Press Coverage of the Drug War is So Flawed it Actually Encourages People to Sell Marijuana

I wrote yesterday [4] about an absurd report [5] in The Philadelphia Inquirer which valued marijuana at over $100 per joint. As I pointed out, boastful law-enforcement sources frequently collaborate with slothful reporters to produce wildly inaccurate news coverage of the drug war.

Obviously, it is just unacceptable to have major news sources reporting frivolous and false information. The laugh-out-loud craziness of implying that a joint costs $100 just shouldn’t have made it to print, and we can all gaze at this spectacle and shake our heads as we recognize that the incompetence which made this report possible is perfectly typical. It explains volumes about the media's neglectful role in permitting drug war indoctrination to permeate our collective consciousness each day. It is 2007, and we shouldn't even be reading celebratory drug bust stories anymore, because each new one is a mere exhibit of the failure of those that came before it.

But, beyond all of that, it stands to reason that such coverage has a remarkable potential to entice individuals to enter the drug trade in the first place. The theoretical deterrent value of reporting on major drug busts and the fate of the perpetrators is surely undermined when profit margins are overstated so dramatically.

If one believes The Philadelphia Inquirer that 16 pounds of high-grade marijuana can be sold for $812,000, and one subsequently stumbles across an opportunity to acquire that amount for the (more likely) price of $50,000-80,000, they might be intrigued. By routinely exaggerating the street value of illegal drugs, the press renders itself an inadvertent advertising campaign for the lucrative business of black market drug distribution.

I've heard, but cannot confirm, that the Canadian press has sought to scale back this exact behavior after a revelation that constantly reporting on multi-million dollar marijuana seizures was having the effect of convincing people that it's easy to make a million dollars growing pot. I have no idea whether this is accurate, but it's certainly amusing to consider the possibility that all of this reckless drug war reporting is simply emboldening prospective marijuana entrepreneurs.

One wonders, therefore, how many more of these drug bust press conferences our intrepid journalists are willing to snooze their way through before becoming overcome with déjà vu and finding themselves compelled by the distant call of journalistic integrity to do anything other than cut and paste the predictable pontifications of the proud pot police into the morning paper.