It knows how to pull my heartstrings and invoke my tear ducts almost at will but as it goes into its own advertising and promotion between the commercial breaks, it loses me. I wander. I write or I go into the other room. When I come back it’s telling me what’s coming up “after the break”. This is insane. I feel cheated, used and abused. I feel that I’m being toyed with and exploited.
In another echo of so many over-inflated advertising egos of the past, I laughed out loud when I saw the double page spread in The Times for Christine and Adrian’s new breakfast show “Daybreak”. This is an utter waste of money. Double page spreads are the creative team’s favourites because there are their words and pictures up in lights, like a poster, unsullied by editorial or other content. They’re the account man’s favourite too because they make for an excellent presentation and impress the client easily. Watch how readers behave. The page gets turned in double quick time. And in The Times? What objective is being achieved for ITV’s marketing strategy? Are readers of The Times part of Daybreak’s target audience? If this is aimed at potential advertisers it is an extraordinarily expensive way of reaching them.
Countless millions are wasted based on the petty pretensions of marketing directors or their advertising agencies. Similar egotistical spendthrifts inhabit TV production. Occasionally though, particularly in Britain, you see beautifully crafted and intelligently written masterpieces of communication. The new Vauxhall ad is one of these.
Home Office Backtracks On Cannabis – Part 2
See the original article here.
The Home Office has been denying to me all week that it had changed its story. It claimed that it had said “Drugs such as heroin, cocaine and cannabis are extremely harmful and can cause misery to communities across the country.” It claimed that cannabis was never included in this statement.
Today it finally owned up. It issued this statement at 5.18pm this evening:
A Home Office spokesperson said:
“There is clear evidence that drugs such as heroin and cocaine are extremely harmful substances.
“There is also clear evidence that cannabis is a harmful drug which can cause both physical and psychological problems. Even the occasional use of cannabis can be dangerous for people with diseases of the circulatory system, and it can contribute to heart disease and lung cancer.
“In this instance there was a drafting error with the original version of this statement, which was subsequently rectified.”
Does It Look Dangerous To You?
Now, I understand and respect the professional efforts of the Home Office PRs to damp down this story. It just doesn’t wash though does it?
Why did it take nearly two weeks to correct this error?
Why did they try to cover up the error in the first place?
All this from a government department that emphasises how important are its “health and education messages” and that it must not send “the wrong message – to young people in particular.”
Of course, the truth is that the Home Office sends inaccurate and misleading messages about drugs all the time. Everyone, except the Home Office ministers and mandarins, agrees that the present drug classification system is nonsense, that it amounts to nothing less than misinformation. In fact, the Home Office is currently less than seven days away from a judicial review of its political manipulation of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. The Drug Equality Alliance co-founder, Casey Hardison, has taken it upon himself to challenge the Home Secretary and the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) in the Administrative Court for its irrational, unfair, and possibly illegal exclusion of alcohol and tobacco from control under the Act.
Even David Cameron agrees that ecstasy should not be a class A drug – see here. The debacle and embarrassing nonsense about the ever-changing classification of cannabis destroyed Alan Johnson’s integrity for good. Young people have been watching the government’s “messages” for years, comparing them to their own experiences and realising that the government talks rot when it comes to drugs. The Home Office is inconsistent, unreliable, contradictory and nothing short of dangerous when it comes to messages about drugs – as they’ve just proved, yet again.
As for the revised statement, there is evidence to show that smoking cannabis can cause the same damage to the cardiovascular system as smoking tobacco, but no one smokes anywhere near the same amount of cannabis as they do tobacco – they’d be asleep! In fact, the very latest research shows that cannabis has an extraordinary protective effect for tobacco smokers and may actually reduce the likelihood of lung cancer. Other recent research has also shown cannabinoids to have remarkable effects in shrinking brain, head, neck and breast cancers.
The Home Office is so far out of date it’s difficult to believe. It still talks sensationally about the dangers of “new stronger strains of cannabis known as skunk”. The truth is that skunk has been the predominant type of cannabis available in the UK for more than 20 years. That’s how up to date the Home Office is. Finally, the “psychological problems” story. Sure, any psychoactive substance has the potential for harm but increasingly there’s evidence to show cannabinoids actually have an anti-psychotic effect. One of the most useful applications of medicinal cannabis is in the treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
To those who don’t already know the facts, I say simply google your questions. Even the Home Office, much as it might try, has not yet found a way of silencing the truth.
Peter Reynolds 
