Tobacco, Marijuana, Ecstasy and the Media

Northwest Center for Health & Safety
P. O. Box 5853
Portland, OR  97228-5853

In 1964 the Surgeon General, Dr. Luther L. Terry, issued a report stating that cigarette smoking was the primary cause of lung cancer. The 1971 book Cigarette Country, written by Susan Wagner and published by Praeger Publishers, documented how the tobacco industry and the media worked together to discredit the surgeon general's report and keep the public in the dark.  This same phenomenon is going on today with illicit drugs, particularly with marijuana and ecstasy, the two drugs favored by the media.  The following includes excerpts from Ms. Wagner's book as well as from documents obtained from American Lung Association, and Jeanette McDougal of Drug Watch International.

In 1968 Free lance writer Stanley Frank wrote an article for True Magazine entitled "To Smoke or Not to Smoke — that Is Still the Question," which concluded that the "hazards of cigarette smoking may not be so real as we have been led to believe"(1) and that "Statistics alone link cigarettes with lung cancer, a correlation that is not accepted as scientific proof of the cause and effect." He stated further that "...there is absolutely no proof that smoking causes human cancer." (2).

A few months later another article "Cigarette Cancer Link Is Bunk" echoing the exact  same refrain, appeared in the National Inquirer.  This article carried the byline Charles Golden.  In 1968 a curious senator, Warren Magnuson, asked the new Surgeon General, William H. Stewart to take a look at the two articles.  It was discovered that Frank "worked for a public relations firm that had been on retainer to the Tobacco Institute since 1963." Alerted to a possible conspiracy, writer Ronald Kessler of the Wall Street Journal looked into the matter and found that that at least 600,000 copies of the True article had been sent out by a Tobacco Institute PR firm to influential individuals throughout the country, and further, that writer Stanley Frank had authored both articles. (3)

The Federal Trade Commission found that True Editor, Douglas Kennedy, a self-professed heavy smoker who believed that a link between smoking and lung cancer was just propaganda, had worked with a tobacco company PR firm to promote the tobacco industry's views regarding smoking.  The FTC inquiry further found that a tobacco company attorney had supplied Stanley Frank with "the materials used in writing the True article."  In a communication to the attorney,  the PR firm contact wrote "many thanks for your help in development of this meaningful and impressive story for 'our side."  One of the four True editors who reviewed the article thought it was "completely biased...and damn misleading."  He further stated "What's wrong here is that our writer didn't go out like a good reporter and do his legwork and his homework.  The result is the purest trash--dated, biased and without present justification." (4)

Surgeon General Stewart stated that "According to the Public Health Service, the True article conformed to a pattern of attack on former Surgeon General Terry and his advisory committee on smoking and health."  Dr. Terry had stated several years earlier that such attacks "are repetitious and cleverly manipulated in a continuing program to shake public confidence in the [Surgeon General's 1964 tobacco] Report." (5)

This was despite the fact that "...the most common type of lung cancer--bronchogenic or squamos-cell carcinoma--occurs almost entirely among cigarette smokers and rarely in those who have never smoked." (6)

What we see here is a complicity of the media in writing articles supporting a political agenda rather than doing the labor-intensive investigative reporting necessary to provide an unbiased and factual story.

The most glaring example of this today, and an exact parallel, are the articles being written by John Cloud of Time Magazine.  Last February Cloud was one of the plenary presenters at a San Francisco conference promoting Ecstasy.  The "State of Ecstasy" conference was co-hosted  by the Soros-funded Lindesmith Center, directed since its inception by  pro-drug proponent Ethan Nadelmann, and the San Francisco Medical Society.  Cloud stated, "The last thing I want to say is, getting back to the media for one second, the best thing to do, I think, is to, is for organizations like this to be more active as Ethan [Nadelmann] is.  He calls me every couple of months about pitching stories, and about pitching them in a way that recognizes reporters strengths and weaknesses." One can only imagine what "strengths" refers to, but their "weaknesses" undoubtedly includes having an affinity for drugs, abject laziness, and a preference for fiction.

Cloud has recently written another article for Time Magazine titled "This Bud's Not for You," protesting the Drug Enforcement Administration's position against the use of hemp oil in food products. Cannabis hemp is the only variety of hemp - and there are numerous different plants in this category including Manila Hemp, Mexican Hemp, Mauritius hemp, New Zealand hemp, India hemp, sisal, flax and kenaf  - that is smoked for its hallucinogenic properties.  And it is the only one that it is illegal to grow. The bias in this article, coupled with Cloud's ecstasy conference statement, leave little doubt that he went back to the same spigot for this story.

