The cause of Reefer Madness V2? (and no, it’s not skunk)

A quick update on the previous blog “Complaint to the PCC re The Daily Mail October 30th – Update of sorts“: The Press Complaints Commission has now started investigating my complaint regarding the outrageous reporting of a study from Bristol university that the, paper claimed, proved cannabis caused psychosis. The study proved no such thing of course and didn’t even use cannabis, or people. So with luck the Daily Mail will soon be hauled over the coals. Well, we can hope.

On CLEAR we have an impressive archive of PCC complaints is starting to build up and a quick glance at the growing list shows the Daily Mail is no stranger to misreporting the cannabis issue. Since the CLEAR PCC campaign began at the start of this year there have been a total of 40 complaints of which 19 – almost half – have been against the Daily Mail or the Mail on Sunday. Now this doesn’t represent some kind of vendetta on behalf of either myself or Peter Reynolds, simply the Daily Mail frequently breaches the PCC guidelines which stipulate the press should take care not to publish distorted or misleading information. Fact is, it’s not that the Daily Mail is sloppy and just fails to take due care an attention, it’s pretty clear that it fabricated a lot of its stories and deliberately prints distorted and misleading information.

Now the thing is given its reputation I don’t expect the claim that the Daily Mail deliberately publishes distorted and misleading information to come as a great surprise to that many people, it is not, shall we say, an earth-shaking revelation. However, the fact that politicians take the opinion of the Daily Mail seriously is not in doubt and that a publication which has so much influence uses this power to promote policies based on lies is deeply worrying.

So perhaps it’s time to recap a little and take a quick look at what the Daily Mail has been doing over the past few years. It is not much of an exaggeration to claim that the whole “reefer madness” hype – or at any rate a large part of it – can be placed at the door of the Daily Mail. Again, this isn’t exactly news, but the way it’s been done and indeed the extent it’s been done is a real eye opener.

Before we go any further though a couple of health warnings: First, the Daily Mail isn’t alone in spreading hype, far from it. Much of the gutter press has joined in to promote the great “skunk scare” and all the rest of the alarmist claims that support reefer madness V2. Indeed it’s not only been the tabloids with even the quality end of the market joining in lead, of course, by the Independent of Sunday. Secondly it is important to note that the Daily Mail has, on occasion, run factual and honest stories relating to cannabis and even to cannabis law reform. Perhaps most notably the paper failed to join in the hype created by Julie Myerson in early 2009 – this was one of those “skunk took my child away” claims from a self-publicist with good press connections which most of the tabloids swallowed hook line and sinker. The way the Mail reported this whole affair was a shining example of a jewel in the mud, but it was a rare example of such reporting.

So it was that I sat down on a quiet day last week and entered “cannabis” into the Daily Mail search and ploughed through the 3000 + results looking for reefer madness articles to salvage. Some hours later, foaming slightly at the mouth the job was done and the list can be seen here in The Daily Mail Reefer Madness Archive.

Several things become obvious from this list. The list starts at 2001, which is when the internet age arrived and these things all become searchable. Back then the cannabis issue was being reported in a reasonably factual – verging on supporting – sort of way. In the whole of 2001 only one vaguely reefer madness story was run: “Cannabis can cause insanity, scientists warn“

Professor Heather Ashton, from the University of Newcastle, said cannabis contains between 450 and 500 different substances and the smoke from a cannabis cigarette is more likely to cause cancer than an ordinary tobacco cigarette.

‘Cannabis affects almost every body system,’ she said. ‘It combines many of the properties of alcohol, tranquillisers, opiates and hallucinogens.’