Kevin Sabet gets carte blanche to claim Massachusetts marijuana users are addicted to stoned driving for Wall Street, or some nonsense like that
It has been an awful month for media aimed squarely at adult-use cannabis in Massachusetts. I know that I have claimed such things before, but considering the nature of the anti-marijuana propaganda which is propagating widely, it’s no exaggeration.
In the past week alone, WCVB ran a feature about some “researcher [who] says [the] results of [a] new nationwide study should be [a] wake-up call regarding cannabis use,” while the Washington Post dug up the cranky old bones of libertarian loser George Will to lean in. In a piffle titled “Rethinking the haphazard marijuana social experiment,” Will attempts to rationalize why recreational cannabis is the rare industry for which he is anxiously calling for more regulation.
But of all the gutless crud coating the minds of Massachusetts media consumers these last couple of particularly painful days, a segment on NPR’s All Things Considered hurt the worst. Now burned deep into the consciousness of countless boomers and moderate liberals, it centers a lengthy one-sided interview with an utterly shameless Kevin Sabet, president of the Virginia-based Smart Approaches to Marijuana which is funding ballot Question 8 in Mass to close adult-use pot shops.
The eight-plus minute piece ran on GBH in Greater Boston, and on its website. The headline: “Recreational marijuana repeal supporter says potency, addiction risk warrant legalization rollback.”
The ensuing interview is tough to stomach. I understand that it is difficult to counter every lie that an insane fabulist like Sabet belches up, but there’s really little effort by the host to check this guy. And the level of bullshit is ludicrous. Here are some standout whoppers to listen for if you hear a prohibitionist bark …
From the start, in his literal first sentence after thanking the host, Sabet lies about the nature of the so-called Coalition for a Healthy Massachusetts behind Question 8. Despite knowing well that the out-of-state group he runs was the sole funder supporting the signature collection effort, and that the gathering of voter names was fraught by controversy involving their paid canvasser bullies, he goes out of his way to mischaracterize all of the above. His words:
I think the reason almost 100,000 Massachusetts residents signed this petition, which was really a grassroots effort, was that they’d been lied to about what marijuana was supposed to bring. They thought it was really about freedom, about just a low-potency plant that makes you a little high and a little giggly, a little munchy.
The next major offense is their letting Sabet rant about potency—to the point that someone who doesn’t know very much about cannabis chemistry might start to think what he’s saying is true. And it isn’t. The guy is picking cherries and serving the pits as meals, and without an interviewer who is willing to follow up, he lets it fly. Sabet is so comfy that he rolls with his schtick comparing weed to tobacco and opioids.
In SAM fairy tale land, the billions in economic benefit to the commonwealth as a result of cannabis tax revenue are “drops in the bucket.” Sabet also claims that the impacts and cost of regulating legalized weed outweigh the hundreds of millions of dollars that fund public programs each year. Here’s what the liar has to say with a statistic plucked right from his crack for topping:
And really, we forget to count the costs, you know, for every car crash, because there’s been a huge increase in car crashes in Massachusetts. … It’s actually 85% of marijuana users in the state now admit to driving right after they use, 50% within an hour or less.
There’s a lot more worthy of correction, but my big question for now is, Who made Kevin Sabet a spokesperson for poor Black kids? I guess GBH did …
Let’s be honest. If you’re a young Black kid without a lot of opportunity because society has basically said that, you know, your opportunity is going to come from marijuana, it’s not going to come from, you know, actual housing, healthcare, education reform, which is what we need. You’re going to have a much harder time clawing back from maybe your marijuana addiction because there are so many kids now that are actually — I know it sounds crazy to some people, but they do meet the clinical definition of addiction. One-in-three now, according to the HHS, of users, because of the potency. And that’s going to be a lot harder for that poor Black kid to claw out of than an upper-class white kid out of, you know, another part of town.
Bonus: Read this piece that I actually wrote for (W)GBH back in 2014 titled, “An Open Letter To Journalists About Pot Prohibition.” In it I warned, “Unless hard facts and compassion take journalistic precedent over stubborn stoner taboos, you’ll end up on the same side of recorded history as homophobes and climate change deniers.”
