Project Censored

1) The annual unveiling of Project Censored. "We define censorship as any interference with the free flow of information in American society," says project director Peter Phillips in this year's press release. "Corporate media in the United States is [sic] interested primarily in entertainment news to feed their bottom-line priorities. Very important news stories that should reach the American public often fall on the cutting-room floor to be replaced by sex scandals and celebrity updates." And, once every year in the altie press, those stories are replaced by a meaningless list.
-- By Matt Palmquist

Care With Facts

The New England Journal of Medicine is peeved at Supervisor Gavin Newsom. The San Francisco politician's "Care Not Cash" campaign has been using the prestigious journal's logo on its literature, implying that journal articles uphold Newsom's central claim -- that reducing General Assistance cash benefits to homeless people will reduce drug use. "We do not permit anyone to use our logo," says a spokeswoman for the Journal. "We have given the matter over to our legal department to handle."

The logo appears on campaign literature captioned, "The New England Journal of Medicine has found that cash-only systems cost lives." Newsom says that he talked to the Journal and that using the logo was "inappropriate, a mistake."

Apparently, that wasn't Newsom's only mistake.

Neither of the two Journal articles in question fully supports Newsom's argument that stripping the homeless of cash is effective medical or social policy. One of the articles seems to directly oppose Newsom's thesis.

Andrew Shaner, M.D., authored one of the articles that Newsom says he read as support for his Care Not Cash position. The 1995 study points out that -- among cocaine-addicted veterans who are schizophrenic and, largely, African-American -- drug use peaked after the arrival of disability payments at the first of the month. It concludes, "Simply discontinuing the disability payments will not eliminate drug abuse and might exacerbate hunger and homelessness."

Shaner, who is associate director of mental health for the Greater Los Angeles Health Care System and a professor of psychiatry at UCLA Medical School, is not pleased that his study is being incorrectly characterized in San Francisco. "It makes people think that I am an archconservative," he complains in a telephone interview. "Of course, some homeless addicts spend GA money on drugs. But taking the money away is not the solution." He says that the people he studied have very little in common with the diverse population of homeless people in San Francisco; for one thing, his subjects were all chronic cocaine users, all male, and mostly black. Not to mention 100 percent schizophrenic.

A 1999 Journal article frequently cited by the Proposition N campaign as supporting the Care Not Cash proposal does make a correlation between disability payments (rather than General Assistance or welfare payments) and deaths from substance abuse. But the study, which reviewed 30 million death certificates, did not focus on homeless people, or even poor people, because, "[i]nformation on income was not available from the death certificates. However, race was indicated on the death certificates, and in the United States, nonwhites are considerably more likely to be poor than whites." In other words, the study simply examined death rates of nonwhite people, of all incomes, from substance abuse, in connection with disability payments.

The strained use of social science to back the Care Not Cash effort does not, apparently, stop with the New England Journal of Medicine.

Prop. N proponents, including Newsom, frequently refer to "Rand reports" as evidence that reducing, or eliminating, biweekly checks, and replacing them with housing, drug treatment, and other benefits, will benefit homeless people. But a Rand organization report that deals with the effects of the federal government's 1994 elimination of Social Security payments for substance abusers in Los Angeles completely contradicts Prop. N's main "scientific" prop.

The December 2000 report, available on the Web site of UC's California Policy Research Center (www.ucop.edu/cprc/ podus.pdf), concluded that taking cash payments from substance abusers increased financial burdens in other areas of government, including emergency health care, and did not appear to help the addicts recover. "Loss [of cash payments] was associated with more unstable housing, greater incarceration, lack of stable employment, and decreased income." Rand's researchers, who said they were surprised by the results of their investigation, recommended that the federal government restore cash benefits to people with "disabling substance abuse."
-- By Peter Byrne