More BBC anti cannabis hype on behalf of the government – “Revealed – cannabis”

Nobody listens to people who “cry wolf” or who are hypocrites. Nothing could be nearer the truth when it comes to the government’s anti cannabis campaign aimed at young people.

The problem we have is real; we have ever younger kids getting hold of and smoking  cannabis and despite of all the effort being put into trying to dissuade them, kids are still doing it.

Now it doesn’t take much of a leap of logic to conclude that is probably not a good thing; there are plenty of common sense reasons to want to keep kids away from drugs of all kinds – not just cannabis, be the drug alcohol, glue, cannabis or whatever. Drugs will affect the child’s development and cause a range of other harms, but the government has decided to focus its efforts on cannabis and hence we have seen a whole series of government anti cannabis campaigns aimed at kids in recent months, coupled with an increase in legal sanctions with the move back to B all supported by the BBC and reported as factual news items.

So it was with interest that Radio 1 Newsbeat carried a shock horror story this week under the headline “Cannabis warnings ‘not working'” in it’s latest effort to support the government campaign:

The government has spent millions trying to warn young people about the risks of smoking cannabis, but despite high-profile television campaigns, it remains the most commonly used illegal drug in the UK.

Er, hang on. If some other – probably class A – drug had overtaken cannabis as being the most used illegal drug we really would have a serious problem on our hands. That rather daft introduction set the standard for what was to follow.

The report was in fact a trail for a programme in the “Revealed” series shown last Saturday – this one claiming to expose the truth about cannabis. If you’ve never seen “Revealed” (and I hadn’t before seeing this) it’s one of those awful “Yoof” TV shows with camera work that is carefully designed and scripted to look amateurish and  spontaneous featuring trendy looking people who are only just too old to be called young. The blurb for the programme sounded interesting:

Reporters Anthony Baxter and Aidan Campbell investigate the UK’s most commonly used illegal drug, cannabis. Adina visits a forensic lab to examine resin up close, while Anthony travels around the country to discuss attitudes towards the class B drug.

The show meets Terri who saw her life spiral out of control after spending hundreds of pounds on cannabis, and talks to teenagers who say it is easier to get hold of than alcohol.

With the help of doctors and scientists, the team separates fact from fiction and asks whether cannabis really can mess with your mind.

As usual the programme relied on selective use of information, such as

The Royal College of Psychiatrists says there is evidence to support claims that if you start smoking the drug before the age of 15, you are more likely to develop mental health problems in later life.

Maybe the Royal College of Psychiatrists does say it, but there is also quite a lot of studies out there which don’t support this claim and indeed, the concerns which were widespread a few years ago about cannabis causing severe mental illness have largely gone unsupported in more recent research. No mention was made of this of course, although anyone reading that Newsbeat report on the BBC website would see a link pointing to a story from January this year which states:

But Professor Nutt from the ACMD reckons the link between cannabis use and that kind of severe mental health problem is “probable but weak”. The latest research suggests the government would have to stop 5,000 men and 12,000 women from smoking cannabis to prevent a single case of schizophrenia in both groups.

“Using cannabis will tip a few people over the edge but in terms of most of the population, there isn’t really a risk there,” he said.

The programme drew on the recent “Frank” survey which claimed to show a large number of young cannabis users had experienced what it called “mental health problems” because getting stoned had lead to feelings of paranoia, re-enforcing the false idea that such unpleasant feelings are a symptom of real mental illness. It also made the point that cannabis is ILLEGAL and it’s AGAINST THE LAW (caps for effect). It wasn’t explained that Frank is a government sponsored anti drug advertising campaign and works to government directives.

As might be expected for a “yoof” programme, the whole thing was very shallow. Perhaps the most ridiculous part came in the forensic lab, where  Aidan is shown handling rather good examples of Indian hash and so-called “skunk” weed, then being made to wear protective clothing – mask and gloves – in order to handle young plants which hadn’t even flowered yet and to would not have contained any active constituents. Why they did this is unknown but can only have been at the direction of the people in the lab.

