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Friday, July 11, 2008

This Week on Drugs

posted by on July 11 at 17:24 PM

Seattle isn’t the only city with an anti-pot zealot named Carr (we have Tom Carr, the city attorney). Boston has its own anti-pot Carr, first name Howie. And he’s a dolt (our Carr is actually smart on non-pot issues). Here’s Boston-Carr’s op-ed in the Herald.

Marijuana makes you stupid. It’s as simple as that.

And now in Massachusetts, we are going to have a ballot question that asks the following: Do you really want to make it even easier than it already is to get stupid, and stay stupid?

Yes, the Bong Brigade is on the march again. They want to put the high back into high school, the truckin’ back in truck stops, the joint back in all those joint legislative committees. Stand by to see stoners at the Stone Zoo, potheads in Marblehead. The grass is always greener in Greenfield, dude.

This one’s, like, totally for Jerry Garcia!

The ganja-guys then cite the alleged “collateral damage” of this CORI indignity: “inability to find employment, obtain housing and receive a college loan.”

Please. The reason stoners can’t find employment is because they’re too wasted. They forgot to turn on the alarm clock. They went out for a smoke break and never returned. They missed the bus, man. They can’t “obtain housing” because they can’t get it together to ever leave mom’s rent-free basement….

The fact is, once you make something legal, even if it’s just de facto, it’s easier to get. Pot does fry your brain.

On cue for the marijuana-decriminalization initiative—which appears likely to pass—Howie Carr trots out every stale joke (dude!) and hackneyed stereotype (your brain’s an egg in a skillet!) to paint all pot smokers as a bunch of behind-the-times dolts. But the joke is on Carr. Most of the adults reading the Boston Herald have smoked pot (thousands of them still do), and they have jobs, and set their alarm clock, read the paper, and have every reason to disdain Carr’s simplistic, unscientific hackery. The proof is in the clicking. Pot-law reformers are using increasingly sophisticated media and messages to earn enormous followings online. Paul Armentano at Huffington Post, Scott Morgan at DRCNet, and Bruce Mirken at AlterNet deconstruct bad science and shred federal drug propaganda, with class and sophistication. They’ve been so effective that the White House has established its own shamelessly defensive blog, Pushing Back, in an attempt spar. But like Carr, all they’ve got are the half-baked arguments of yesteryear. So ironically, it’s the drug warriors who live up to stereotypes of yester-decade, while the time-warp hippies leave them in the dust.

Roll Another One: Medical-marijuana patients in Washington say 24 ounces isn’t enough.

Killer Weed? Guys busted growing dope in cemetery.

Killer Cop? Chokes marijuana suspect.

RSS icon Comments

1

"I don't smoke to make myself more interesting. I smoke to make you more interesting."

Posted by flamingbanjo | July 11, 2008 5:59 PM
2

Pot does make you stupid. But nothing short of an icepick lobotomy will make you as stupid as Howie Carr, who was already a legendary Boston idiot twenty years ago when I was there.

Posted by Fnarf | July 11, 2008 6:16 PM
3

The link goes to the Boston Herald, not the Boston Globe. The Herald is the tabloid that Rupert Murdoch bought and sold. The Globe is the one that the NYT says that they would love to sell, but its worth so little that they can't afford to.

The last oped I see from the Globe about decriminalization is from about a half year ago: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/11/22/creating_a_sensible_marijuana_law/ and is much more sensible.

Posted by Andrew | July 11, 2008 6:31 PM
4

Too much pot, Dom? Howie Carr writes for the Herald, not the Globe -- as your own link says. And nobody really takes Howie seriously in Boston. He's just there to get people like you riled up.

Posted by bigyaz | July 11, 2008 9:30 PM
5

When I worked at Harvard, we had a serial foot fondler at work in the stacks, and they set some undercover cops to try and trap him. Problem was, you could spot them a mile away, because they were all drinking coffee out of thermoses and reading the Herald. No one at Harvard reads the Herald, ever; it's just not done. It'd be like catching Frank Blethen reading The Stranger.

