won't someone think of the children?? Yeah, pot isn't good for kids. Neither is fine Kentucky Bourbon and I still seem to be able to purchase that with ID. If we want to keep pot away from kids, who arguably might be harmed by it, shouldn't we set up a distribution system where adults, who are not harmed by it, can purchase it but children cannot?
Oh, yeah, nobody in the White House cares about kids. If they cared about kids, we'd be doing something about child poverty instead of letting it increase. They must care about something else. Puritanism, perhaps?
The "drug war" makes absolutely no sense to me. I mean, sure, you get to crminialize just about everybody and weird culturally biased sentencing laws against "ghetto" drugs do unfairly target pesky minorities, who we can send to jail in droves and get free labor out of, but, um, everybody smokes pot. Poor kids. Rich kids. White kids. Lots and a lots and lots of white kids. And kids of color. And, like, um everybody. And it's less bad for you than alchohol. Lets review the risks:
alchohol
- liver disease
- heart disease
- addiction
- alchol poisoning
- chocking to death in a pool of your own vomit
- becoming an angry, violent belligerant drunk
pot
- lung cancer and all the smoking-related cancers (if you smoke it, but not if you eat it)
- um, having thoughts that seem really profound but aren't
- noticing all the hollywood cliches and conceits in your favorite movie and relaizing that it's a contrived piece of crap.
- playing free jazz
- giggling
How to lie with statistics
Mr Lagoy notes: "And it found the age of youths using marijuana is falling. The teenagers aged 12 to 17 said on average they started trying marijuana at 13 1/2. The same survey found that adults aged 18 to 25 had first tried it at 16. Do you see the problem with that statistic? you'd have to take all of the answers of '17' and up from that second group and scrap them. that first group hasn't had a chance to smoke pot for the first time at 18 yet." Also note that almost all the kids in the first group are under 16. If a kids is 14 now and will try pot for the first time at 16, her answer doesn't get counted. So the ages come out lower. surprise! Kids under 15 who have tried pot report that they were under 15 when they first tried pot! What does that tell you? Absolutely nothing. What a great way to set national policy.
Also note that this administration has been trying to protect us from the dangers of hemp oil and especially hemp fabric. My hemp pants may be getting me high right now! Except that, um, they're not. However, they do pose a hborrible danger to cottom and timber interests, since hemp is a far more efficient source of fibers than cotton or trees. An acre of hemp can produce 5 times as much paper as an acre of trees and the hemp can be harvested yearly, whereas it takes more than 20 years to let the trees mature.
Reefer Madness! Reefer Madness Reefer Madness! Reefer Madness!! aieee! we must protect druggie teenagers by sending them to "treatment" and jail!
2 comments:
I didn't mention drunk drivers or high drivers, mostly because the dangers of driving while high are controversial. One British study seemed to imply that high people were better drivers.
Also, I read that drving while talking on a cell phone had the same increase of accident-risk as drunk dirving. Either some anti-cell crusader was making stuff up, or drunk driving really isn't that dangerous. The police measure drunkeness by blood alchohol content, the amount of alchohol in your blood stream. But this fails to take into account alchohol tolerance. When I got home from school this spring, my alchohol tolerance was so low that I prolly shouldn't have driven after just one glass of wine (and I didn't), but there are habitual drinkers in the world who probably drove fine after a bottle of wine. Some of them possibly correctly asserting that they drive better when they've been drinking, maybe because they have more practice in that state.
So what I'm trying to say is that I don't know if high driving is dangerous and drunk driving may not be as dangerous as we've been lead to beleive. And that's what I really realy hate about government statistics. They lie about risks. If I'm going to make an informed choice about sex or drugs or alchohol, I need good data, but instead official sources are trying to frighten me. Those metro ads about how many people have HIV and how many people know it are misleading, only stating stastics for a subset of the population. And, you know, HIV is kind of hard to catch. Most people don't get it the first time they're exposed. It doesn't mean that it's not a scary-as-hell risk, but if the government is running around saying that pot will kill you, all of their stastics, true or not, lose credibility. Overstating risks just increases risky behavior. I'm going to go inject heroin wih dirty needles now.
yup, great post. also, driving while tired is probably the most dangerous state of all.
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