South Carolina has a bill in the works to become the 34th state in the nation to legalize medical marijuana, and Attorney General Alan Wilson is freaking out. He went to the Statehouse lobby and stood in the middle of a row of serious-faced white-robed doctors and called marijuana “the most dangerous drug” in America. Marijuana, he says, causes addiction, traffic accidents, and deaths by overdose. ("A fatal dose of marijuana would require ingestion of fifteen hundred pounds in fifteen minutes," says David Schmader, author of Weed: The User's Guide.)
From the Post and Courier:
“They use words like stoned, high, wasted, baked, fried, cooked, chonged, cheeched, dope-faced, blazed, blitzed, blunted, blasted, danked, stupid, wrecked — and that’s only half the words they use,” Wilson said. “Are these consistent with something that describes a medicine?”
Someone needs to use that as a song sample.
Image: Screenshot of Andrew Brown's Twitter video Read the rest
The video above is an anti-drug PSA from the early 1970s, in which a slick talking magician offers drugs to children on a playground. "Hey kiddies, gather round, the man with the goodies is here!" he says as he sets up a small performance table and uses magical flourishes to show off his illicit wares. One of the kids in the audience, playing the part of a heckler, challenges the prestidigitating pusher at every turn with spoilers like "They say amphetamines can cause something like schizophreem," "Withdrawals from barbituates can cause convulsions," and "[LSD can cause] bad trips and a chance of chromosome damage."
When I started reading Malcolm Gladwell's latest New Yorker article, Is Smoking Marijuana as Safe as We Think?, I was reminded of this commercial -- specifically, the part where the magician, annoyed by the kid's heckling, makes a marijuana bouquet spontaneously appear in one hand and a joint in the other. He says to the kid, "Grass. Anything wrong with pot?" The kid replies, "They're not sure yet, they just started studying about it." Gladwell starts off his article like this kid (who was correct in 1973), by arguing that we still don't know anything about marijuana's effects. The problem is, it's 2019 and Gladwell's article disingenuously cherry-picks some facts and fails to disclose other facts as part of what seems to be a strong anti-pot agenda.
On Twitter, science journalist Dave Levitan pointed out a number of major problems with Gladwell's piece. For example, Gladwell wrote "smoking pot is widely supposed to diminish the nausea associated with chemotherapy. Read the rest
Here's the joke: Stoner Sloth is a disastrous, tin-eared anti-marijuana ad campaign from the New South Wales Department of Premier and Cabinet. Read the rest
Parents in Portsmouth, Rhode Island got a letter from the Portsmouth Middle School warning them that students may be snorting and smoking ground-up Smarties candies. The letter warns of risks of cuts, lung infections, nasal passage scarring, nose-wedged maggots (!), and future cigarette and drug use. John McDaid, a writer and local investigative blogger, got a comment from Portsmouth School Committee chair Dave Croston, who stated "I can say only that this behavior raises troubling issue of modeling." Read the rest