Of course, what the programme didn’t do  was to express even the slightest misgivings about the workings of the law in all of this, the focus was all on young people ignoring the warnings about using cannabis and asking – without really daring to give the real answer – why so many people broke this law. No thought was given to the possibility that it could be because the law is a bad law.

You can watch this episode of “Revealed” on i-player for the next few days and you’ll see what I mean about the rather tired “yoof” style production values, but don’t worry, it only last 15 minutes.

So what’s going on? Why is the government’s anti cannabis drive apparently falling on deaf ears? Perhaps it’s down to the “crying Wolf” issue mentioned above.

It should always be remembered that the best form of advertising for any product is word of mouth recommendation from people you know. Now lots of young people know older people who use cannabis without ill effect. Cannabis is very, very widespread and it’s use established in large parts of society. Many children have grown up in homes where cannabis is used, their parents or brothers and sisters use it. So these kids will know personally people who have used and continue to use cannabis without ill-effect. So who are they going to believe? A government run campaign or their family and friends? Do we even have to ask that question?

The problem is that the things the government is trying to warn the young people about are claims built on the back of wild exaggerations. Remember the cannabis makes you mad campaign so enthusiastically promoted by campaigners such as Marjorie Wallace of SANE (Radio 4 MP3 from 2005) and the associated claims of 25-fold increase in cannabis strength as promoted by the Independent newspaper in 2007?

The skunk smoked by the majority of young Britons bears no relation to traditional cannabis resin – with a 25-fold increase in the amount of the main psychoactive ingredient, tetrahydrocannabidinol (THC), typically found in the early 1990s.

These claims have been rubbished often enough now and are widely understood to be hype – to be crying “Wolf” – yet the present campaign is based on these over-egged claims. Just as the old legalise cannabis campaign slogans of “the harmless herb” were easy to demolish, so are claims built on such obvious hype. It hasn’t been helped by certain people taking the lead in bringing it all about; the whole exercise is well understood to be a government inspired and directed campaign because it follows the enthusiastic support of Gordon Brown and other government figures and the move back to class B which was done against expert advice. In other words, this sort of thing is something “everybody knows” is a government lie.

The other problem is  the anti cannabis campaign is seen as hypercritical – and in truth it is. We are seeing all these warnings about cannabis and very little if anything similar about alcohol. Indeed, if you’re a teenager you’ll probably be familiar with the ongoing sexual health campaign featured on posters appearing in colleges around the country.  This is actually a very good campaign warning kids to be aware that when they get drunk they’ll lose their inhibitions and be likely to have unprotected sex. Nowhere on the posters does it say “don’t drink” or “don’t have sex”, this is a real world campaign giving sensible advice in a way that can be believed.

There are also good campaigns which encourage sensible drinking and awareness of what can happen if you drink too much. Young people are told to expect to fall asleep in the loo, to pass out and to injure themselves through excessive drinking. Again, it’s all good advice but the difference between it and the information given for cannabis is only too obvious to young people.

The plain talking of the alcohol and sex advice  stands in start contrast to the cannabis information which warns of the danger of feeling a bit paranoid and of getting arrested.

The real danger of all this hype is to cause the baby to be thrown out with the bathwater – to discredit all the information now being given out about cannabis – and as we started off by saying, there is a real problem out there with kids using drugs. Cannabis is not 100% harmless and we need effective measures to keep kids away from it. If it is true as the TV programme claims (and as personal experience also shows) that cannabis is easier to get than alcohol for kids, then we should accept that the problem rests with the way the establishment treats cannabis, which is so far removed from the way large chunks of society treat it.

So rather than spending our BBC licence fee making programmes which simply reflect government propaganda,  perhaps the BBC could actually tell the truth about the failings of drug prohibition and the dangers it’s causing? After all, don’t we have a right to expect the BBC to tell us the truth, or is its role no more than a government mouth piece?