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Get stoked: The MSM Are Acting Less Childish About Pot

The strain of "reefer madness" that's been infecting American
newsrooms since at least 1911 appears to be abating amid some
sobering new economic realities. Salacious stories about cannabis
continue to move newspapers just as briskly now as they did in the
early Twentieth century, when the drug became illegal. But the
fever's changed gears.

"The de facto ban on serious, cogent mainstream media discussion
about the topic has been lifted," says Stephen Gutwillig, State
Policy Director for the Drug Policy Alliance in Washington. "They've
stopped acting like they're in sixth grade. There's less puns and
'scare quotes.' The Wall Street Journal did a front-page story last
week that treated medical marijuana like just another industry story."

Recently, The New York Times ran a classic, "Style" section hit piece
on cannabis, but then followed it up, almost as a mea culpa, with an
extremely insightful and bold "roundtable discussion" with leading
thinkers on the topic. The Economist now stands alongside the
National Review in calling for legalization, and even the staid
Congressional Quarterly Researcher devoted its entire June issue to a
thorough review of the topic.

Watchers say demographic changes (about half of the adult population
born since 1960 has tried the drug by age 21) and the Obama
administration's progressive outlook have combined forces with pure
capital interests and technology to effect a pushback against
traditional law-and-order voices on the issue.

Ryan Grim, author of the history and analysis This Is Your Country on
Drugs and senior congressional correspondent for The Huffington Post,
says winds of change are, indeed, blowing in the opposite way of
historical precedent--not just in the culture at large, but in journalism, too.

"Some people have referred to it as 'the drug war exception' to
journalism: where you're supposed to get both sides of the story, but
for some reason, with drug war reporting it doesn't apply," says
Grim. "It hasn't in the past, but it's starting to change."

Take, for example, the hysterics of Teddy Roosevelt's Opium
Commissioner, Hamilton Wright--whose journalism in the early 1900s
('UNCLE SAM IS THE WORST DRUG FIEND IN THE WORLD,' read one
Wright-inspired New York Times headline in 1911) encouraged the
'reefer madness' that stayed with the country and its journalism
until late in the Twentieth Century.

"They gave [Wright] 5,000 words to spew out this unsupported nonsense
like, 'There is an epidemic upon us!'--things that weren't even
remotely true," Grim says. "And the ironic thing was, the press at
the time was significantly funded by advertising for patent
medicine--opium elixirs and other unregulated stuff--which is now infamous."

According to a Congressional Quarterly Researcher analysis, the 1930s
emerged as the golden era of cannabis prohibition agitprop, with even
The New York Times stating in 1934, "The poisonous weed...maddens the
senses and emaciates the body of the user.... Most crimes of violence
in [the West], especially in the country districts are laid to users
of the drug." The canonical propaganda film Tell Your Children
appeared in 1936. In 1937 Congress passed the Marihuana Tax Act,
effectively prohibiting the drug.

It was the Nixon Administration that gave newspapers the War on Drugs
to fight all-time peak levels of cannabis usage by high schoolers,
which in turn led to the hard line "Drug War" of the '80s. It wasn't
until the '90s that the reform movement--then a generation
old--became professional enough to push back against media
portrayals, says Grim.

"You had NORML in the '70s, but it was more of a theater agitprop,
and not the kind of organization that was sending out press releases
and producing annual reports and generally trying to play within the
confines of the media game," Grim notes. "That definitely has
changed--and it's not surprising that after the movement has started
professionalizing itself, it has been able to get the ear of some
different people."

As a result, information and perspectives about pot's role in
American society are now coming from multiple sources. "People are
now interviewing other medical professionals, cops who are for or
against the war, specialists, the whole variety of voices are in
articles that in the past would have just been totally dominated by
one position," Grim says. And the press have been using data whose
gathering was funded by the Marijuana Policy Project in computing the
possible benefits of legalization.

The Bush administration proved powerless against popularly led
medical cannabis initiatives metastasizing across the country. And
with Barack Obama's landslide victory, and its hands-off approach to
state reform, the topic is now wide open. California governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger and gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom have called
for a dialogue on the subject. California State Assemblyman Tom
Ammiano is sponsoring a bill this fall to legalize personal
possession of small amounts of cannabis in California--a fact that,
in a turn of events that would have been almost unimaginable in
previous decades, has made him something of a media darling.

"My schedule for media is very heavy and it's very diverse," Ammiano
says. "There's so much media around every day and internationally
that I can pick and choose."

As for the coverage itself: a lot of it has been good, he says, "but
it needs to get better. Certainly the Fox Network doesn't really
treat it with any kind of gravitas. Those people still have that
puerile Cheech and Chong attitude. They don't see it as public
policy, they see it as something to tie to prostitution. There has
been more serious discussion in the Wall Street Journal, [in] The
Economist, [and among] people like Milton Friedman--and there have
been very thoughtful editorials about it," Ammanio says. And "CNN
treated it in a more adult fashion."

At the same time, though, the influence of network television is
waning amid the rise of an old-style partisan press on the Internet.
Just as "we're seeing a rapid decline of straight media on electoral
campaigns," California political consultant Larry Tramutola points
out, the Web is diversifying the conversation about marijuana. The
debate "may be decided in the blogosphere," Tramutola says. "It may
be decided on informal networks."

That shift means that the goal posts of the mainstream coverage of
that debate have moved, as well, says Richard Lee, sponsor of Tax
Cannabis 2010, a direct democracy initiative to legalize marijuana in
California. "We've seen a big change in the media," Lee says, "where
for years we were the one whacko little quote at the end, and the law
enforcement got the majority. Now it seems the opposite. We seem to
be making the front page more than ever." In fact, Lee says,
"reporters keep telling us how difficult it is to find opposition quotes."

Lee describes a recent appearance he made on Fox Business Channel.
"Instead of debating somebody who was against legalization," he says,
"the person they had on there was just quibbling about how much money
could be made when [marijuana] was legal. It's like this professor
somebody and they were like, 'There's lots of good reasons to
legalize it, but I don't think we'll be getting as much money as some
of the proposals say.' I wasn't even really debating the guy."

Indeed, some of the billions of dollars of cannabis revenue have
begun circulating into the legitimate economy, sobering the
discussion for reporters amid record shortfalls in government revenue
and a massive recession. In cash-strapped Oakland, voters just
approved a medical pot tax by a margin of four to one. Furthermore,
medical cannabis now comprises a significant percentage of print
advertising at many urban weeklies.

"The Wall Street Journal is not going to joke about it if it's real
money," Grim points out.

Still, change comes in increments. "People are seeing the reality of
change on the ground when a shop opens up and the sky doesn't fall,"
Grim says. "It's the change that begets change, because people's
fears are not matched by the reality of what's happening."

And one of the changes is journalistic--a shift in the terms of the
legalization conversation itself. "I think editors are realizing that
people want more honest, unbiased coverage of the issue," Richard Lee
puts it. "Newspapers are to a certain degree mirrors of our society.
To the degree that our poll numbers [about marijuana] are up and more
people than ever don't think it should be illegal--the coverage reflects that."