Tarzan

In an effort to keep my mind as open as possible to the other side of the argument, I’ve been buying and reading some anti-marijuana books through Amazon.com. They are hard to find, believe me. After scrolling through some 200 or so titles, most by pro-legalization authors, I finally found “Marijuana,” by Sandra Lee Smith, (an Arizona school teacher who is apparently an expert on the subject).

I would actually recommend getting this book. Not because it’s good, but because it’s laughable. This inexpensive 57-page easy-read, with almost Dr. Seuss-size text, is intellectually insulting even to most children (its apparent target audience).

First, it would make a great coffee table book for when you have friends over even though comedy is not the author's intent.

Second, if you’re preparing a speech at school or for your toastmasters group, its content and arguments are so poor that they actually help to reinforce the legalization argument, even though that’s not the author’s intent.

In order to be illustrative, the book has lots of colorful photos, most of which are staged. The most hilarious of these are:

 A photo of a healthy-looking young woman, with, an amused smile on her face, balancing on one foot on a stone wall of some sort of well or pond that’s about 6-foot diameter and one-foot deep, in the middle of a meadow somewhere. The caption reads, “Teens who are stoned on marijuana often risk their lives in foolish stunts.”
 A photo of a father in the kitchen of his house, holding a dinner plate up in the air like a tennis raquet, getting ready to use it to give a backhanded slap to his daughter, who is on her knees holding one arm up, trying to block his assault. The caption reads, “Violence at home may pressure a child to try to escape through marijuana.”
 A black-and-white photo of some hippies sitting indian-style sharing joints and bowls in someone’s apartment, (possibly also staged). The caption: “Pot parties, popular in the 1960s, did not make people creative; they really damaged their brains.” Where she gets this last bit of crap about “they really damaged their brains, is beyond me. Not only is it not backed up by any scientific evidence, but I could just as easily try to state as fact my opinion that some of the most creative and intellectuals I know used to be hippies who smoked pot in the ‘60s.

Some of my favorite passages:
 “Myth: only a few people use marijuana. Fact: Unfortunately, between 16 and 20 million people…….” She presents this information apparently thinking that it’s evidence of how bad it is. But I read that and thought, “So what?” What’s funny about it is that actually, people on both sides of the legalization debate generally agree that large numbers of people these days smoke pot, and both use that information to try and further their argument.
 “Fact: Marijuana is not considered physically addictive, but it might as well be. Pot is extremely addictive psychologically. Frequent smokers feel that they can’t function without the aid of the drug.” - So what? There are lots of legal things without which people feel they can’t function.

Also, this book contains a lot of fictional or semi-fictional short story vignettes that are supposed to illustrate what bad things marijuana does to young people. All of them are pathetically anti-climactic. One story, under the heading, “False Courage,” describes a teenage girl who has a crush on a guy at school, but is too nervous to talk to him. The first paragraph or so focuses on how she wishes she were high so she wouldn’t be so nervous about talking to this guy she likes. But she ends up talking to him anyway without getting high, which defeats the whole ostensible point of the story. They go for a walk together, smoke a joint, and then walk away holding hands. “Half a mile later they were stoned and didn’t care whether or not they made it back to class at all.” After reading this, I thought, so, is that the end of the story? So what? What’s the point?
Not only is it anticlimactic, but also it’s poorly told. The way the story describes it, he pulls a bag with four joints and gives her one. This pretty much shows that the author not only has never smoked pot in her life, but also probably has never even witnessed anyone smoking pot. Generally when people get high together, they share joint, they don’t each light up joints and smoke them individually. This uninformed description of how pot-smoking takes place in a social setting is reminiscent of that scene in “Reefer Madness” where a man and woman, rather than sharing a joint together, are each smoking their own joints, while the woman plays the piano “Faster! Faster!! Faster!!!”

Overall, this book has lots of unsubstantiated claims about marijuana, which even if they were correct, wouldn’t even come close to justifying the continued prohibition of marijuana.

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"On second thought, lets not go to Camelot. It is a silly place..."
-Monty Python and the Holy Grail