One of the lessons House Speaker Newt Gingrich claims to have learned the hard way is that in a policy fight with President Clinton, the press will always side with Clinton. He got more proof last week. When the president jumped on Gingrich for declaring that teen smoking "has nothing to do with Joe Camel," reporters gleefully piled on. Not one questioned Clinton's assertion that "teen smoking has everything to do with Joe Camel."
They should have. The idea that the cartoon camel depicted in ads has lured kids into smoking is pure myth. Even the notion that 90 percent of kids recognize Joe Camel is a wild extrapolation.
It's based on interviews in 1991 with 23 preschoolers in Atlanta who suggested they were almost as aware of Joe Camel as they were of Mickey Mouse -- a finding that couldn't be replicated in other studies. Ever since, anti- tobacco zealots have insisted there's empirical evidence of Joe Camel's evil influence. The Federal Trade Commission tried, but has been unable to prove that Joe Camel ever caused a single teenager to begin smoking or continue smoking.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported on its front page last week that part of the reason for the recent increase in smoking by black teenagers has been that cigarettes are thought to prolong the marijuana high. Of course, the Times finds "experts" to say that "advertising has been the main factor" in increased smoking. (These experts don't manage to explain, however, why marijuana use among teenagers has also gone up in recent years, unless President "I didn't inhale" Clinton himself is taken as an advertisement.)
In any case, drug legalizers on the left are now painted into a corner. How to decriminalize marijuana now that it has been exposed, on the front page of the New York Times, no less, as a "gateway" drug to the real evil -- cigarette smoking.
Gasp.