Normally I hate to cover medical stories. Stories about medicine are usually corporate entities panning poorly researched products as miracle cures in the hopes that public awareness - even of products with low success rates - will somehow assist with the legitimisation process and allow the products to be sold as prescription or over-the-counter (OTC) drugs.
But in this case, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr Sanjay Gupta has admitted to being the face of CNN's effort to mislead the public about marijuana's efficacy when used as a pharmaceutical. This story has implications for the freedom of religion, manipulation of the public by the press, and corporate manipulation of government. So the story earns its place here.
While I'd like to compliment Gupta on his honesty, it's too late in coming. Furthermore, his apology is shrouded in more half-truths. Media pundits have an obligation to research facts. While he claims to have "steadily reviewed the scientific literature on medical marijuana from the United States and thought it was fairly unimpressive," this very sentence is misleading. First of all, there is a ton of scientific literature from other nations that shows promising results in understanding marijuana's potential for helping cancer patients cope with extreme pain and regain appetite. There is also medical literature from around the world that explores the psychological mechanisms behind the various compounds in marijuana (not just THC) that can have a positive impact on a wide array of medical conditions.
But really, does Gupta or his overlords at CNN truly think that modern Americans are so stupid that we believe the medical community in the United States to be that divorced from what is being researched in other nations, say the UK, Germany, Japan, France, Israel, or Switzerland? Because out of the 15 biggest pharmaceutical corporations, half are based in the US. The other half conduct their research in the UK (GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca), Germany (Bayer), Japan (Takeda), France (Sanofi-Aventis), Israel (Teva), or Switzerland (Novartis and Hoffman-LaRoche). And that's not counting the plentiful marijuana research reports published in other nations like Australia, Holland, Brasil, Russia, India, or China. Either Sanjay Gupta is telling more lies or CNN really does ignore the world outside the United States when it puts together its newscasts.
What if CNN's anchors started out the newscast saying "we reviewed todays news stories from countries outside the United States and found them to be fairly unimpressive"? Would that fly with you? No news of bombings in Nigeria, no news of Oprah being dissed in Switzerland, no news of violence in the Holy Land... all because it's "fairly unimpressive". If you claim to run a first-rate news agency, it's a lame excuse that flies as well as a hog. Rather than regale you with all the published, peer-reviewed studies that Dr Gupta chose to ignore since they weren't published in "the United States", I'll just wrap up my point by pointing the "liar" finger at Dr Gupta's face.
Now, because I try to hold pleadingthef1rst to a higher journalistic standard than CNN, I did some background investigation into CNN's holdings and those who hold stock in CNN. At this point, I can confirm that Time-Warner (which owns CNN) holds no pharmaceutical stock. However, I was unable to confirm whether any pharmaceutical corporations hold stock in Time-Warner, or whether Ted Turner (the mogul behind CNN) owns any significant stakes in pharmaceutical corporations. These facts are important because now that a majority of the American public has consistently backed marijuana legislation for over a decade, pharmaceutical companies are trying to figure out how to cash in.
The problem for their business side is that the American federal system has allowed a lot of smaller businesses to cash in ahead of them and accumulate a wealth of folk knowledge and research knowledge along the way. So because of anti-marijuana drug scheduling at the federal level, the only tactic left to the world's major pharmaceutical corporations for cornering the market is to turn to marketing. In other words, since they can't just play the game with its current rules, they want to deceive the public into thinking the rules are different long enough for them to manoeuvre into a dominant market position.
While this may sound like yet another outlandish conspiracy theory, it's how things are done. Just look at these few CNN stories from years past:
Dirt-Cheap Diabetes Drug
Leukemia Drug
Breast Cancer Drug
I could list many, many more similar articles from the CNN archives, but hopefully you are getting a sense for how at least this one media corporation is manipulating public thought on pharmaceutical information. They know that we, the People, will not spend our precious family time reading every major scientific article on every potenial drug. And we're not going to spend our free hours watching FDA proceedings in person. So they know we're going to rely on these secondary news sources (like CNN) to keep us misinformed. Mind you, every one of the major news corporations is doing the same thing. It's just that Sanjay Gupta's misdirection is so blatantly obvious that it provides an ideal focus for PtF's criticism.
Now, as for religious freedom, if you are of European or North Asian descent, there is a ~70% chance that your ancestors smoked marijuana regularly as part of a religious sacrament to honour and commune with your deceased ancestors. This religious tradition is still maintained today in the underground. Unfortuantely, the Supreme Court does not recognise religious practise unless it has not-for-profit religious status with the IRS. Just keep in mind that the Constitution exists to protect our rights, not to limit them. Yes, we may be breaking federal law by practising a religion that's over 3,000 years old, but we are not in violation of the greater law. In fact, it is the federal government that is in violation of that law.
Shame on CNN and Sanjay Gupta for enabling such an abuse to continue for so long, and shame on all American media for allowing so many medical patients suffering from epilepsy, insomnia, cancer, and other ills from getting the treatment that doctors today will still readily proscribe. While the public eye stands ignorant, doctors know what works. They may have their hands tied by insurance law, but they will still tell their patients how to survive chemotherapy, even if the federal government will arrest them for it.
Finally, shame on Barack Obama. We elected you thinking you would end drug persecution. We hoped that you would remove this scourge which alienates many African Americans and takes their lives and livelihoods at a young age. You've got two years to stand up and act like a progressive American, and we hope you - like Dr Gupta - won't act after doing a decade of damage.
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