Gallup recently reported that 50 percent of Americans are in favor of legalizing marijuana, while 46 percent remain opposed.

Well, doesn’t that just bubble my bongwater! For the first time, we can actually say that there are more rational, logical, free-thinkers in our society than idiot bovine who mindlessly devour the propaganda of the anti-fun fuddy-duddies who have lorded over our country for way too long.

Naturally, after Gallup released the report, all the anti-fun fuddy-duddies appeared on the cable news shows, rehashing their tired B.S. that marijuana is not a virtuous blossom grown from the mineral-rich soil of God’s green Earth, but that it’s a heinous pistillate fertilized in the hothouses of Hell with the blood and bone-bits of deflowered Girl Scouts.

OK, nobody quite put it that way, but there was an awful lot of fear-mongering, such as when David Evans of the Drug Free America Foundation told MSNBC’s Chris Jansing that “Marijuana use is going to double or triple” if made legal.

Don’t you hate when people make declarative, predictive statements about things that might happen when everybody knows that nobody knows what the future holds. Evans said that marijuana use is going to double or triple, not “I think it will” or “I believe it will” or “My gut feeling is that it will”– with “gut feeling” being an appropriate way to say it since double or triple is a statistic he clearly pulled from his anus. Actually, to retrieve such a ludicrous stat, he had to reach his arm beyond his anus—deep into the ravaged hinterland of his rectum, past the cold, crusty crevasse of his dying colon, up the snaky ravine of the intestines, where his fist waged an epic battle at the gates of the ileocecal valve (fiercely guarded by the Owls of Ga’Hole) and drilled into the slimy folds of the lumen, where poop and other poop-like matter (such as bogus statistics) are formed.

Double or triple? Please! There is no way of foretelling such complex matters of human behavior—especially when no one knows if legalization will cause the price of marijuana to rise or drop; or how much it would be taxed; or how much government regulation would be implemented; or how much, and what kind of, marketing will be permitted— which is why not a single, legitimate, scientific study has attempted to predict how much consumption will increase, if at all, and why Evans had no choice to but to retrieve that number from the recesses of his bowels.

Whatever. The job is to frighten the herd into submission. So, the fuddy-duddy cattle farmers spew their propaganda on cable news shows like CNN (Cattle News Network), HLN (Heifers Late Night) and, of course, FOX (For Oxen Only) News, and all the livestock on Mooing Moron Farms believe it—unquestionably—just as they believe that the slaughterhouse is where well-behaved cows go for a spa and massage.

My gut feeling is there would be a slight increase in usage if pot were made legal (about 10 to 15 percent), which would occur over the course of a dozen-or-so years, and my reasoning is:

1. Pot is already as easy to acquire as any legal drug and damn near as easy as buying groceries.

2. According to a 2009 survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, roughly 102 million Americans (41 percent) have admitted to using marijuana during their lifetimes, while 15 million (6 percent) admitting to using regularly.

Put another way, of the 102 million Americans who have tried marijuana, 85 percent of them did not become regular smokers, which suggests that there is a whole shitload of people out there who tried it and realized, at some point, it wasn’t for them. This suggests that it wasn’t a law that kept those 87 million people from smoking dope (or they wouldn’t have tried it in the first place); rather, it was their own disinterest.

There is something Evans said that did make sense. He said that when cannabis consumption doubles or triples, “all the costs to society will double or triple, as well.”

That seems reasonable. Whatever the increase in consumption—10 percent, 50 percent, double, triple, centuple—the cost to society will likely increase, respectively. Of course, the question then becomes, what are the societal costs of marijuana consumption and legalization? Is it the cost of manufacturing more cardboard Pringle’s tubes ? Is it the cost of pressing all those extra String Cheese Incident concert tickets? Is it the cost of providing emergency-room health care to uninsured reefer smokers who burn their fingers trying to light the last millimeter of roach? Or, is it the cost of hiring more IRS agents to collect and oversee the estimated $6 billion in extra tax revenue should pot become legal?

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Didn’t Decker just attempt to predict the future by saying we will reap $6 billion in taxes? Perhaps. But at least I didn’t pull the number from my ass. I pulled $6 billion from a study conducted by economics professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University. Of course, he could be wrong, too. It is—study or no study—just an opinion. However, it’s an educated opinion, which is only my opinion about his opinion, but I’m right about my opinion—in my opinion.

It’s the same setting every time. On one side of the table, you get a rabid, anti-pot conservative making ridiculously inflated, Reefer Madnessian claims about the harmful effects of marijuana, and on the other side, a mild-mannered, though ill-equipped, pro-pot liberal who never gets around to saying the one thing that will obliterate the conservative argument.

This time it was a debate/interview between Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham and Steve Fox, author of the book Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?

“Would you smoke pot before a TV appearance like this?” Ingraham smugly asked at the beginning of the interview.

The blood raged in my body, and the walls of my aorta stretched to their rupture point as I howled at the television. “Of course he wouldn’t, you moron!” Nor, I’m betting, would he get loaded on Rumple Minz, shave his head bald, paint his fingernails black or change into his full-body, leather masochism outfit. There’s probably a whole crap-ton of things he would not do before going on television—so what does that have to do with anything?

