FAIR: With Marijuana, the Obvious Is Incendiary

[eridani]

http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/with-marijuana-the-obvious-is-incendiary/

Given that Obama was in no way endorsing marijuana use, it might be hard to imagine there was much controversy at all. Alcohol-related deaths are most certainly a more pressing public health concern than marijuana, with excessive drinking blamed for 88,000 US deaths per year by the Centers for Disease Control. In contrast, the British Medical Journal (9/18/03) reported that while “the use of cannabis is not harmless, the current knowledge base does not support the assertion that it has any notable adverse public health impact in relation to mortality.”

But the media were off to the races. CNN host Brooke Baldwin declared the alcohol/pot comparison was “the quote that has really made news this week.” Former drug czar John Walters appeared on CNN’s The Lead (1/22/14) to say:

I think the science over the last 50 years has shown us this is more dangerous, not less dangerous. He knows some of this. If you read his autobiography, you can see when he does talk about using marijuana, he basically says what we have known. Marijuana makes you stupid.

(Obama, of course, ended up at Harvard Law School; if he hadn’t smoked pot, maybe he could have gotten into Yale?)

[TroglodyteScholar]

1. "Marijuana makes you stupid."

...says one moronic prick who never learned how to think beyond what someone told him.

[Warren DeMontague]

3. Anyone ask Carl Sagan?

[Warren DeMontague]

2. Yeah, the drug warriors are in a panic, and big pharma buys a lot of corporate media airtime.

They're fighting a losing battle, though. Prohibition is stupid public policy. Even the DEA can't keep it's narrative straight; they reassure the public that "people don't generally go to jail for pot smoking" while defending laws that put people there for exactly that reason.

Yes, keep it criminalized, they say, even though they acknowledge that some tens of millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans manage to use it recreationally and go about their business. While, meanwhile, the physical, social, and public health devastation wreaked by alcohol- by any estimation, a FAR more dangerous drug- dwarfs that of pot by many orders of magnitude.

[Scuba]

4. The War on Drugs is a huge success ...

But not for the reasons they want you to believe ...

[daleanime]

5. +1

[Enthusiast]

7. How long can we continue to ignore the obvious?

Law enforcement industrial complex influence?

[Scuba]

8. Yeah, somewhere I have enough graph showing rise in private prison inmates. Correlates nicely.

[Enthusiast]

6. I think the rightie advocates of the drug war fear

that marijuana smoking might influence the politics in an negative way (makes you liberal). At least it might make you less likely to buy into the RW authoritarian bullshit. That's what they believe, anyway.

We know this is nonsense. Some of the reddest necks I know are dope smokers. But seriously, this Nixon era fear persists to this day and remains one of the reasons they cannot abandon the marijuana part of the drug war.

You would have had to have been there. In the 1960s I mean.

[retread]

9. Whenever this crap comes up I think of Bill Hicks.

"They lie about marijuana. Tell you pot-smoking makes you unmotivated. Lie! When you're high, you can do everything you normally do, just as well. You just realize that it's not worth the fucking effort. There is a difference."
Bill Hicks