THE STREET VALUE OF CANADIAN JOURNALISM ABOUT THE WAR ON DRUGS

After working for five months in four countries preparing a series on
illegal drugs, I think I'm entitled to a little self-indulgence. So bear
with this journalist while he writes about journalism -- specifically, the
media's role in the insanity of drug prohibition.

It's a long and sorry record. Prohibition laws owe their very genesis to
"drug scares" fomented by the media. Maclean's, for one, ran the racist
screeds of Emily Murphy that led directly to legislation in the 1920s.

The crack cocaine hysteria of the 1980s showed that modern journalism is
not so far removed from Murphy's glory days. We exaggerated, invented
facts, ignored evidence, lied and whipped up panic. The legacy of this
shoddy work can be seen in such popular myths about drugs as the "instant
addiction" canard, and in horrific American drug laws. There's a reason why
the U.S. has more people in prison for drug offences than the European
Union has for all crimes combined. The reason is the media.

The recent coverage of the biker war and the shooting of reporter Michel
Auger gives little reason to hope things are improving. True, the media
haven't used the shooting as an excuse for an old-fashioned drug scare. But
we've done something that may be just as dangerous: We've hardly mentioned
drugs at all.

One "analysis" of the gang war called it the result of our "affluence and
complacency." Many long stories about the violence never mention drugs, as
if gangs kill people for kicks. It's like writing about Al Capone's mayhem
in Chicago without using the word "alcohol."

Shallow reporting invites a shallow response. After all, if bikers are
killing people for no reason, all society can do is make war on the gangs,
and accept lost lives and liberties as the price. But if there's an
underlying reason -- say, the trade in illegal drugs -- then we might
consider whether there are other ways to deal with that issue. If the
Charter of Rights is overridden to ban gang membership, media coverage of
the biker war will be partly responsible.

Or consider the announcement earlier this month that police had made two of
the biggest heroin seizures in Canadian history. It was major news. Yet in
none of the coverage I saw did a journalist ask the only question that
matters: Will this cut drug supply enough to significantly reduce drug use?
That's what the whole exercise is nominally about. Shouldn't we ask if it's
accomplishing what it's supposed to? But no one did.

The media are painfully credulous in dealing with the police, far more so
than with any other institution. They give us numbers and we run them, no
questions asked, leading to endless stories of uprooted marijuana plants
that read like Vietnam War body counts -- "143 destroyed in latest
operation" -- and are about as meaningful. Even worse are the "street
value" reports police feed us. A seized field of marijuana, say, will have
a "street value" of $200,000 because that's what you might get if you
harvested, processed, shipped, and sold the marijuana in small portions.
It's like saying a pond in Northern Ontario is worth $1 million because
that's how much it could be worth if it were bottled, shipped and sold at
Lollapalooza. It's a PR ploy to puff up the police success. And we fall for
it time after time.

The media seem blissfully unaware that the police -- like politicians,
corporations and everybody else -- have their own interests and present
things in ways favourable to those interests. That's not a knock against
the police. It is the media who aren't doing their job.

I could go on. The media often take popular wisdom about drugs as fact and
fail to check with experts. We distort reality by delighting in the lurid.
We don't dig for root causes.

Many things will have to change if Canada is ever to have sane drug
policies. Chief among them is journalism.

Another matter. Liberal MP David Kilgour, in response to my series, wrote
that legalization would make drug abuse soar. He ignored my empirical
evidence that it would not, instead resting his claim on a column in the
Citizen by James Q. Wilson. But Mr. Wilson also cited no evidence to
support this view. So Mr. Kilgour's assertion rests only on another
assertion. That is not a credible argument. It is a stack of turtles.

And that is everything you need to know about the case for drug prohibition.