REEFER MADNESS IS MEDIA FIXATION

Paul Cellucci, U.S. ambassador to Canada, warned that decriminalization of
marijuana might lead to border crossing delays. The warning fuelled
opponents of decriminalization, who added economic catastrophe to the list
of woes that reefer madness brings.

A majority of both Canadians and Americans, however, have consistently
favoured decriminalization because the preponderant weight of science and
personal experience points to negligible negative effects.

So what's behind the enormously funded, politically supercharged,
internationally coordinated anti-marijuana movement? Why is this weed
perennially causing rancour among the highest national political offices in
the world?

There are well-documented historical reasons, including the medical
profession's abhorrence of an uncontrollable but very effective medicinal
substance easily obtained and self-administered, the cotton industry's
fierce competition with the industrial hemp industry, and tobacco and
spirits manufacturers' competition with marijuana manufacturers for the
lucrative psychoactive substance market.

None of these explain the recent surge in official state interest in the
harmless recreational habits of private citizens. The element entering the
marijuana battlefield and heating it up again is new communications
graduates hoping to prove their theory that the mass media can be used to
modify and control mass social behaviour.

Until Marshal McLuhan's complicated 1960s ideas about media and its
influence were finally understood and absorbed two generations later, the
use of mass media by agencies like the state to modify and control mass
social behaviour was only a suspicion of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists.
But now the potential of the mass media for use by the state to alter
social behaviour is deeply and widely understood.

We are now entering the experimental stage of theories of media-generated
social control. Marijuana, being an illegal yet widely available and often
used substance, provides an excellent laboratory in which to test those
theories.

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy has become the focus
of this huge social behaviour experiment. In 1997, the office's mission
statement says, it "proposed and received dedicated funding for an historic
initiative: a large-scale paid media campaign" implemented in conjunction
with "a wide array of non-profit, public, and private-sector organizations,
including America's major corporations and media companies."

The mission statement, aimed at an older generation of U.S. Congress
members who didn't get McLuhan, but who control the funding for the Office
of National Drug Control Policy, outlines the theories that will be tested
in this experiment: "Media campaigns, in some situations, can be a powerful
force for social change" it says. "Media have come to play an increasingly
important role in public health campaigns due to their wide reach and
ability to influence behaviour in a variety of ways."

The office points to "embedded messages" contained in Hollywood movies and
pop music that influence mass society in their drug choices, and hopes to
show that the state can also influence mass society by embedding its own
messages in the same media. Through various forms of coercion, including
suggestions that to condone the smoking of dope is to aid and abet
international terrorism, for example, the office has recruited major
corporate and media empires to sign on to the project and provide
support-which includes "embedding" anti-marijuana messages in their products.

So-called "faith-based" organizations, community institutions and foreign
governments are being recruited in the same manner. "The impact of drug
prevention messages and activities offered in communities across America
will be enhanced... and communicated by many voices," the section on
strategy says. "Through coordination with community-based organizations,
professional associations, the entertainment industry, and the media, those
voices will resonate."

The plan devised by the office and distributed to the "entertainment
industry and the media" contains detailed instructions on ways they can
help to generate social change. "People underestimate the cumulative
probability that an event will occur even if they correctly understand the
odds that the event will occur on any one occasion. Expressing cumulative
probabilities can be an effective means of enhancing the perceived
relevance of a risk," it suggests. Thus, you will find marijuana stories in
the mass media discussing the risk of smoking five joints a day for 40
years, and little about the risk of having a joint with friends tonight.

Canada's social policy has been edging slowly toward the decriminalization
of marijuana and the people at the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy are concerned, but not because marijuana is a dangerous
substance-we all know it isn't. Their concern is that Canada's government
will pollute their media experiment and endanger their positive results.

This might throw into doubt their entire theoretical foundation, which is
that orchestrated media campaigns can be an effective tool for modification
and control of mass social behaviour, applicable wherever state interests
collide with popular sentiment.