Some of the biggest opponents of a legal, free and fair cannabis market aren’t the Pamela McColls of the world, but the media, particularly the taxpayer-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Media helps shape public opinion and their occasional misinterpretation of facts, slanted bias and outright lies have led many to champion war, debt, prohibition, excessive taxation and regulation.
The recent headline calling cannabis extractions “marijuana on steroids” is the latest example.
By now, I expect the police to fear monger about extractions — instead of say, fentanyl or missing and murdered aboriginal people.
I also expect the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse to rally against shatter since their entire existence relies on viewing drug use as a problem the government needs to correct.
But it is the job of the media to fact-check and report as objectively as possible. This article from CBC did interview cannabis activist Dana Larsen, but followed with a condescending tone that, “wherever that cannabis culture is” cannabis extractions are “not like the marijuana that a lot of the older people remember.”
The media often commits this logical fallacy of appealing to tradition. Where, since cannabis extractions are newer and different from what the baby-boomers experienced, it is therefore a bad thing.
This line of reasoning simply doesn’t follow.
If cannabidiol (CBD) and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) are the medicinal elements of cannabis, and extractions offer higher concentrations than simple bud, then it follows that shatter is actually the better option.
It is the “older people” that smoked less potent bud that risked inhaling more carcinogens to get the same level of high a tiny “dab” of shatter provides.
With extractions or very potent bud, one doesn’t need to inhale as much smoke. Does this not make modern cannabis a lot safer than the older, less potent plant material our parents were smoking?
Of course, the CBC didn’t mention this. Instead they finished the opinion-piece-disguised-as news by quoting from a report by the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse.
Where more potent, safer cannabis use should be curtailed until “we have the research, until we know what the impacts are and really focusing on a public health approach.”
And that is the crux of mainstream opinion reinforced by the lack of journalistic integrity — your individual rights, your self-ownership, basic to being a human being, must be sacrificed for the “public health approach” as dictated by unelected bureaucrats for a drug that has no potential for toxic overdose.
That is not how a free society works. It is one of the “risks” of living in a free society that things are legal until proven harmful for non-consenting adults. The CCSA has got it backwards and the CBC has no interest in correcting this error. The burden of proof is on the CCSA, for there is no justification for making things illegal until proven safe.