Mission
Patient
Resources
Medical
Uses
News
Recipes
Search
Message
Board
Contribute
Links
Contact
|
|
FIGHTING "CHEECH AND CHONG" MEDICINE
5/19/02
I wanted to bring your attention to this article proving that
the genesis of ONDCP's entire paid media campaign was the passage of mmj
initiatives in 1996. Following Drug Czar John Walters recent pronouncement that
the ads actually do a poor job of influencing behavior (a topic I and other
journalists will be weighing in on: see my initial salvo in the WSJ letters
column, hopefully Monday, 5/20/02, or Tuesday and Cynthia Cotts, "Press Clips",
Village Voice next week), the government's paid propaganda campaign is
coming under renewed scrutiny. One bit of research, which I excerpt below,
failed to achieve the notice I believe it deserves. Based on court documents, it
proves the media campaign arose from governtment officials deciding to throw
public funds into the breach against Soros/Lewis/Sperling money.
Feel free to reprint this e-mail on
your site.
Regards,
Daniel Forbes
ddanforbes@aol.com
These excerpts are from
Salon, 7/27/00: Fighting 'Cheech and Chong' Medicine, the phrase
being Clinton Drug Czar, Barry McCaffrey's, not Salon's headline writers.
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1057/a07.html
FIGHTING "CHEECH AND CHONG" MEDICINE
By Daniel
Forbes (ddanforbes@aol.com)
Did The White House Drug Office Go Too Far
in Trying To Stop the Spread of Medical Marijuana Initiatives?
When voters in California and
Arizona passed ballot measures legalizing medicinal marijuana in November 1996,
White House drug czar Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey mobilized his troops
to combat the spread of what he had previously called "Cheech & Chong"
medicine.
McCaffrey quickly proposed that
doctors who "recommend or prescribe" marijuana be stripped of their DEA
registration -- that is, their ability to write prescriptions for controlled
substances -- and be excluded from treating Medicare and Medicaid
patients.
But a group of California
doctors and patient advocacy groups sued to enjoin those restrictions, and a
federal judge agreed. Now that same lawsuit provides evidence of a more
ambitious, but less well-known, effort by McCaffrey's Office of National Drug
Control Policy to stop the spread of state initiatives legalizing medical
marijuana -- an effort that, among other achievements, helped inspire the
ONDCP's controversial taxpayer-funded, anti-drug media crusade.
The cooperation of the ONDCP and its key ally,
the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, in the fight against medical marijuana
is a little known chapter in the annals of the nation's ongoing drug war.
SNIP
Within days of the California
and Arizona pot initiatives' passage, for instance, McCaffrey convened a
high-level meeting of some 40 government and private sector drug warriors to
plan a response to the medical marijuana threat. At least one participant
knew at the time that the meeting -- convened by federal officials to counter
the will of state voters -- would be controversial if word of it ever became
public.
"The other side would be
salivating if they could hear [the] prospect of [the] Feds going against the
will of the people," commented Robert Wood Johnson Foundation vice president
Dr. Paul S. Jellinek, according to notes of the meeting taken at the
time and uncovered by the California doctors' lawsuit.
Daniel Porterfield, who is currently vice
president of communications for Georgetown University, attended the meeting as a
deputy assistant secretary in charge of coordinating various anti-drug efforts
within Health and Human Services. He told Salon, "The reason for the
meeting was to organize the effort for the other 48 states."
One outcome of the meeting
was a determination to step up the media war against drugs, which helped lead to
ONDCP's paid media campaign.
SNIP
It was Nov. 14,
1996, just nine days after the passage of medical marijuana initiatives in
California and Arizona, that McCaffrey convened the first meeting at ONDCP's
Washington office.
The attendees included
then DEA administrator Thomas A. Constantine and three other DEA
officials; seven ONDCP staffers; and representatives of the FBI as well as the
U.S. Departments of Justice, Treasury, Education and Health and Human
Services. Also present were White House domestic policy adviser Leanne
Shimabukuro and public liaison Christa Robinson, plus eight senior executives
from private groups supportive of the drug war, including the president of the
Partnership for a Drug-Free America.
SNIP
The two sets of contemporaneous
notes surfaced as part of the discovery process in the federal lawsuit Conant
vs. McCaffrey, currently under adjudication in the U.S. District
Court for the Northern District of California. The lawsuit was filed in
response to Gen. McCaffrey's formal policy statement -- issued Dec.
30, 1996, at a press conference attended by Attorney General Janet Reno, Health
and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala and a DEA official -- in which he
threatened to revoke the federal prescription-writing privileges of doctors who
recommended or prescribed medical marijuana to their patients, bar them from
treating Medicare and Medicaid patients and criminally prosecute them. The
plaintiffs were granted a preliminary injunction; the next court date is
Aug. 3.
Attorneys for the
plaintiffs provided Salon with copies of documents the federal government has
made available to them as required by the court in the case's discovery
process.
