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What to watch for in the Question 2 campaign
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ugust 28, 1953: California Attorney General Edmund (Pat) Brown announced that the fight against marijuana was “showing marked results.” Voters have become accustomed to seeing and hearing the truth shaved in political campaigns. Yet it often comes in a subjective form. Yes, Candidate A is misrepresenting Candidate B about Issue C, but it’s done in a way that it hangs from the edge of truth by the fingernails and no one can actually say it was a case of lying. That word is rarely used in political campaigns. But this year, marijuana is on the Nevada ballot again, and lying has always been essential to drug prohibition. The war on drugs could not be sustained without lying. And on the narrower issue of marijuana prohibition, lying has been there from the birth of prohibition on June 10, 1937, when in the dead of night Congress enacted the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 which, though it only taxed marijuana, was used to arrest users for possession. On that June 10, U.S. Rep. Carl Vinson of Georgia was the bill’s floor manager, and he was asked a direct question—“[D]oes the American Medical Association support this bill?” Vinson said, “They support this bill one hundred percent.” It was a lie. AMA lobbyist William Woodward had testified against the measure. Well before the birth of marijuana prohibition, there had been plenty of lies that laid the groundwork for the ban. U.S. Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger, the J. Edgar Hoover of narcotics, was fond of using stories about black men and white women to mine the lode of racism in an effort to demonize marijuana. The Hearst press conducted a fact-challenged antimarijuana campaign that—get ready for some Trump deja vu—demonized Latino immigrants. Things haven’t improved much over the years, either. When the facts are inconvenient, lie—which was what Clinton drug “czar” Barry McCaffrey did when he spoke about Holland’s enlightened drug policies. “The murder rate in Holland is double that in the United States,” he said. “The overall crime rate in Holland is probably 40 percent higher than in the United States. That’s drugs.” Chicago Tribune reporter Steve Chapman checked it out and found the murder rate in Holland was one-fifth that of the U.S. In addition, violent crime was “exceedingly scarce by American standards”—and marijuana use was lower than in the U.S.
The way lying was used—and still is—can be explored in our earlier article, “Lies our drug warriors told us” (RN&R, Aug. 26, 2006). Thus, the initiative petition that seeks to make marijuana legal but regulated, much like booze, will offer special challenges. Voters can’t really count on reporters to keep the facts straight for them, if history is any indication. Not only were journalists in on the act in the early days, they are loath to be seen as soft on drugs now. Still, there are much better fact-checking features in journalism today than ever before. Had they existed in the 1930s, marijuana might never have been made illegal. So we’ll hope for the best but also plan for the worst. Given this history of lies in the service of prohibition, and against the possibility that this campaign will be as shot through with bad information as it has been since Virginia City enacted the nation’s first anti-drug law, we want to help voters understand what lies ahead and offer this guide.
Forms oF misinFormAtion May 1, 1971: “In some schools, says NIMH [National Institute of Mental Health], there is evidence that marijuana use has crested.” —Associated Press Not all cases for marijuana prohibition involve lying, and those that do can conceal the lying with other deceptive techniques. Some don’t lie at all. They use facts—but manipulate them, conceal some of them, color them with loaded terms, spin them, ignore them. To demonstrate, we will use some actual arguments employed by prohibitionists—when possible, in Nevada. To make it as up-to-date as possible, we will frequently use essays and letters to the editor (“Economic boom ahead,” RN&R, June 30) written in the current campaign by Republican Douglas County lawyer Jim Hartman, president of a prohibitionist group called Nevadans for Responsible Drug Policy, as examples of what lies ahead. Make it up. Some prohibitionists invent anti-marijuana information on the grounds that they are serving a higher cause. For instance, on April 2, 1970, Reno physician Wesley Hall—newly elected president of the American Medical Association—announced that the AMA would shortly release a study showing that marijuana deadened the sex drive and caused birth defects. The AMA knew nothing about this; his board did not authorize his statement, and it wasn’t true. No such study was ever released. Much
“keep the lines straight” ContinUED on PAGE 14 07.07.16
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