The double standards of the New York Times are on clear display in the newspaper's coverage of illegal drugs.
Sunday's New York Times style section carries a mostly laudatory feature about parents turning to drugs during the pandemic: "Though there aren't reliable statistics that break down parents' use of alcohol, marijuana and anti-anxiety medications specifically, overall adult use of these substances has gone up since the pandemic began, said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse."
The Times doesn't really distinguish between "anti-anxiety medications" that are doctor-prescribed and FDA-approved, and marijuana, which has no FDA approval as an anti-anxiety medication. When President Trump suggests that people use hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19, the Times goes crazy about how unscientific he supposedly is. But with marijuana for parents, the fervor that the Times usually brings to its support for FDA approval and large, randomly controlled trials suddenly falls by the wayside. It suggests that what the Times really cares about isn't science but something else.
Likewise, a book review complains:
Feuer tells a brisk, compact tale, but he could have used a few pages more to take us to the other side of the wall of mirrors. He could have told, for example, how in the late 1970s, under intense pressure from the United States, the Mexican Army launched Operación Cóndor in the thickly forested Sinaloa mountains, where many of today's most important traffickers were born. The brutality was overwhelming to impoverished peasants who had found a way out of raw hunger and into peaceful poverty by cultivating marijuana and poppy.
The Times review glorifies these "peaceful" peasant poppy farmers, but the end result was opiate addicts in U.S. cities and towns. The Times has elsewhere been campaigning against the Sackler family for its supposed role in the opioid epidemic. Passages like that one, though, suggest that what the Times is really against isn't drug abuse but billionaires, or philanthropic Jewish billionaires.