Like all tabloid vs. highbrow broadsheet rivalries, though, the Herald always had the better sports section. I wish the P-I would turn into a tab and put sports on the back page, like God intended.

Posted by Fnarf | July 12, 2008 12:16 AM
6

I wish I could understand the constant intense need to defend pot smoking (apart from genuine medicinal reasons).

Posted by Hartiepie | July 12, 2008 4:41 AM
7

Dear #6;

I support *medical*, marijuana, but I understand those who want it legalized across the board. Pot, unlike cigarettes, can't kill the smoker. Pot, unlike alcohol, makes the consumer quiet and mellow, not agressive. Pot, unlike both, is a relatively harmless drug - and if legalized would be regulated [under 18 years old? no Pot for you!] and taxed.

I truly believe that if marijuanna was legalized, that tobacco products could be phased out and made into a prescription medication. That would certainly do a lot to reducehealth care costs. And the government could tax the Hell out of it and [maybe]balance the budget.

But, as I said, my main support is for medical marijuanna, which has been proven to help a variety of ailments. Almost 30 years ago I watched my aunt die of starvation - she had stomach cancer and eating gave her terrible pain. When she smoked marijuanna she was able to eat. The cancer didn't have time to kill her, though - Reagan declared his War on Drugs and we weren't able to obtain enough pot for her. She weighed 62 pounds when she did and looked like an Auschwitz victim. I've supported medical marijuanna since and always will.

Posted by Schweighsr | July 12, 2008 9:52 AM
8

"our Carr is actually smart on non-pot issues," said Dominic Holden.

You're gonna need to drop the bong and provide more substantive proof.

The guy's been an unmitigated disaster.

Posted by NapoleonXIV | July 12, 2008 11:44 AM
9

@7--- lots of things should be legalized. Pot has a subculture hook to it like nothing else.

I just don't understand why it's so popular(Yes I've done it in several ways etc) and why it seems to bring out the beast in everyone who thinks it is so cooool. Every pothead I have ever met is indeed stoopid.

If it was legalized --- and it should be-- I wonder how long it would take to lose the counter-culture vibe it maintains in the states.

Posted by Hartiepie | July 12, 2008 12:13 PM
10

71 oz for sixty days? Are they insane? no one could possibly consume 71 oz in sixty days. You wouldn't be able to move.
I go through about an 1/8 of an ounce a month and I think I smoke too much... over an ounce a day is just...nuts.

Posted by samdinista | July 12, 2008 12:59 PM
11

@ 3 & 4, fixed to say Herald. Thanks!

Posted by Dominic Holden | July 13, 2008 2:23 PM
12

As a former Mass. resident I concur with Fnarf's observation about Howie Carr and Boston Herald readers. When I lived there he was matched only by the idiotic Jerry Williams of WRKO radio and Tim Eyman-esque Barbara Anderson, Marblehead's very own marblehead, as the unelected state resident who had waaaay too much political power resulting from addle-brained state residents who thought his word was gospel. (Massachusetts' reputation as a bastion of liberalism is highly overrated. A surprising number of incredibly stupid people live there.)

Intelligent New Englanders read the Globe. The Herald, on the other hand, has to make sure no word it prints has more than two syllables lest the readers have to go find a dictionary.

Posted by RainMan | July 13, 2008 10:24 PM
13

I can't imagine what you could possibly do with 24 ounces of pot in 60 days much less 71 ounces. Especially with medical marijuana which tends to be much stronger. Even if you're not smoking any and you're just eating it you'd be immobilized all the time.

In reality if they legalized 24oz I would like to think that if they found someone so incredibly sick that they needed over 1oz/day they would just cut them some slack. As a huge proponent of medical marijuana, and someone who really thinks it should generally be legalized I think if you're going to bother setting up limits like this 71oz is just absurd.

Posted by Colin | July 14, 2008 10:18 AM

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