5 Things to Know About Cannabis

5 Things the Corporate Media Don't Want You to Know About Cannabis

By Paul Armentano, AlterNet. Posted September 23, 2009.

Recent scientific reports suggest that pot doesn't destroy your brain, that it doesn't cause lung damage like tobacco -- but you won't hear it in the corporate media.

Editor's note: Come see Paul Armentano and many other top marijuana experts and advocates in discussion at NORML's 38th national conference taking place this week from September 24–26 in San Francisco. Click here to learn more.

Writing in the journal Science nearly four decades ago, New York State University sociologist Erich Goode documented the media's complicity in maintaining cannabis prohibition.

He observed: "[T]ests and experiments purporting to demonstrate the ravages of marijuana consumption receive enormous attention from the media, and their findings become accepted as fact by the public. But when careful refutations of such research are published, or when later findings contradict the original pathological findings, they tend to be ignored or dismissed."

A glimpse of today's mainstream media landscape indicates that little has changed -- with news outlets continuing to, at best, underreport the publication of scientific studies that undermine the federal government's longstanding pot propaganda and, at worst, ignore them all together.

Here are five recent stories the mainstream media doesn't want you to know about pot:

1. Marijuana Use Is Not Associated With a Rise in Incidences of Schizophrenia

2. Marijuana Smoke Doesn't Damage the Lungs Like Tobacco

3. Cannabis Use Potentially Protects, Rather Than Harms, the Brain

4. Marijuana Is a Terminus, Not a 'Gateway,' to Hard Drug Use

5. Government's Anti-Pot Ads Encourage, Rather Than Discourage, Marijuana Use

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