Reflections on Playboy: A new <i>Playboy</i> article believes the meth scare; the <i>Playboy</i> Advisor believes in storks

June 14, 2007

A new Playboy article believes the meth scare; the Playboy Advisor believes in storks

Obviously, I made up the second half of the post title. I only wish I could say the same for the first. The July issue’s “The Dark Side of the Summer of Love” by Frank Owen should have been called “The Journalistic Dark Side of Frank Owen.” His account of Dr. David E. Smith’s experiences founding and running the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic 40 years ago misses the real story with a pattern of thinking doomed to repeat drug-war history.

Neither Owen nor Smith takes any care in distinguishing behavioral cause and effect when describing the hustlers, thugs, and con men who destroyed that San Francisco utopia—and who also, for some reason, tended to like crystal meth a lot more than the general square or hippie population. If he won’t try meth, can Owen at least do math? Crunching his numbers from page 128—“Today 10.4 million people have used crystal meth at least once in their life. There are an estimated 257,000 addicts.”—reveals that more than 97% of those who dare to try the stuff don’t have the irresistible urge to try it again. Hmm. Could it be that the dangers of a substance associated with certain unsavory people (accurately or inaccurately, it shouldn’t matter in terms of good civic logic) have been overstated in a spirit of moral panic? Does that ever happen? Unless you’re seriously worried about the public threat of, say, chocolate addiction, you have to admit that addictive potential does not justify prohibition of any drug, anyway. If you don’t respect the difference between correlation and causation, you deserve to drown by leaving your mouth open in a rainstorm and you just might be dumb enough to do it.

Immediately after undermining his own point of view with those stats, Owen places the blame for meth’s “exploding labs, ...overdoses, [and] ...battles with law enforcement” on what happened way back in 1967. The fact that prohibition itself causes or exacerbates all those problems in 2007 is completely overlooked. The article can’t even keep its story straight on the kind of person that crystal meth turns you into. Dangerous sociopaths preying on the innocent during the Summer of Love aren’t the only meth lovers. It’s also “a substance we know today as the favorite high of hillbillies, right-wing preachers and suburban moms.” (p. 58) Fortunately for Owen, most citizens don’t notice when the official story about a drug suddenly changes—or when groups of other citizens presumably out of earshot are demonized.

The annual benefit parties for the Marijuana Policy Project that I’ve had the pleasure of attending are consistent with the best of Playboy’s socially libertarian legacy. The top-billed article of July, on the other hand, depresses me with its intellectual laziness. I need to light up my bong and sip some Peruvian coca tea.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 11:53 AM

koikana left this comment at June 18, 2007 4:15 PM
Very interesting... although I wasn't aware (being someone who doesn't really look at playboy that often) that that was something they write about!

Erin O'Brien left this comment at June 19, 2007 4:08 PM
Oh dear.

You might want to read Girl Next Door No More and a post on why Playboy images are more like cartoons than photos.

All of which is a shame, because according to your post, it seems there's probably still some good copy popping up once in a while in the magazine. To bad all those horrible photoshopped pictures get in the way.

Shantra Harmony left this comment at June 29, 2007 8:19 PM
This is a great post, Brian! Nothing irritates me more than when people (intentionally or not), equate correlation with causation. Great analysis!

June 14, 2007

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