Put it in perspective.

In a recent International Business Times article, the author poses the question: “Are Journalists Too Soft On Pot?” Let me clear this up for you right now. No.

If you want evidence of this, search the word “marijuana” in Google News. What you will likely find is a study that says weed is doing something good for people, an article or two about states that are considering legalizing and then a slew of stories about how organized crime is connected to marijuana.

Now, obviously the crime stories are tied in with the fact marijuana is still illegal on the federal level, but let’s not pretend the media is ignoring the negative connotations around marijuana.

The author of the article speaks with Kevin Sabet, a crazed War on Drugs byproduct and a “professional anti-pot propagandist,” you might say. One of Sabet’s arguments is that when marijuana use among kids between 12 and 17 went up in states that have legalized, none of the media reported it as a negative trend.

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Sabet is right that Colorado went from 11.16 percent in that age group having smoked in the past month in the 2012–2013 survey to 12.56 percent in 2013–2014, but this is a very small change. Washington went up less than a quarter of a percent, and Oregon went up by around half a percent.

This is such a small change, and it misses a major point. As the Washington Post noted, alcohol and hard drug use went down in that age range during the same time. That’s good and could be tied to marijuana replacing those substances. No one is advocating for teens to smoke more marijuana, but it’s naive to assume some of them aren’t going to experiment around those ages.

Teen use also decreased overall if you look at the nation as a whole. Furthermore, the states that legalized already had above average teen use to begin with, so marijuana use is obviously more prevalent there. That’s probably why they were able to legalize it.

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The communications director of the Marijuana Policy Project may have responded to the premise of the article the best:

“You are framing your story around the question of whether the media is ‘going too light on the movement,’ which inherently suggests you are going too hard on the movement,” Mason Tvert told the author. “An unbiased story would be about whether the media is covering the issue and the movement accurately. We are still in a situation in which the marijuana-policy-reform movement has to prove everything and constantly defend itself, whereas opponents are generally taken at their word.”

Another thing the article points out is that NORML’s list of editorial boards that are anti-marijuana has gone from around 150 in the 1980s to around 30 or 40 now. However, that doesn’t mean over 100 outlets are now pro-marijuana, it just means they’re not obviously against it anymore. It also means there are still a few dozen that are against it.

Certainly you’re more likely to get clicks and support when you run a pro-marijuana story than when you run one against it, because marijuana is popular these days, but respectable journalists don’t tend to not write important stories because they’re going to get some hate mail.

What we have to remember here is that it just seems like the media is covering marijuana softly right now because of how harshly it was treated before. As you can see in my article about how and why marijuana was made illegal, we’ve been dealing with an anti-marijuana media onslaught since the beginning of the 20th century.

“A widow and her four children have been driven insane by eating the Marihuana plant, according to doctors, who say that there is no hope of saving the children’s lives and that the mother will be insane for the rest of her life,” read a New York Times story from 1927.

Not long ago, every time someone tried to argue for the medicinal values of marijuana in the media they were laughed out of town. Only recently have publications started to take that seriously, and they still often write their stories with buckets of skepticism. If it’s not an FDA-approved treatment, it must be hippie shit, right?

Is the media too soft on marijuana? Hell no. It just seems that way because the media isn’t spewing propaganda written by Ronald and Nancy Reagan anymore.