Media Dustup Pits Bloggers and Wired Against NYTimes

destinyland writes "Wired magazine ran a table listing the scientific effects of prescription drugs (and one illegal drug) — leading to an accusation from the NYTimes that they were 'promoting' drug use. But this routine controversy led to a fierce pushback online from bloggers and from Wired's reporter, who discussed his past drug use on his own blog and called for an honest discussion of scientific evidence and straight talk about medical effects."

Comments

Re:when haven't we promoted drugs?

[jc42]

And with hemp, if you speak of the unsmokable male plant, can grow 7x faster than corn, replenishes the soil, and would put a lot of industries under.

Actually, one of the main reasons that hemp was outlawed in the US was that it was a cheap source of high-quality fiber. Google for "marijuana hemp paper Hearst" to find lots of the history.

The basic summary is that in the 1920s and 1930s, the Hearst publishing empire owned extensive acreage of pulpwood farms. But some very cheap methods of making high-quality paper from hemp had been developed, and were seriously threatening to make the Hearst-owned forests worthless. So the Hearst-owned publications, especially newspapers, went into a major PR campaign about the dangers of the female hemp plant, aka marijuana. They also paid for lots of lobbying in Congress. They succeeded in getting marijuana added to the growing list of outlawed drugs. But the actual intent was to make it illegal to grow hemp for fiber.

It's common knowledge that paper mills are among the worst industrial polluters. If hemp were legal, and most of the pulpwood farms were converted to hemp, it would not only result in cheaper paper; it would also result in a lot less pollution from the paper-making process.

Hemp is also a good source of oil (from its seeds), and is a fairly good crop for producing cheap industrial (fuel) alcohol.

I suppose one could object to such things because they "put a lot of industries under". But that argument could be used against any scheme to improve the efficiency of any industry by introducing a new process. An industry that can't adopt improved production processes probably deserves to go under.