Thursday, March 15, 2012 -

    BBC Waterloo Road Goes Reefer Madness Crazy

     Waterloo Road is described as “… a contemporary drama series set in a challenging comprehensive school in Rochdale.”  This week it looked more like a propaganda film, funded by Big Booze and GW Pharma, backed by the Home Office and full of lies, propaganda, sensationalist nonsense and misinformation.  Its latest storyline, flying in the face of all the scientific evidence, is that cannabis causes schizophrenia.

    Is this what the BBC calls responsible?  Is this travesty of truth and science the right way to educate and entertain children and families?

    Waterloo Road is produced by Shed Media, part of Warner Brothers.  Disturbingly it claims to be involved in producing “factual entertainment” programmes.  There are no facts in this programme though, just prohibitionist lies and scaremongering.  Whoever the scriptwriter and producer are they need to be held to account for this dreadful distortion of truth.  Their work is fiction, fantasy fiction of the most incredible and ridiculous kind but with a sinister, dishonest edge.

    You can watch the programme on the BBC iPlayer.

    Please complain about this programme and make your views known.

    BBC Complaints website

    Email BBC Points Of View: pov@bbc.co.uk

    Email Shed Media: info@shed-media.com

    I have made a complaint to the BBC and written to all my BBC editorial contacts as follows:

    Dear Sirs,

    Waterloo Road “Cannabis causes schizophrenia” storyline

    I am extremely concerned about this emerging Waterloo Road storyline. It is a very dangerous path for the BBC to be following which is more to do with propaganda than with science or evidence.

    I am the elected leader of Cannabis Law Reform (CLEAR), a registered UK political party and now the largest, membership based drug reform group that Britain has ever seen

    That this message about cannabis is dressed up in the empathetic guise of a soap opera makes it particularly insidious and powerful. It is the promotion of a myth in a way that is quite likely to cause fear and confusion amongst viewers. It is extremely irresponsible.

    I want to ensure that in any news, current affairs or discussion programmes where this storyline is mentioned that a proper balance is preserved. I am available for comment at anytime on 07*** ******.

    Despite the massive increase in cannabis use since the 1960s, there has been no increase at all in psychosis or schizophrenia. Research data in all countries across the world confirms this. In 2008, specifically in response to tabloid scare stories, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) commissioned scientists at Keele University to examine the evidence. They concluded that the rate and prevalence of schizophrenia was either “stable or declining”. (Ref. 1 below).

    The world’s leading experts on cannabis and links with psychosis are Professor Glyn Lewis and Dr Stanley Zammit of the Universities of Bristol and Cardiff. They are both on the record repeatedly stating that there is no proof of a causal link between cannabis use and psychosis.

    Hickman et al 2009 (Ref. 2 below), a study of all published evidence, shows that the risk of a correlation between lifetime cannabis use and a single diagnosis of psychosis is at worst 0.013% and probably less than 0.003%.

    This storyline is a fictionalised account of the scare stories that the Daily Mail and other tabloid newspapers have been running for more than 10 years. It is particularly disturbing and inaccurate that the subject of the story develops symptoms after he has stopped using cannabis. As fiction, you may claim that it is dealing with an extreme case but the effect will be to misinform and mislead. Certainly, children should not be using cannabis but misinformation and propaganda like this does more to cause confusion than to protect or inform.

    Please would you explain how you will be providing suitable opportunities to balance this sensationalist storyline with some facts and evidence?

    Yours sincerely,

    Peter Reynolds

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    3. Reefer Madness In A Final Frenzy
    4. Reefer Madness
    5. The cause of Reefer Madness V2? (and no, it’s not skunk)
    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Maharg-Smith/831904195 Maharg Smith

      an excellent letter peter and also a useful tool for us all to frame our complaints around
      …swift and accurate rebuttal is a powerful instrument in any campaign and for the publicly funded bbc to give sustenance to these untruths is a very poor use of not only licence payers money but resources which could be used more responsibly in childrens television

    • sykesbenson

      Nice one Peter mate, It reminds Me of BBC’s “Prisoners Wives” that was on recently…One of the characters “Gavin” blamed His Mum for letting Him “smoke too much” and though It wasn’t specific in what He was “smoking” too much of I think its pretty clear what they were getting at (seeing as the character was chubby, Shy and still had all His teeth so Crack and Heroin were out the window!;-).

      Then the Mother was portrayed having a couple of puffs on a Joint and getting stoned almost immediately laying back on the grass looking up at the sky all “hazy eyed” sayin’ basically since Gavin has been locked up Her life has been so much better (It was Her that shopped Him to the Police and was guiltstricken all the way through the series up until the very end) which I think was aimed at people beleiving that a couple of puffs of the “deadly weed” will make You lose all responsibility and scruples and just not care about things anymore!?!Lol:-)

      The Powers that be are getting desperate to be churnin’ bollocks like that out eh, The times they are-a-changin’ !:-)

    • Ian Singleton

      It’s interesting I think if you look at a lot of American TV.  Wilfred, Sons of Anarchy, Weeds, Bored to Death, the man characters all use cannabis without any negative contagions apart from comedy I don’t think they cast smoking cannabis in a bad light of course over here it’s one puff and you are instantly insane or, shooting up smack the next day, the UK seems to be going backwards at the moment.  It will be the medical side of the issue that will save it with all the evidence of it’s benefits.  A lot of Europe seem to be much more open minded than us.  I heard Peter on that radio show saying he’s thinks there will be some kind of medical cannabis by 2015 lets hope he’s right because that would be the first step to catching up with everyone else.

