Reply #11: Why did Mr. Walters get at least three times the air time as Mr. Myers? [View All]

[Beam Me Up]

Mr. Walters was allowed to bloviate with his predictable and out-dated drug-warrior rhetoric without interruption. Mr. Myers was allowed only a few seconds to present an opposing point of view. Although he countered Walters' rhetoric directly and factually this presentation can hardly be called a fair discussion or debate on this issue.

The American people have been misinformed for years by the media and the government regarding the inherent harms associated with marijuana use. Typically these harms are exaggerated completely out of proportion with the harms caused by other perfectly legal drugs including alcohol, nicotine and prescription medications. This presentation opens with the assertion that marijuana has now been "engineered" to be far more potent than the ditch weed that was available in the 1960s. Certainly more potent strains have been developed but they were always available. Anyone smoking Thai sticks in the 1960s and '70s would find themselves knocked on their ass for hours. But in point of fact it is an irrelevant claim because the average marijuana user knows how to moderate his dosage. More potent marijuana means less ingestion to achieve the desired effect but this observation is not brought forward in the opening sequence leaving the uninformed viewer with the perception that marijuana, today, is a far more potentially dangerous substance than it was forty years ago. This is a highly debatable contention.

How can we have an open, honest and fair discussion or debate -- as proposed by Governor Schwarzenegger -- about the benefits and shortcomings of marijuana legalization when corporate media continues to distort the presentation of this issue?