Note: The following article is being web-published by The Media Awareness
Project of DrugSense as an exception to policy and by request. Headline by
MAP. See also the High Times interview with Dan Forbes at:
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n1655.a05.html

Referenced: The Salon special report (in two parts):
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n043/a09.html
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n046.a04.html

Fighting 'Cheech & Chong' Medicine:
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1059/a03.html

Bookmarks: MAP's links to articles by:

Daniel Forbes: http://www.mapinc.org/forbes.htm

Barry McCaffrey: http://www.mapinc.org/mccaffrey.htm

And to ONDCP Media Campaign items: http://www.mapinc.org/campaign.htm

DAN FORBES DETAILS THE BREAKING OF THE ONDCP INCENTIVES STORY

Given the personal nature of White House attacks on my work, some
colleagues advised against any interview with High Times. But, as this essay
explains, when the government dangles a muzzle, call its bluff and talk to
all and sundry -- especially the likes of High Times.

This past January, I was lucky enough to detail in Salon how the White
House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) provided hundreds of
thousands of dollars of financial incentives per TV episode to the
networks, the incentives rewarding government-vetted and, even in some
cases, government-dictated anti-drug scripts. I quoted consultants on the
ONDCP payroll who promulgated specific changes in specific shows at the
government's behest. Then this March, I revealed that the same
financial-credit-for-content paradigm was in place at some of the nation's
most prominent nonfiction magazines as well.

Requesting an interview with ONDCP on the magazines story tipped my hand,
and though the agency refused to speak, it did blunder into action just
before publication, essentially seeking to persuade Salon's editors that
alleged bias on my part, whatever it might be, should prevent me from
writing ever again on drug policy -- or certainly not without a White House
caution flag attached.

I describe my physical encounter with ONDCP assistant director, Robert
Housman in the High Times interview (or rather, his with me). In his letter
to Salon just prior to the magazines story appearing, he informed my
editors that "...your outlet has an affirmative obligation to your readers
to ensure that [my] biases are disclosed so that your readers can weigh
them in making their own decisions.... However, your publication has yet to
require him to make the appropriate disclosures of bias and interest. I
raise the bias issue in particular at this time as I understand that Mr.
Forbes may now be in the process of preparing another missive [sic] about
the [Media] Campaign for Salon. I would consider it the bare minimum of
fairness and objectivity for Salon to make a full review and accounting to
your readers of the concerns I have laid out here before proceeding with
any further reports on the subject."

And ONDCP's evidence? My work had been linked to by a drug policy site, the
Media Awareness Project ( www.mapinc.org ). But MAP had, by then, some 35,000
articles in its database, pretty much everything written on drug policy
published in English around the world. If mere inclusion on MAP is the
standard, then ONDCP director Barry McCaffrey himself is rampantly biased,
with more than two-dozen articles credited to him therein.

Mr. Housman also cited my Senate testimony critiquing some of the more
authoritarian TV shows credited by ONDCP, including the one that required a
patient to submit to a drug test before receiving potentially life-saving
surgery from the best doctor available.

Salon took this tripe, including the attempt at guilt by association in
regard to MAP, for what it was worth and published the story on the
magazines' involvement.

Furious at this White House attempt at censorship, my livelihood under
attack for having my work appear on a web site where many? most? of the
articles actually endorse administration drug policy, I consciously agreed
to the interview with High Times. Contrary to some colleagues' warnings --
thumb my nose at 'em by going to the mother lode. And since their reporter,
Ken Krayeske, researched the heck out of the topic beforehand, it was a
pleasure to talk to him.

In fact, though I'd remained tight-lipped with several reporters
previously, Mr. Krayeseke adroitly got me to spill the beans that might
otherwise have remained bottled up on why, entirely at my own initiative, I
withdrew the story from Mediaweek where I had initially brought it. As I
told Mr. Krayeske, Mediaweek told me, "We want to run this story, but we
don't want to be critical of the government and we don't want to be
critical of the networks...."

Well sure, but given the seriousness of the disclosures I had -- as
reflected by next-day front pages coast-to-coast, ONDCP's immediate though
slight change in policy, a recent award from the Northern California
chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, a nomination from the
Online News Association/Columbia University (the award pending) and invitations from
House and Senate subcommittees to testify -- ain't that kind of like having
a beauty contest where looks don't count?

This was shortly after Twentieth Century Fox withdrew thousands of dollars
in advertising from Mediaweek's sister publication, The Hollywood Reporter,
after the editor expressed her personal distaste -- in an opinion column --
for the violence in the Fox film, "The Fight Club." Sources confirm the
advertising loss, which Fox flatly denies.

Mediaweek's strictures were expressed on a Friday. After stewing over it
all weekend, I withdrew it Monday morning. I approached Rolling Stone, and
in a series of phone calls (guarded on their end, though the freelancer has
to show his cards) learned they were working on the very same story. So the
race was on.

The New Yorker expressed real interest when I contacted them right before
Christmas, but with the holidays and all, could not publish for several
weeks at least. With my call obviously having alerted Rolling Stone, how
to preserve my scoop, one I'd been pursuing on spec for the better part of
a year? Voila: the Internet, and why not start at the top, with Salon.

And the bigger picture? As I was lucky enough to reveal this past summer,
the whole ONDCP Media Campaign sprang from the basest of motives: an
attempt to influence the American electorate in an entirely partisan way.
Detailed in "Fighting 'Cheech & Chong' Medicine" (Gen. McCaffrey's phrase
by the way) in Salon this July, the whole magilla arose to large degree as
a response to the passage of medical marijuana initiatives in California
and Arizona in 1996. The campaign was to help ensure that the other 48
states didn't sanction medical marijuana and perhaps even to roll back the
two referenda that had just passed.

It was engendered at a meeting convened by Gen. McCaffrey nine days after
the '96 election. In attendance were two White House officials, the then
head of the DEA, representatives of the FBI, Justice, HHS, Treasury and
Education, along with state law enforcement personnel and the president of
the private Partnership for a Drug-Free America. As records of the meeting
I obtained indicate, they discussed the need for tax payer-funded propaganda
to thwart potential medical marijuana initiatives in the other 48 states and
perhaps even roll back the two that had passed. As one participant told
me, "The reason for the meeting was to organize the effort for the other 48
states." And with lightning speed by Washington's standards, a $2-billion,
five-year media campaign was born.

Interpret the word "partisan" correctly to include attempts to influence
state ballot initiatives contested in every election since, including this
year's and it's likely that the campaign violates its own enabling
legislation. Nailing it to the wall, one critic told me these were "public
officials on the public payroll in a public facility conspiring to commit
actions to undermine an election." And thus your tax dollars covertly at
work.