Fox News Relays “Weed Causes DNA Damage”
June 18th, 2009 by Russ
Fox News is about the last organization on the planet to willingly affiliate itself with genuine scientific inquiry. Except when it serves Fox’s agenda, that is. That’s why, this week, Fox News gleefully announced a study cleverly entitled, Marijuana Not Only Gets You High, It Damages Your DNA.
NORML’s blog was quick to offer a counterattack, though. They point out that not only are the claims made by the Fox article far stronger than those that the scientists made themselves, there is a huge body of countervailing evidence that has shown that weed not only is far less harmful than tobacco, it actually contains several cancer-preventing and regenerative compounds.
The study itself (cited by Fox News) is almost impossible to penetrate — it’s written entirely in lab-work jargon, obviously never intended for an average audience to interpret. Fortunately, we here at tFS specialize in sniffing-out bunkum and hooey from jargon-based sources.
The entire study that Fox News is so proud of, studies not the effects of cannibis per se, but of a compound called Acetaldehyde. In fact, the first sentence of their study says that:
Acetaldehyde is an ubiquitous genotoxic compound that has been classified as a possible carcinogen to humans.
Did you notice the word “ubiquitous” in there? Yeah, in plain human speak, the study is granting that this Acetaldehyde element is literally everywhere. It’s in ripe fruit, coffee, bread, and virtually all plant matter. So, you’re just as likely to consume Acetaldehyde from car exhaust, or sitting by a campfire, than from smoking marijuana.
And yet, Fox News didn’t title their story, Campfires Can Damage Your DNA. This is because Fox News has no particular agenda against campfires. But it does have an agenda against pot. It’s a good thing that the Fox folks don’t seem to be particularly literate when it comes to science, or they could be a lot more effective at spreading around their propaganda-fueled bullshit.
