This is just a quick rant regarding the the unmitigated, relentless and inexcusable stupidity of keeping marijuana illegal and lying about it nonstop with taxpayer money, not that many taxpayer's mind, since many still actually believe the shit.
Well, of course you're right - lots of taxpayers DON'T believe it. They are good Americans who simply put up with abjectly stupid shit because that's what Americans are used to.
Those of you who still believe in keeping the plant illegal - for whatever indefensible reason - should not make the jump as you'll only be offended. I promise.
And you don't want to hear it anyway.
Everybody else, come along!
The bottom line of this rant is that facts and factual logical arguments go almost nowhere in the effort to sway opinions about cannabis reform, primarily because whenever exculpatory evidence is available the media cravenly lets loose with the same old stupid, and previously obliterated propaganda talking points. These talking points and the media presentation of them is emotional material, not factual. It's more than just lies and false information - it's fearmongering.
Oh, plenty of people who want cannabis relegalized will tell you about the facts until you're blue in the face and they are foaming at the mouth and it won't make a dent on those who simply believe this shit. It's not that the facts don't matter, in the end: it's getting those who still are caught up in the fearmongering propaganda that cannot make any use of the "facts".
Paul Armentano of NORML has a piece at Alternet currently regarding this stupidity and which prompted me to post this.
Anti-Pot Propaganda As Stupid As Ever -- Yet Our Alarmist Media Continues to Hype It
Mr. Armentano is doing what I have encouraged reformers to do for about the last 2 years: use pushier, more pointed, challenging language.
See, marijuana reform activism is substantially different than other forms of activism and agitating for positive social change.
It begins with the stone cold fact there never ever was any salient, legitimate, defensible reason for marijuana to be made illegal, let alone heinously demonized as it has been and still is. because it's based on lies and utter horseshit, refutation of claims is easy. Simple facts wipe away the lies....except, of course, that the lies are broadcast with impunity by the mainstream media and facts are deftly screened out of the MSM..
One of the many recurring lies is the insinuation that marijuana somehow causes schizophrenia and insanity. This stems from the very earliest days of cannabis prohibition people bought into scaremongering lies about "reefer madness", the idea that smoking marijuana makes to go insane and kill people.
Never mind that this has been refuted time and time again. The refutations never make it into the MSM but the predictable regurgitation of the "cannabis will make you have schizophrenia" lies gets a free ride in the press:
Once again members of the mainstream media are running wild with the notion that marijuana use causes schizophrenia and psychosis.
To add insult to injury, this latest dose of reefer rhetoric comes only days after investigators in the United Kingdom reported in the prestigious scientific journal Addiction that the available evidence in support of this theory is “neither very new, nor by normal criteria, particularly compelling.” (Predictably, the conclusions of that study went all together unnoticed by the mainstream press.)
Yet today’s latest alarmist report, like those studies touting similar claims before it, fails to account for the following: If, as the authors of this latest study suggest, cannabis use is a cause of mental illness (and schizophrenia in particular), then why have diagnosed incidences of schizophrenia not paralleled rising trends in cannabis use over time?
In fact, it was only in September when investigators at the Keele University Medical School in Britain smashed the pot = schizophrenia theory to smithereens. Writing in the journal Schizophrenia Research, the team compared trends in marijuana use and incidences of schizophrenia in the United Kingdom from 1996 to 2005. Researchers reported that the “incidence and prevalence of schizophrenia and psychoses were either stable or declining” during this period, even the use of cannabis among the general population was rising.
Round and round and round it goes.
Let me be really clear: this is not about the actual studies in that article: do go to AlterNet and read the thing and check the actual links, which I have NOT included here. This post is not about this latest reefer mad nonsense, but about the "bigger picture" of how the media regurgitates known lies ad nauseum without ANY repercussions.
It's about the fact that as soon as some sort of exculpatory evidence gets breathed into the public discourse, such as the studies mentioned above, the media dutifully recycles all the known reefer mad crap to bury it. You can set your clock by it.
What needs to happen, really and truly, is for cannabis activists to realize that all the facts and tidy displays of logical information mean almost nothing to the folks who swallow this garbage whole. In one ear, out the other.
It's indisputable: marijuana prohibition and anti-marijuana propaganda is stupid as hell.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
And thoroughly indefensible: none of this horseshit can be logically defended.
And the people who STILL believe this shit in the 21st Century just don't seem to be among the best and brightest when they open their mouths and whine on and on about efforts to fix cannabis prohibition.
I mean, of course these are otherwise decent, intelligent people who have lives and families and get jobs and become successful and all that, but this is simple pattern recognition. Many of them even have IQ's in the 3-digit range. Good educations, the works.
But to the extent people have their faces buried in a TV or don't even begin to question media stories in general,(or worse, actually think the US government can tell the truth) we really can't expect them to add 2 and 2 or connect the dots.The media does an awesome job of never letting a real public discourse evolve on this.
Marijuana prohibition is a vastly counterproductive endeavor that has plumbed the deaths of exactly how stupid people can be. It's a cancer on our society but, out of fear and ignorance, they wish to perpetuate it.
And all too often, the dumbest of the lot have guns and badges and pretend to be "experts", which would be a hysterical joke if they weren't ruining or killing so many people for pot. They arrest more people for marijuana than all real crime combined.
Sometimes cop's reefer ignorance is funny:
Note the reporters laughing at the cop. These are the same reporters who mindlessly pass on the propaganda.
Often, though, cops hurt or kill people en route to 'saving them from the eeeeeevil weed":
The officer in this video is a fucking menace to society.
You can hear him say he didn't want the person to "overdose" as if one can OD from marijuana. He believes this shit and and he acts upon it, which technically qualifies him as delusional and therefore makes him a friggin' danger. It's a false belief. Reports are that he was discplined, which I tend to doubt, but there's a judge in that town who now refuses to allow him in his court. Something about the cop violating something called 'the suspect's constitutional rights". Interesting, eh?
Still.... so many people - even some of those who say things like "I don't smoke pot but I think it should be legal" - just accept this as inevitable, as not important enough to work on, as something that - for reasons I will likely never understand:
- will require the whole US government to shut down while the laws are fixed
-We can't get there from here
-it's not the right time. Maybe later.
-We have more important things to deal with.
-Blah, blah, blah, etc... Etc... Etc...
Good citizens, one and all. Baaaa-a-a-a-a-a.
Yes, I am directly trashing these opinions/objections as stupid, baseless, ignorant and uninformed. One are entitled to one's opinion but I am entitled to tell people it's wrong, stupid, and they are wholly unable to even begin to defend it. I laugh in their direction.
Nobody is able to defend this nonsense without lying or regurgitating stupid shit.
Noooooo-body.
It's well past time to be far more pushy about this. People who still think cannabis should remain illegal should feel shamed and or angered into finding some sort of defense for their stupid beliefs.
And they can't.
Make them open their mouth as utter their lame opinions and make them feel ashamed of their ignorance.
THEN maybe they will be a bit more open to established facts.
Please check out SAFER and their book Marijuana is SAFER: So why are we driving people to drink?.