SNIP
According to the
notes, James E. Copple, then president and CEO of the Community Anti-Drug
Coalition of America, told his colleagues, "Need to frame the issue properly --
expose this as legalizers using terminally ill as props." Maricopa County
District Attorney Richard Romley, who led the Arizona delegation, stated that,
"Even though California and Arizona are different prop[osition]s, the strategy
of proponents is the same. It will expand throughout the nation if we all
don't react."
As summarized in the
documents' clipped parlance, Copple also told those gathered at the meeting,
"We'll work with Arizona and California to undo it and stop the spread of
legalization to other 48 states.
Twenty-seven states have the potential." He added, "Need to go state by
state. $ to do media." And Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates, long a
prominent critic of medical marijuana, is quoted as saying, "Legalizers are
going national.
We need to get organized
quickly to counter the Americans for Compassionate Use" -- a pro-medical-use
group.
In addition to Copple's statement
regarding media funding, comments from two executives of the private Partnership
for a Drug-Free America suggest that the meeting was a major catalyst in
replacing the nonprofit advertising and media industry umbrella group's then
nearly decade-old, donated-media public service campaign with a taxpayer funded
effort.( PDFA is an unpaid consultant in ONDCP's media campaign, and its name
appears on all of the campaign's advertising. ) As PDFA executive
vice-president Mike Townsend stated at the meeting, "National Partnership [PDFA]
concerned about what they can do about spending $ to influence legislation."
One attendee who asked not to be identified
said, "I recall a general discussion of the media campaign, what should and
shouldn't be done."
PDFA president Richard
Bonnette laid out the challenge to the group. "We lost Round I -- no
coordinated communication strategy.
Didn't have media," the notes quote Bonnette telling his colleagues. One
participant not clearly identified in the notes asked the gathering, "Who will
pay for national sound bites? Campaign will require serious media and serious $."
PDFA's Townsend suggested the group
should reach out to "California parents" and, according to the notes, said the
effort required "$175 million. Try to get fedl $." In fact, that was the
amount backers of the anti-drug media campaign first asked Congress for,
according to Rep. John L. Mica, R-Fla., chair of the Criminal
Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources subcommittee of the House Government
Reform Committee.
SNIP
During the
meeting, attendees viewed television commercials paid for during the elections
by proponents of the medical marijuana initiatives. The notes summarize
the remarks of Orange County Sheriff Gates as follows: "Money made the
diff. on [California's] Prop 215. $2 million spent - advertising
campaign - Drug Policy Foundation - Soros $." The last references are to a
reform group and billionaire financier George Soros, a major financial backer of
medical use initiatives.
A second
participant, who requested anonymity, told Salon, "People were talking of Soros
money at the meeting. That was a real topic, and that there was limited
federal money that could be used. We were trying to counter the California
and Arizona initiatives. But at that point there was no money." Eleven
months later, a five-year, $2 billion ( half public, half private ) federal
campaign was instituted to shape the views of Americans of all ages regarding
illegal drugs. Asked two weeks ago whether the intent was to limit further
state initiatives to approve usage of medical marijuana, another participant who
asked not to be identified said, "Yes. They wanted to influence public
opinion. There was a lot of talk that this was the tip of the iceberg of a
national campaign to legalize marijuana, period."
SNIP
Following the ONDCP-convened meeting, PDFA
chairman James E. Burke moved to take action on his colleagues'
sentiments, including their desire for federal money.
Working closely with Rep. Rob Portman,
R-Ohio, he began a heavy lobbying campaign in Congress to transform his
organization's model of donated ads into the current taxpayer funded
program.
Portman's former chief of
staff, John Bridgeland, told this reporter last year, "Burke came to Portman,
came up and wowed a lot of folks on the Hill."
Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., chair of
the House Appropriations subcommittee which funds the drug office, and the
self-styled "chief appropriator" of the ONDCP media campaign, said last year,
"We were convinced by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America to spend tax
dollars." Finally, testifying before the Senate Appropriations Committee on
February 3, 2000, ONDCP campaign media director Alan Levitt stated, "PDFA is a
key campaign partner. Mr. Jim Burke, chairman of the Partnership,
has been one of the strongest advocates for this public-private media campaign."
For its part, PDFA has said that the
public campaign was necessary because privately donated advertising was drying
up. But while PDFA's donated advertising declined in the early '90s, it
didn't exactly evaporate. According to Competitive Media Reporting, a
company that tracks advertising spending, the value of PDFA's anti-drug campaign
was larger than the advertising budgets of many of the country's most
established brands.
With $278
million worth of donated advertising time and space in 1995 and $252 million in
1996 ( down from 1991's peak of $367 million ), PDFA was the fourth and fifth
largest advertised "brand" in the country -- competing alongside companies like
AT&T and Burger King for the public's attention.
It should be acknowledged that the media
campaign has never directly tackled the issue of medical marijuana in its paid
advertising. And yet fully half of the current ONDCP advertising budget
for a campaign nominally geared toward curtailing youth drug use is actually
directed at adults. According to a statement issued on Jan. 18, in
response to a Salon article about its anti-drug script-doctoring relationship
with television networks, the "pro bono [sic] match component" of the ad program
has "generated over 100 million teen and tween [read: pubescent] impressions and
250 million adult impressions."
SNIP
|
