The Liverpool Echo succumbs to reefer madness

March 21st, 2007

It’s no secret that I can’t abide local papers. They’re predominantly boring, badly written, poorly researched versions of national newspapers. The Liverpool Echo is no exception. They’ve managed to irritate me greatly twice this week. Firstly, they published a story about a man climbing the Beetham Tower West crane (accompanied with a picture of the wrong building) when I’d climbed it months prior and sent them a press release with spectacular pictures. Second, they published this patent nonsense:

SUPER-strength cannabis so potent that just one puff can cause schizophrenia is being grown by Merseyside drug gangs.

Say what? Was author Ben Rossington freaking high when he wrote this? Just one paragraph later, the intrepid journalist begins his climbdown.

Experts warn this new strain of cannabis is so incredibly strong it can bring on the early signs of schizophrenia from a single puff.

Ah, so we’ve gone from causing schizophrenia to stimulating early symptoms of schizophrenia. Regardless of this being a humiliating sample of hysteria, it’s also not true. In fact, the entire Echo story is nothing but a poorly written, badly researched rehash (no pun intended) of a similar story found in the Independent on Sunday last weekend. And that story was itself an unfortunate slice of melodrama that was a sad day for an otherwise quality paper. Over at Transform Drug Policy Foundation, Steve R has written an excellent debunking of the IoS article.

Not to be outdone by a broadsheet, Ben Rossington also inserts this curious factoid:

Research to be published this week in The Lancet is said to show skunk, which has high levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), is more addictive and socially dangerous than class A drugs such as LSD and ecstasy.

Before you credit Ben with any original research, have a look here, where the same sentence appears word-for-word in a Daily Mail article published two days before the Echo broke this sordid tale. What’s more, anyone with even a cursory knowledge of drugs knows that neither LSD nor ecstasy are addictive, and calling them “socially dangerous” is laughable at best. If we’re going to start worrying about “socially dangerous” activities, I think alcohol would be a better place to start. As it turns out, the study referred to here did find that alcohol was more “socially dangerous” than cannabis!

Is the Liverpool Echo so tired that the best it can manage is weak imitations of critically flawed articles? It took me less than an hour to dig out the flaws in this story, why couldn’t the Echo be bothered to do the same?

Entry Filed under: General

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