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Marijuana growing must be ubiquitous these days. Not only are there the daily grow busts that any dedicated drug war news scanner notices, but this week, we have a couple of incidents where the pot growers were just in the wrong place at the wrong time: In Baton Rouge, an unfortunate 53-year-old woman got busted for growing pot after a small plane crashed in her back yard. Cops and emergency personnel arriving at the scene found the pilot uninjured, but they also found 14 potted pot plants, so the woman and her roommate are going to jail. Meanwhile, the search for the missing pregnant Ohio woman (if you watch cable news this story is unavoidable) had a dramatic moment yesterday when a cadaver dog started alerting near a patch of ground where the soil had been disturbed. No, it was the body of the missing woman, it was...you guessed it, some poor guy's little pot patch in the woods. Man, talk about bad luck! But these stories also make one wonder just where else this stuff is growing. Apparently everywhere.

Pete Guither at DrugWarRant points out another amusing irony contained in ONDCP's new report Teens, Drugs, and Violence. The report emphasizes the connection between teen drug use and violence with this statistic:

Nearly one in six teens (17%) who got into serious fights at school or work in the past year report using drugs;

Always skeptical, Pete used his research skills to put these numbers in perspective:

…if you look at the 2007 Monitoring the Future report, you see that the percentages of any teens who used drugs in the past year are: 8th grade (14.8%), 10th grade (28.7%), and 12th grade (36.5%). So to say that 17% of teens who got into serious fights report using drugs is not a particularly alarming thing. (In fact, it appears by these numbers that teens who use drugs are actually less likely to get into serious fights.)

It might be necessary to explain that Monitoring the Future is government data, frequently cited by ONDCP when it suits their agenda. Of course, we wouldn't go around issuing reports about how drug users are less violent than everybody else (even though that seems likely to be true). The point here is that ONDCP's insinuations about the relationship between drug use and youth violence reflect the precise opposite of what the data actually show. And this predictably proves to be the case virtually every time a report such as this is issued by that office.

One need only examine the sprawling media coverage they've generated this week to see why ONDCP has every incentive to continue issuing meaningless announcements like this as often as possible. Some news outlets did include a reform viewpoint, but that's insufficient since the headline does most of the damage and since the report's intellectual value is null to begin with.

A media that is dutifully skeptical of self-serving claims by government officials would quickly discover the treasure trove of nonsense and incoherence contained in every such announcement from ONDCP. Unfortunately, we don't have one of those. Therefore, journalists, I beg you, if you receive a press release that begins, "John P. Walters, Director of National Drug Control Policy, today released a new Special Report showing that..." please understand that there are almost certainly several potent ironies and contradictions contained therein, which deserve to be noted in your reporting. If necessary, I will point them out to you with or without being credited.

Otherwise, understand that if you publish a story merely passing along claims made by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the likelihood that you've authored something inaccurate, incorrect, and/or incomplete will be extraordinarily high.