During wartime, the media often engages in propaganda to bolster support for government policies. The so-called “War on Drugs” is no different.
Consider the following article, from the BBC:
Cranberries singer O’Riordan has died of drowning
O’Riordan suffered a coma from an overdose of a legal drug known as alcohol. He drowned in his bathtub. His death has been ruled a tragic accident.
A few years later, TV star Matthew Perry collapsed from an overdose of a drug called Ketamine. He drowned in his bathtub. His death was considered an outrage, as if he had been killed by drug dealers.
Here it is Reason Magazine:
Last month, federal prosecutors charged five people in the celebrity overdose death last year. Three have pleaded guilty so far, and this month, a trial date has been set for the other two. . . . For one thing, Perry did not overdose, and his drugs were not contaminated; while the medical examiner listed ketamine as the main contributing factor in his death, the exact cause was drowning. “Matthew Perry drowned while under the influence of ketamine the same way people drown under the influence of alcohol,” Ryan Marino, a doctor of toxicology and addiction medicine at University Hospitals in Cleveland, told Filter.
Andrew Stolbach, a physician and toxicologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, “said it’s unlikely Perry would have died if he hadn’t been in the water,” VICE reported last year. “It’s really dangerous to use sedatives in the pool, especially alone, or in the bathtub,” Stolbach added.
Of course, no attempt was made to find the people who sold Dolores O’Riordan her alcohol.
Reasonable people may not agree on the right policy for illegal drugs (or alcohol). Reason suggests Perry might be alive today if Ketamine wasn’t illegal without a prescription:
Ketamine was developed for use in anesthesia and pain relief before gaining popularity as a club drug in the 1980s. Recent evidence suggests that it can be used to treat chronic depression and addiction. In the right context, it’s also very safe: A 2022 scientific review of 312 overdoses and 138 deaths in which ketamine was present found that “there were no cases of overdose or death related to the use of ketamine as an antidepressant in the treatment setting.” . . . As investigators would discover, Perry stayed clean through ketamine therapy but eventually became addicted to the therapy itself; when doctors refused to increase his dose, he sought medicine elsewhere.
Obviously, we can’t be sure what would have happened if Perry had continued to access the legal source of the drug. O’Riordan drowned despite having legal alcohol. Perry may have done the same. All alcoholic drugs are dangerous to some degree. But it is also clear that the use of illegal drugs creates serious risks, as it is very difficult to ensure that a person has the desired dose. Most fentanyl deaths occur in people who didn’t even know they were taking fentanyl.
My concern here is with the media. If voters are to make informed decisions about drug policy, it is important that the media does not become an arm of government propaganda. So far, they have failed to provide specific information on the effects of drug use, as they report the effects of illegal drug use in a very different way than the way they report the effects of legal drugs such as alcohol. Please give us the facts.
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