Fear Mongering Headlines Try to Demonize Cannabis

It can’t just be me who thinks some media outlets have been trying really, really trying hard to make cannabis seem like the devil. Sure, that’s been happening for a long time, but their efforts seem amplified in the wake of growing support for legalization.

While headlines are meant to hook the reader, doesn’t journalistic integrity mean anything? The most recent horribly unjust portrayal of cannabis comes from the UK’s Daily Mail, a constant offender of bad journalism.

Headline: “Driver, 20, high on cannabis who killed his two friends after veering into oncoming car is jailed for six years.”

The paper would have you believe, based on the headline, that, because this guy was high, he veered into oncoming traffic and killed two of his friends.

What the headline doesn’t tell you is that the driver had a long history of reckless driving and had actually been arrested two times (for more reckless driving) in between the accident and his trial. On the night in question he was going 25 miles over the speed limit, and no one in the car was wearing a seatbelt.

Additionally, there was no way to tell how impaired he was. A THC acid test of his blood supposedly indicated that he smoked cannabis a few hours prior to the accident. I don’t know about any of you, but I’m not even a little stoned after a few hours go by, let alone so stoned that it would cause me to drive recklessly. I would believe it if the guy was found to be driving 25 miles under the limit — stoners aren’t speeders.

One “expert,” a forensic scientist the Daily Mail talked to stated: “Cannabis is generally less impairing than alcohol and other drugs, but studies have shown that it can impair cognition and impair driving performance. The impairment due to cannabis may out last the experience of the high of taking cannabis and may last four or five hours after.”

Bollocks! Four or five hours after smoking weed you’re either asleep or half way through a Lord of the Rings marathon.

The article, outside the headline, hardly says anything about cannabis at all and the judge who sentenced this man said the accident happened because he was driving too fast.

The judge told the defendant, “You were driving a car that was involved in a head-on collision on a residential street, the reason for this collision was that you were driving far too fast. You lost control.”

So, really, the only people who are trying to say that cannabis caused this crash are the author of the article and the Daily Mail’s sterling editorial staff.

It makes me wonder who owns the paper and what stake they have in keeping cannabis an illicit substance.