During wartime, the media generally engage in propaganda to increase support for government policies. The so-called “War on Drugs” is no different.
Consider the following heading, from the BBC:
Cranberries singer O’Riordan died of drowning
O’Riordan had fallen into a stupor due to excessive use of a legal drug known as alcohol. She drowned in her bathtub. Her death was treated as a tragic accident.
A few years later, TV star Matthew Perry fell into a stupor due to overuse of a drug called Ketamine. He drowned in his bathtub. His death was treated as a shame, as if he had been murdered by drug dealers.
Here it is Reason magazine:
Last month, federal prosecutors charged five people in the overdose death of a celebrity the year before. Three have pleaded guilty so far, and a trial date was set for the other two this month. . . . For starters, Perry didn’t overdose and his medications weren’t contaminated; while the medical examiner listed ketamine as the main contributing factor to his death, drowning was the most immediate cause. “Matthew Perry drowned while drunk on ketamine, just as people routinely drown while drunk on 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 is unlikely Perry would have died if he had not been in a body of water,” VICE reported last year. “It’s really dangerous to use sedative medications in a swimming pool, especially alone, or in a bathtub,” Stolbach added.
Naturally, no attempt was made to find the people who sold Dolores O’Riordan her alcohol.
Reasonable people can disagree about the optimal policy for illegal drugs (or alcohol). Reason suggests that Perry might still be alive today if ketamine were not illegal without a prescription:
Ketamine was developed for use in anesthesia and pain relief before gaining a reputation as a club drug in the 1980s. Recent evidence suggests it can be used for treatment persistent depression And addiction. In the right context it is also quite safe: A Scientific review from 2022 Of the 312 overdoses and 138 deaths in which ketamine was present, “no cases of overdose or death were found associated with the use of ketamine as an antidepressant in a therapeutic setting.” . . . As researchers would do discoverPerry stayed clean through therapeutic ketamine treatments, but eventually became addicted to the treatment itself; When doctors refused to increase his dosage, he looked for the drug elsewhere.
Obviously, we don’t know for sure what would have happened if Perry had continued to have access to a legal source of the drug. O’Riordan drowned despite having access to legal alcohol. Perry would have done the same. All intoxicating drugs are dangerous to some extent. But it is also clear that illicit drug use carries greater risks because it is much more difficult to ensure that one gets the desired dose. Many fentanyl deaths occur in people who were not even aware they were consuming fentanyl.
My concern here is with the media. If voters want to make intelligent decisions about drug policy, it is essential that the media does not become part of government propaganda. So far, they have failed to provide objective information about the consequences of drug use because they report the consequences of illegal drug use in a radically different way than the way they report the consequences of legal drugs such as alcohol. Please give us the facts.