The Media’s Embrace of “Fake News” About Drugs

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

DeForest Rathbone, chairman of the National Institute of Citizen Anti-drug Policy (NICAP), says one of the most notorious examples of “fake news” in the media is the notion that marijuana is medicine. He is so alarmed by the misinformation being spread by the media about marijuana and other aspects of the growing drug problem that he sponsored a full-page advertisement in Monday’s Washington Times, urging President Donald Trump to personally follow through on his promise to address “the growing national public health crisis of soaring drug addiction and overdose deaths.”

“There is virtually no one in America today who does not personally know of a drug-related tragedy among his family, neighbors or friends,” the ad says.

However, Rathbone says the media have played down the serious nature of the crisis. “We have become intimately aware that the nation’s current drug crisis is far greater than is being reported in the mainstream news media,” the ad goes on to say.

The ad expresses support for the President’s commitment to stop the proliferation of drugs across the southern border and throughout the nation.

In his inaugural address, Trump declared that drugs “have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.” On the campaign trail, he repeatedly condemned the illegal drug trade, noting the amount of heroin flowing across the southern border and the rising number of overdose deaths.

The current reporting of annual overdose deaths at 50,000 “represents only about a third of the actual 150,000 total drug-related deaths,” the ad says. “That total includes additional deaths from drug-related illnesses, accident and crime.”

The problem goes beyond heroin and overdose deaths, Rathbone said. The ad notes the growing acceptance by some “Stoner States” of marijuana and its alleged “medical” benefits. However, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently reaffirmed the scientific evidence that there is no medical use for smoked marijuana. “Marijuana is dope, not medicine,” the ad states.

In this case, it’s the far-left marijuana lobby that is truly “anti-science.”

Rathbone told Accuracy in Media that his ad, endorsed by many anti-drug organizations, is part of his effort to counter media propaganda in favor of the drug culture. However, despite his telephone number and email address being featured at the top of the ad, he has yet to receive any calls from the media about the ad and what parents believe needs to be done about the growing drug crisis.

“In the last eight years, owing to a lack of enforcement of federal narcotics laws, marijuana use has escalated from 7 to 13% of the U.S. population,” the ad states. “Fueled by the insatiable demand for all illicit drugs, there are now roughly twice as many gang members in the U.S. as law enforcement personnel, breeding violent crime and civil unrest, mostly focused on our youth.”

This information “needs to be exposed,” Rathbone told AIM. He said the Trump Administration has to be informed and educated about “how bad the carnage is” throughout the country. “This is far worse than anybody is talking about,” he said.

The ad cites the following examples of the damage that is being inflicted on the American people:

  • A huge number of parents are suffering enslavement to the drug-related mental incapacitation of children who are unable to function independently. Many of these children bully their parents into housing, feeding and supporting them, and sometimes even paying for their drugs. Such incapacitated kids often end up as street people blighting communities.
  • Today there is a soaring demand for foster parents for abused and neglected children of drug-addicted young parents. One community saw a 400% increase in such tragic cases just in the past year alone. Millions of grandparents are raising these kids.
  • The nation’s schools are awash in drugs, as cited in periodic youth surveys documenting schoolchild drug use, drug-related violence, bullying, fear and depression, resulting in soaring rates of teen suicide, youth addiction and overdose deaths.
  • The nation’s cities are suffering a virtual holocaust of murders and other violence caused by the massive proliferation of nuclear strength, psychosis-producing marijuana and other drugs. In Washington, D.C. the entire Metro train system is dysfunctional and racked with violent crime resulting from too many of its employees smoking “medicine” that is being allowed and encouraged by the city’s continuing pro-marijuana political leadership.

The growing drug crisis can be traced, at least in part, to the policies of President Barack Obama, a member of the “Choom Gang” of heavy marijuana users as he was growing up in Hawaii. He brought his soft policies on drugs to the Oval Office. For example, Obama ordered his Department of Justice to stop enforcing federal marijuana laws. As a result, the ad states, a massive marijuana trafficking industry has emerged in states that have legalized the drug, affecting the nation as a whole.

The ad expresses the hope that new Attorney General Jeff Sessions will declare the pre-eminence of federal over state laws and “restore prosecution of violations of federal drug laws.”

Rathbone told AIM that he also believes the Trump administration must declare that the nation’s current drug problems “constitute a national and growing urgent public health crisis.”


Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

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2 thoughts on “The Media’s Embrace of “Fake News” About Drugs

  1. Prescribing cannabis medically if the THC is active is like prescribing alcohol medically.

    It is barbaric & stupid.

    But the legalize drugs crap is just another socialist subversion psywar angle.

    Like so many other angles such as LGBT, ethnic civil rights, environmentalism, animal rights etc ad nauseam.

    The intention really is to make us sick.

    Wouldnt it be nice if all of the money, time and research wasted on leftist activities had been spent on something useful like space colonization.

    The same can be said for the fruitless wars of the last two US presidents.

    But the leftist conspiracy has gone so far and so deep now that it will take a massive war to correct it. One that may or may never come.

  2. Our Lives, Our Liberty, Our pursuit of happiness..It is beyond time our Government Butted out of our Personal Choices… I have Hemophilia I am in tremendous pain. Yet Even though I have No criminal record and Not so much as a speeding ticket against my license. Our Government’s war on pain Doctors has made it imposable to receive the care my conditions requires…I need a MILD medication for my every day arthritis from the damage done by years of bleeding into my joints, And a strong medication for when I have bleeds. Yet all I can receive is one, or the other… Though my pain constantly changes… I can receive something mild for every day. Or be stuck with the strong stuff, & simply suffer day to day to save it up for the bleeds when I need it most. It is pathetic people no matter how different or rare their condition. They are forced to receive the ONE SIZE FITS ALL standard of care our over reaching leaders deem as acceptable. Lawmakers who have never had a hard day of pain let alone years of suffering can not even properly sympathize let alone empathies.. I do not blame any person In serious pain for turning to street drugs. Our Doctors hands are tied in most cases, or they are so paranoid of losing their lively hood they leave people to suffer unnecessarily.. Our leaders have left them little choice… It does not escape notice that the statistics for Alcohol and tobacco are not on that list. Funny how they place the disclaimer that they are not included. They want the less knowledgeable reader to blindly accept these numbers as huge and jump right on their bandwagon… As they and even the number of deaths due to Doctor error Dwarf these numbers by such a margin they would be entirely off this pathetically tiny chart… If I am not mistaken Suicide Deaths due to overdose are still smaller than Suicide by Gun. If given a choice, who would not choose a painless death… So it would amaze me the numbers were not larger if I did not know how few people can actually obtain that large of a dose at once… My condition being one of the few that merit large doses when necessary.. I am all for keeping street drugs out of the hands of children. And keeping prescription medications from those not capable of using them responsibly, but the war on people in true and provable Pain NEEDS TO END… If I were to decide marijuana was the only medication I need. It is not their place to keep it from me. Nor could they… This article makes me WANT to move to Colorado… I imagine it had the same effect on other like minded people as well…

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