When I was a cub reporter twenty-eight years ago at the daily Advocate in Stamford, Connecticut, my first city editor-a white-haired veteran of the International Herald Tribune named Marian Campbell-told me that the cure for cancer was the holy grail of all news stories.
“Unless they discover the cure for cancer,” she would say over the clackety-clack of the manual typewriters, “this paper goes to press on time.”
What I found out a quarter-century later is that not even the cure for cancer is a big enough story to crack the Berlin Wall of media censorship in this country. Toss in the facts that the cure appears to be a benign substance that has been illegal for 63 years, and that the government knowingly suppressed evidence of its curative powers 25 years, and you get twice the storyæand twice the censorship.
I won’t name the “investigative journalists” who didn’t respond when I sent them this story. I won’t list the numerous “progressive” publications that ignored it. I won’t describe the forbidding sense of professional isolation I endured in the months I tried to place the story.
Suffice it to say that it’s what one would expect in a society that has criminalized its own young for two generations around the cannabis issue simply because we were told to do so.
Thousands of innocent people who are in U.S. prisons for possessing or selling “the cure for cancer” await liberation and reparations. Someday our grandchildren will look back and ask, “What did you do to set the cannabis prisoners free?”
Here’s what any responsible journalist should be doing:
Go to primary sources when evaluating cannabis research. The AP and other news organizations love to elevate “bad science” and suppress “good science” when it comes to cannabis. You have to read the original research articles yourself and make your own judgments.
Investigate and report on the war on children that is a major component of the war on drugs. The marijuana laws are the main tool the police use to persecute minors. No other policy affects more families in more insidious and devastating ways than cannabis prohibition.
Learn about the history of cannabis prohibition and about the pharmaceutical, liquor, and tobacco giants that are behind it. If you don’t know the history of cannabis and hemp prohibition, you’re too ignorant to justifiably call yourself a journalist.
If it turns out-as my story would seem to indicate-that cannabis is the cure for cancer and the government suppressed this information for 25 years (and continues to suppress it), then the body count alone will make this the biggest holocaust in recorded history. Virtually all federal drug policy makers of both parties since 1975-including legislators, presidents and the DEA-will be complicit and criminally liable.
That’s why they don’t want this story covered.
To learn the history of cannabis prohibition, read http://www.jackherer.com.
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