I'm Not the Only One Who's Heard My Hair Grow?!

I was linked to the "What is your anti-drug?" website after reading an article about one of my favorite musicians, Aphex Twin. One of his songs was made into the background music for a nationally aired anti-drug commercial several years ago. If you've never seen one of these ads before, it's where some goofy, prepubescent teenager comes on the screen and says, "Skating/surfing/dancing/writing/music/being gay/doing math/etc. is my anti-drug. What's your anti-drug?" Well, in the "What is your anti-drug?" submission box, I carelessly put 'marijuana', but unfortunately that answer was not acceptable. Instead, I was linked to this anti-marijuana propaganda:



Seriously though, does the government really think it's curbing marijuana use with a message like this?! Let's look at these statements for a second:

• 'Tried to e-mail Uranus.' - Does that seriously instill fear of marijuana in anyone to smoke pot? Does any kid think, "Hrm, I could try marijuana, but then I might try to e-mail Uranus, so, well, I guess I'd better not try it."?
• 'Made hat out of ground beef.' - Okay, that's just retarded. I've never heard of anyone getting high and then deciding it would be a good idea to rub ground beef all over their head. Smoking pot does not make someone a completely irrational idiot.
  
• 'Heard my hair grow.' - I don't know about everyone else, but if I could really hear my hair grow from smoking wacky tobaccy, I'd probably be high all the time.
  
• 'Spent night in jail.' - That seems almost like the logical equivalent of saying, "Don't brutally murder people and destroy all evidence, not because it's a bad, immoral idea, but because you could still be caught and have to go to jail." Even still, I don't think smoking pot is necessarily a bad, immoral idea.

In summary, I would say this advertisement is actually COUNTER-EFFECTIVE. Who comes up with these statements anyway? Does someone working for the DEA just randomly think, "I know, let's tell teenagers they'll hear their hair grow if they try marijuana. That'll keep them drug free!" Seriously, WTF?

Why is marijuana illegal anyway? The government is foolish for wasting billions on something they could profit from. Why are drugs even illegal period? While I agree a government must exist and collectivism is necessary to a small degree to offset free market failures, i.e. environmental protection, what ever happened to the philosophy that each individual (instead of the government) owns themselves? Isn't that what the U.S. Constitution is based on? Since 1913 when the income tax was enacted to WWI, when income tax rates were 77%, to the years of the Prohibition, we have been 'owned', 'mommied', and controlled by the government. I am in no way an anarchist, but I hate the reality that we live in both a semi-socialist and semi-fascist society. If you're interested, here's a paper I wrote about why legalizing marijuana would be in the best interest of both the public and government. It is perhaps not the most eloquent paper, but it still contains a lot of good points in my opinion. In heed of presenting a good argument, I claimed in this paper that legalizing and regulating marijuana would reduce the consumption and trafficking of harder drugs. So in other words, if you think all drugs should really be legalized because it's not the government's responsibility to monitor the public, you may still not like the premises of this paper.

Oh, and I gotta try some of this new vodka. It's made from cannabis seeds- how cool is that? Together, let's overthrow the U.S. government and declare this the official national beverage.


-[It's time for a revolution]-
It has to start somewhere,
It has to start sometime.
What better place than here?
What better time than now?
All hell can't stop us now!
All hell can't stop us now!

-Zack de la Rocha, Guerrilla Radio



-Greg
hi[at]humans.com
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