Rant: The press driving me nuts. Again.

It drives me mad when the press fails to do its job and instead chooses to chase something shiny. That's one reason I started this newsletter--the press too often fails to depict Florida as it is, not how people want to believe it is.

The President has nominated Dr. Casey Means to be Surgeon General. Dr. Means is an ally of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I believe all nominees to any position deserve the highest level of scrutiny. I am extremely disappointed that many nominees to the 47th Administration, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., did not receive the scrutiny their incredibly important offices need.

I'm all for scrutiny. I'm not saying I'm for Dr. Casey Means as Surgeon General. I don't know her work. What I've read in the Associated Press I find distressing--for example, her stance on pesticides in genetically modified foods is sophomoric and likely plain wrong. As is her connections through her brother to pharmaceutical companies.

What I do know the Associated Press put out a smug piece about how Dr. Means endorsed exploring psychedelics, including magic mushrooms, as if that is somehow shocking or disqualifying. There's ample evidence that the stigma against carefully controlled use of psychedelics may warrant further study. Which, as I read it, is all she proposes.

The AP spins it as if she's endorsing the use of illegal narcotics. The problem is, she operated out of Oregon, where the psychedelics she proposed people might want to try are legal.

As an aside, do spare me the "That's why I don't read the AP!" or "The AP is a liberal rag" stuff. I'm talking about the press in general and using the AP as an example.

There were many studies into psychedelic therapy until the hippies, literally the hippies, started getting into it and Nixon decided to up LBJ's nasty racialized war on crime to the beginnings of the war on drugs. There's a whole book on it called, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime.

From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime — Harvard University Press

Co-Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial PrizeA New York Times Notable Book of the YearA New York Times Book Review Editors’ ChoiceA Wall Street Journal Favorite Book of the YearA Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the YearA Publishers Weekly Favorite Book of the YearIn the United States today, one in every thirty-one adults is under some form of penal control, including one in eleven African American men. How did the “land of the free” become the home of the world’s largest prison system? Challenging the belief that America’s prison problem originated with the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society at the height of the civil rights era.“An extraordinary and important new book.”—Jill Lepore, New Yorker“Hinton’s book is more than an argument; it is a revelation…There are moments that will make your skin crawl…This is history, but the implications for today are striking. Readers will learn how the militarization of the police that we’ve witnessed in Ferguson and elsewhere had roots in the 1960s.”—Imani Perry, New York Times Book Review

Harvard University PressAndrew Preston

So, instead of exploring how Dr. Means may have a conflict of interest through her brother, who she wrote a book with about using these psychedelics and who owns, or at least owned, a psychedelic pharmaceutical company, the AP chose to instead plagiarize Richard Nixon's hatred of hippies playbook.

The AP piece does mention that the FDA recently found that a study on MDMA, known on the street as ecstasy or mollies, was too full of errors to justify allowing it to be used in therapy, but that is not the end of the story.

Two years ago Last Week Tonight with John Oliver did a feature piece on this very topic and when compared to the AP piece written this week, it just makes a mockery of the attempt to discredit Dr. Means via criticizing psychedelic assisted therapy. I will say, Oliver appears to mention the study that the FDA recently rejected about MDMA, but that's only a fraction of the story. Still, as is the norm, Oliver's team of researchers spent weeks on the topic, ran it past their team of lawyers and produced a piece on Psychedelic Assisted Therapy that far from praising the use of psychedelics in therapy, invites the audience to cautiously expect further studies and expanded regulations.

Watch it for yourself.

As for the headline "Trump surgeon general pick praised unproven psychedelic therapy, said mushrooms helped her find love," I'll point out that germ theory was also an unproven thing and "held in disdain in Europe" for centuries and I'm guessing when Louis Pasteur knew he was immunized from rabies, "Hey baby, guess who has two thumbs and can't get rabies--THIS guy," was an effective pick up line that could help him find love.