Unlike Watergate, the question isn't really what Peter Bensinger
        said or at what point he knew he was lying: the real question
        is why the hell do so many people believe him? Also unlike 
        Watergate, the question when resolved - to the effect that
        either Bensinger was a moron or a liar when he said these things-
        wont' clear the air of his presence. Peter Bensinger is not a
        president, physician or pharmacist. He's the director of the U.S.
        justice department's Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which
        is to say he's just another cop when all is said and done, and
        cops are expected to lie and fuck up and are routinely forgiven
        for it.
 
        At Quantico, Virginia, Bensinger was actually addressing other 
        cops, the 1978 graduation class of the FBI. thus a delicious irony
        occurred: the head of the DEA, which under Nixon profited 
immeasurably 
        by the exposure of the FBI's filthy behavior against civil-rights 
        and anti-war dissendents, was either misleading or deluding young
        aspirants to the very agency  that the DEA has already sucked 
virtually
        dry of law enforcement power.
 
        Weeks later, Bensinger repeated the same falsehoods before another 
        bunch of cops at the annual International Police Chiefs Convention in 
        New York City. This global menage of law-enforcing storm troopers 
        was probably being knowingly misled by the DEA chief. Somewhere 
between
        Quantico and New York, the National Organization for the Reform of
        Marijuana Laws {NORML} has determined, Bensinger was personally
        aprised by a top AMerican Cancer Society doctor that no, grass as it
        is used socially is nowhere near as carcinogenic as tobbaco. But 
ince
        the Quantico address had picked up so little press, Bensinger 
obviously
         felt obliged to repeat if verbatim in media-infested New York City.
        Sure enough, next day the New York Post [a sensationalistic tabloid
        owned by Rupert Murdoch] gave it a whole half page of dense-faced 
type,
        with photos. Within another month, NBC ran a special hour one sunbday
        night called  "Reading, Writing, and Reefer." in which Edwin Newman
        gravely informed American parents and children that a single joint
        of marijuana was as effective as 116 tobacco cigarettes at inducing
        lung cancer.
        
        By now, the glad news that grass causes cancer and kills babies has
        gone fourth from the DEA to all quarters of the earth. See, although
        the DEA is strictly a law-enforcement uniut - a bunch of cops -
        It's spokepersons are widely regarded as 'experts' on dope. Regional
        Regional DEA chiefs and agents are continually in demand for 
        lectures in schools and before civic groups, and media people like 
        Edwin Newman routinely consult the DEA on matters pertaining to 
        'narcotics'. Unhappily, being just a bunch of Cops, these local DEA
        bozos wouldn't have a chance of intrepreting the latest highly
        technical scientific documents on marijuana research; so they pick
        up on speeches by biggies like Bensinger and parrot them to the 
        locals.
 
        And this is how it shows up in your neiborhood paper and on national
        telly: warning, the federal government has determined that grass is
        several hundred times more carcinogenic than tobacco and murders
        babies in the womb. News reporters, while generally brighter than
        cops, are not very often interested in substantiation allegations of
        this nature. Like most of us, they consider research scientist to
        be a forbidding, semi-alien life form and wouldn't know how to go
        about getting in touch with them, even if they had the time, energy
        and technical vocabulary to do so. So they run this horseshit as
        proven fact out of ignorance and inertia, despite their having been
        regularly made into assholes by so many narc-squad dope scares in
        the past.
        
        At High Times, though, we have people who can research scientific
        stuff and interpret it: they've done that with Bensinger's New York
        speech, in which was put fourth the nugget of the DEA's latest 
        anti-pot 'medical offensive'. The point-by-point results are
        arresting, illuminating, and highly comical, when you compare the
        truth with what a bunch of cops extorted out of it.
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        'there will be more to come...
--- Maximus/2 3.01
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