In his State of Ecstasy talk , Cloud grouses,  "The third mistake is, and this is the worst mistake, is to quote law enforcers on science questions [laughter and clapping from audience].  That happens a lot and again, I hate.. I'm not… I'm harping on this because…not because they're competition.  I mean, U.S. News and World Report is a great Magazine and Chitra Ragavan  who wrote that story, and who has done some great work for NPR before, but, you know, she quotes someone saying a DEA… a local DEA official… saying 'It could be worse than cocaine.'  Well, you know, I guess it could be worse than cocaine.  Anything could be.  But, you know, it's a sort of scare tactic quote that she shouldn't have put in her article, basically."

The only "opinions" that Cloud considers valid are those put forth by those who believe drug use is a personal choice, and that drugs should be legalized. He does not recognize the perspective of the legions of those working in prevention, many who have lost children to drugs.  And he has summarily dismissed law enforcement information as "scare tactics. This is not journalism.  At best it is tabloidism.  Is he writing at the behest of the Soros-funded legalization machine?  Someone needs to investigate Cloud the way that tobacco shill Stanley Frank, and anti-D.A.R.E. shill Steven Glass, were investigated, and let the public see what crawled out from under the rock.

The extent of Glass's deliberate and deceitful attacks on D.A.R.E. were suppressed by newspapers from coast to coast.  However, in a letter published in the Washington Times on September 14, 2000, Joyce Nalepka of Drug Free Kids - America's Challenge, revealed what many of us have suspected but had not seen documented.  She wrote:  "In a review of his [Steven Glass] work, The New Republic discovered that at least 27 of his 41 published articles were entirely or partially made up.  This was described by Vanity Fair magazine as 'a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern journalism.'"

The settlement of the suit brought by D.A.R.E. against Glass and The New Republic, included a substantial monetary settlement and required that Glass write a letter of apology. Nalepka quoted from the apology letter in which Glass wrote: "As the articles reflect, I communicated frequently with people and organizations whom I knew to support, and who (in some cases) told me they supported, legalization of illegal drugs and were anti-DARE.  In preparing the articles, I gave credence to what I heard from the anti-DARE people and did not credit the information DARE supplied me....most of which I discounted and was not ever published in the articles.....I further acknowledge that the March 1997 article in The New Republic, which contains many of the same fabrications as are in my March 1998 article for Rolling Stone, played a significant role in attracting the interest of Rolling Stone and its editors." [obviously the editors of Rolling Stone were looking for articles to support the pro-drug bias often seen in their magazine] "In editing the Rolling Stone article, I referred Rolling Stone's fact-checkers to my prior articles in The New Republic, or to sources cited therein."

The last statement above reflects the old axiom that a lie repeated often enough will be believed, especially when it is repeated by the media, and it shows how important it is to actually read the references being used to verify that the information contained in the reference is factual, unbiased and is as implied.

The tobacco-marijuana link

And finally, some illumination on the tobacco company-marijuana connection story that has been alluded to and whispered about since the 1970's.  The one that claims that the tobacco companies have been waiting with bated breath for marijuana to be legalized so that they could be first in line to benefit from this potential cash cow, and that they had already registered trademarks for marijuana cigarettes.

A memo provided by the tobacco document information service of the American Lung Association of Colorado, and Tobacco Documents Online, references a 1976  report prepared for the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corp by Forecasting International, Ltd.  The report can be found online at www.tobaccodocuments.org/bw/548359.html. An excerpt from page 57 (page 67 of 77912-2673 in the archive) of this eye-opening 1976 document reads:

"The use of marijuana today  by 13 million Americans is socially the equivalent of the use of alcohol by some 100 million Americans.  It is the recreational drug; the choice of a significant minority of the population.  The trend in liberalization of drug laws reflects the overall change in our value system.  It also has important implications for the tobacco industry in terms of an alternative product line. "(The tobacco companies) have the land to grow it, the machines to roll it and package it [and] the distribution to market it" (Reference 200.)  In fact, some firms have registered trademarks, which are taken directly from marijuana street jargon.  These tradenames are used currently on little known legal products, but could be switched if and when marijuana is legalized.  Estimates indicate that the market in legalized marijuana might be as high as $10 billion annually...."

And a very tiny article in the October 23, 1998 Orlando Sentinel reports that a memo written in 1972 by a Phillip Morris scientist and made a part of a Mississippi lawsuit against the tobacco industry "…. suggested Kool cigarettes were considered the best 'after marijuana' smoke to maintain a 'high.'"

Of interest at this juncture is the continuing link between big tobacco and those advocating for reintroduction of cannabis hemp.  Gale Glenn, a cannabis hemp activist with the Kentucky Growers Collective, is the wife of Dr. James F. Glenn, who, until 1999, was Chairman of the now "resoundingly denounced" and defunct Council for Tobacco Research, a group funded by the tobacco industry.  It should be remembered that almost all of the marijuana smoked during the 1960's and 1970's was the variety known as "ditchweed" because it often grew in ditches adjacent to rural roads in some states.  It was, in fact, cannabis hemp that escaped to the wilds from the early years of the 1900's when it was being grown for rope instead of dope.