    • Anonymous

      Wow…..this is from yesterday; The Mail has gone completely bonkers:
      Using the calamitous, dark fate of an eight y/o Canadian girl, who has been abducted, raped and murdered on her way home from school, to bad-mouth the herb.

      ‘McClintic [the culprit] was high on Oxycontin, as she was most days, and had also smoked marijuana.’
      This is just…disgusting….so……inhumane; The things people will do hit the headlines – but see for Yourselves:
      http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2114924/Victoria-Tori-Stafford-trial-2012-Final-moments-girl-8-raped-murdered-Woodstock-Ontario.html

      r.i.p. Tori ;((

    • simonblackledge85

      go peter go peter go peter

    • http://twitter.com/ljscurtains ian jones

      done my complaint

    • steve a

      Nice one, well done.

      It is not all sweetness and light though.  According to my own rules, I now have to watch it to get an opinion.  Whoever said this campaign was going to be easy is a liar.
       

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Dean-Haveron/100003002968190 Dean Haveron

      Cannabis propaganda on TV, didn’t shock me to be honest. It was like the Movie Super 8, I thought that film was horrible, badly acted, badly wrote, but that’s my opinion. Anyway in the movie there is a random point were a guy – who is barely part of the story at all – who has been smoking a joint says he’s too stoned to drive, next scene he’s passed out and the kid goes “Oh my god, drugs are soo bad”. I felt like the entire movie was only made for that small anti-weed scene.

      Hypocrisy is unfortunately alive and very healthy all over the world.

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Dean-Haveron/100003002968190 Dean Haveron

      Very fucking disgusting, excuse the language, but it is just pure evil that the focus of the investigation will be Cannabis and that ‘reefer madness’ exists. I love coming here checking the news and writing the odd comment, but dam it gets depressing sometimes. You think some headway might be getting made and then this and the Waterloo Road situation happens.

    • Anonymous

      ‘Truth is treason in the empire of lies’ –Ron Paul

    • steve a

      I must have watched the wrong 4 episodes, I don’t recall that particular scene.

      I think our complaints are at best premature. Yes it does appear blindingly obvious where the plot is going but they may surprise us yet.  There is, for example, no “proof” that the substance smoked was actually nothing but cannabis and we know the dealer is duplicitous and there is plenty of room in the plot for him to turn out to be a deliberate poisoner and the cannabis itself shown to be innocent.

      Concerns, if I have any about the specifically drug related themes are more to do with dramatic effect and the like.  I have never witnessed the onset of phycosis and have no idea if how they showed it is how it is seen from behind the eyes of the sufferer and if it is a true reflection of reality then those poor people deserve much more understanding than we give them now.

      Also what school is it who lets a broken and bleeding pupil simply walk away from the premises without at least 500 precious teacher hours spent on the initial paperwork for an internal H&S disciplinary enquiry?

    • Anonymous

      Well I’m shocked – Watched this week’s episode and they actually told the truth…

      “They didn’t know if it was a predisposed condition and that the Skunk may have triggered it”

      Well close enough for once

    • Anonymous

      Problem is that they had already made the association  ’normal’ cannabis > 1 ‘skunk’ joint > schizophrenia.  According to my 82 year old mother it’s this new stuff that fills our mental hospitals.  She knows this is a fact and if the television says this too – then she’s right, pre-disposed or not.  I’m sure she’s not alone. 

    • http://www.peter-reynolds.co.uk Peter Reynolds

      Yes, that is what is so difficult about this.  They are being accurate but because the messages are delivered in a dramatic, emotional context, that is where the impact is made.  They have a good defence but the effect of this programme will be to link cannabis with schizophrenia.

      I think our best course is to try and insist that it must be balanced with factual, educational material.

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1264098675 Bill Bailey

      WTF this needs some serious attention thats sick even for someone on nasty addictive class A stuff what utter rubbish, an i hope the offenders have a Great *cough* time in prison >:-}

    • Anonymous

      “Associated with” is not the same as “causation.”

      Schizophrenia affects approximately one percent of the population. That percentage has held steady since the disease was identified, while the percentage of people who have smoked marijuana has varied from about 5% to around 40% of the general population.

      Despite a massive increase in the number of Australians consuming the drug since the 1960s, Wayne Hall of the University of Queensland found no increase in the number of cases of schizophrenia in Australia. Mitch Earleywine of the University of Southern California similarly found the same with regard to the US population and Oxford’s Leslie Iversen found the same regard to the population in the UK. According to Dr. Alan Brown, a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at Columbia University, “If anything, the studies seem to show a possible decline in schizophrenia from the ’40s and the ‘ 50″.

      Kindly Google any of the following combinations:

      Nicotine and Schizophrenia
      Alcohol and Schizophrenia
      Chocolate and Schizophrenia
      Sugar and Schizophrenia
      Gluten and Schizophrenia

      So should we hand the market in any of the above substances to criminals (which is what prohibition effectively does) because its use is ‘associated’ with a certain minute part of the population? Many bipolar patients misuse caffeine and tobacco in an effort to bring on a manic state, thus becoming a danger to themselves or others. Should tobacco and caffeine or whatever works for each individual be prohibited to boost ratings or rhetoric also? Where does it end?

      Persons with chronic mental illness die 25 years earlier than the general population does, and smoking is the major contributor to that premature mortality. This population consumes 44% of all cigarettes. 

      Cigarette smoking rates in the American population are approximately 23%, whereas rates of smoking in clinical and population studies of individuals with neuropsychiatric disorders are typically two- to four-fold higher.