Dear Editor,
Sunday Stabroek recently took the irresponsible step of publishing an article on teen drug use in which the reporter and editors took absolutely no measures to check facts offered by a supposed expert or give opposing viewpoints.
In the November 3 article, your paper essentially allowed a drug counsellor to voice misinformation about the way marijuana functions. The most outrageous claim comes right at the beginning where the counsellor alleges that drug use has no psychological roots. This is completely unfounded in the science of addiction. In recent years medical studies have found that people medicate themselves with street drugs when they suffer from depression, anxiety, psychosis and other mental problems.
This has led to street drugs being associated in the public mind with mental problems, but it is not the drugs that cause the mental problems. It is the mental problems that lead to drug use. Having access to safer pharmaceutical treatments leads patients away from the criminal environment of street drugs.
Did Stabroek News seek any comment from the mental health professionals working in Guyana to verify the radical claims it printed? Did it try to verify the claims on any of the readily-accessible scientific resources available online? The article should not have steered people away from the medical help they need by bad-mouthing psychiatric therapy.
Next, the article allows the counsellor to claim that “all they have to do is smoke [marijuana] once and they get addicted.” Well, everyone who has ever used marijuana is laughing now. How could you publish a claim that is so patently untrue? I challenge you or the counsellor to find one documented case of marijuana causing addiction after one use.
Never mind the fact that marijuana isn’t even physically addictive! (Note I said ‘physically’. Once I wrote a letter to Stabroek News claiming that marijuana wasn’t addictive and you made sure to point out that it was not physically addictive, but allegedly was psychologically addictive. I wonder where your due diligence was this time in vetting the counsellor’s lack of facts.)
Ironically, after making unsupported claims about how addictive marijuana was, your source claimed that marijuana use didn’t come from difficulties in life, but was a choice. If it’s a choice, it couldn’t be very addictive. If it’s addictive, then it’s not much of a choice. This man is spewing nonsense out of both ends.
Your source then claims that modern marijuana is “riddled with dangerous chemicals.”
Well, name one.
Please.
Name one of these impurities and explain how it’s supposedly getting into the marijuana. Especially in Guyana. From Essequibo to Linden to Corentyne, one thing we Guyanese have is good farmland where our skilled farmers can grow excellent weed with organic fertilizers like bat droppings.
Did you make any effort to substantiate this chemicals claim from a reputable source? Did you even ask the counsellor from where he dreamed it up? Since when is a journalist (and their editor) supposed to just accept someone’s word without corroboration?
Near the end of your unbalanced article you brought up a case history of Jane and her son. You used language to make it seem like Jane’s son was acting violently and aggressively because of his marijuana use, but you also mention that the boy was an alcohol user. Hello! Did it occur to you that maybe alcohol, a drug well-documented to encourage belligerence, was the real problem?
I hope you remember the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. If you lie to people and mislead them, they stop believing you. I think preventing teen drug use is an important goal. I am not a drug user and I actively discourage drug use. But kids laugh at the kind of sloppy alarmism you displayed and ignore the good advice that comes with it, because they dismiss it all as lies.
Honest information is the only way to ever win over teens. On November 3rd, Stabroek News did not supply honest information.
Yours faithfully,
Imam Baksh
Editor’s note
A great deal of research has been done on marijuana, some of it producing contradictory results. Much of what is written about the drug, therefore, is a generalization, often with less than total applicability to the body of users as a whole. Having said that, it is not, however, generally accepted that marijuana use by teens always ‒ or even frequently ‒ has psychiatric roots, although it may well have in some instances. Various factors could come into play such as availability, as the counsellor suggested, and peer pressure. The counsellor consequently rightly drew attention to the fact that parents frequently confused signs of drug use in teens with symptoms of mental illness, and as a result failed to have the drug problem addressed.
The statement about addiction following the single use of marijuana should have been qualified; however, persons suffering from an addictive personality (which is thought to be partly heritable) may very well become addicted after their first encounter with a drug or with alcohol, for example.
As for the dangerous chemicals in marijuana, it is accepted in many other parts of the world that the narcotic is sometimes contaminated depending on the conditions under which it is grown in addition to the actions of the sellers trying to make as much profit as possible. Marijuana is also thought to be a much more potent drug now than it was in the 1960s (‘skunk’). Britain has upgraded marijuana from a Class C drug (less dangerous) to a Class B drug, although it must be said that that decision has not met with universal acceptance. Furthermore, it is not the case that all the marijuana consumed here is locally grown, and in any case no one knows exactly under what conditions the local narcotic is cultivated in all locations.
Finally it cannot be said with any certainty whether the aggression displayed by Jane’s son was caused by marijuana, alcohol or a combination of both. What can be said with certainty is that he had an addiction problem which was in need of treatment, and which he eventually received.