Ingraham continued with more dopey questions (paraphrased): Would you recommend that people smoke pot every day? Would you want a stoner to operate on your brain? Would you teach your kids how to use a bong?

Fox responded to the questions adequately enough (paraphrased): No. Nor would recommend drinking alcohol every day. Nor would I want a drunk to operate on my brain. Nor would I teach my kids to use a beer bong.

Having been easily shot down, Ingraham delivered the argument that anti-marijuana conservatives rely on when their other arguments fail, the argument that stymies even the most learned pro-pot spokesperson, an argument that seems credible on the surface but ain’t, the argument that says, (paraphrased): That alcohol is harmful is no reason to make pot legal.

And like all the other pro-pot liberals that came before him, our boy Fox couldn’t respond. Instead, he switched the subject, without making the one point that can stop conservatives like Ingraham in their tracks: In a free society, Laura, you don’t need a reason to make something legal. You need a reason to make it illegal.

There’s just no response to that, certainly not from conservatives. They always fancy themselves little-government types, yet they don’t seem to care that every bullshit morality beef that becomes a law increases the size and scope of government. This is why my ticker becomes a time-bomb whenever one of these hypocrites has the nerve to ask for a reason to make pot legal. The question is not: Should we legalize marijuana? The question is: Should we have criminalized it in the first place? And the answer is: Hell no! Marijuana prohibition is the result of blatant lies, ignorance and propaganda that preyed on the racial fears of Caucasian America toward Mexican immigrants in the early 1900s. It was reinforced in the ’20s and ’30s when it was discovered that marijuana was being smoked by wild-eyed Negroes playing that crazy jump-jive music that was getting all the white girls’ panties damp.

In a free society, you need a reason to make something illegal, and the reason probably shouldn’t be racism.

Look at it this way: What if the whole thing were reversed? What if cannabis were never outlawed? What if rationality ruled the day in the 1900s and pot was never criminalized? Now, what if some hoity-toity prohibition-types suddenly wanted us to vote to make the possession and use of marijuana a crime? Could you imagine? Every free-thinking person in the state would stop what they were doing and say, “What’s this now!? Please cite your reason as to why we should put another asterisk on our freedom.”

There’s no chance that proposition would pass. Nobody ever started a bar brawl because they were too baked. Nobody ever mugged a tourist to get a marijuana fix. Nobody ever contracted diabetes, sustained liver damage—or got cancer, even—from smoking pot.

Says Laura Ingraham: “We really don’t know long-term dangers of marijuana use.” At that point, my heart finally exploded and blood spurted out of my ears. Because, when somebody says, “We don’t know the long-term dangers,” what it really means is, “We haven’t found any long-term dangers.”

Yeah, well, we haven’t found any long-term dangers associated with aromatherapy, either.

C’mon! We’ve been studying marijuana for decades. And report after report—including a 30-year UCLA study that found no link between pot and cancer—all came up blank.

What does that matter anyway? If “long-term danger” were the criteria for criminalization, then say goodbye to alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, sugar, beef, dairy, cell phones, television, typing, sitting, standing, smiling, cranking up your stereo, reading in the dark, playing contact sports, jogging on pavement and all sorts of other activities Ingraham wouldn’t dare want criminalized.

Or would she?

Whatever. The point is: Fuck her, and fuck her friends. It’s my body, my life.

Ed Decker
04.28.2010

Originally published in San Diego CityBeat

The main syndicate of Tijuana is led by the Arellano-Felix family, which is battling other gangs and the police for control of the highly strategic border city. In the last month, violence has grown increasingly more vicious with kidnappings, torture, executions and full-blown, gun-blazing street battles, all of which tell me that now, more than ever, we need to stop this idiotic war on drugs.
Now, I know some folk say that it’s not the so-called war on drugs that causes this violence; rather, it’s the narcotics user who is to blame, because he or she creates the demand. I know of some people who believe that my recreational use of drugs is just as bad as if I were pulling the trigger myself. And, yes, emotionally, there is a part of me that agonizes about my level of culpability for these bloody travesties, but, intellectually, my gut reaction is to say, “No way, José! You cannot pin that shit on me.”

Is it my consumption of illegal substances that creates a black market? Or is it the unconstitutional, arbitrary prohibition of them?

Put another way, which came first, the bong or the bongload?

The way I see it, all drugs were born legal: Alcohol, cannabis, opium, meth, cocaine, ibuprofen, caffeine, steroids, mezcal, mescaline–all of that stuff was legal first, and then, somewhere along the line, some humorless member of the Morality Brigade decided he or she knew better than you do about which consumables were not OK to use and endeavored to take them away from you, with varying degrees of success.

This is the reason people are dying in the streets of Tijuana–not my appetite for narcotics. How do I know this? I know because if I stopped doing drugs tomorrow, nobody would notice and the violence would rage on. But if drugs were legalized tomorrow, the cartel wars would abruptly halt, and only then, in the words of the Rev. Sunday, would the “reign of tears truly be over.”

One merely need look back in our history to see what an enormous waste of blood and treasure is prohibition. Sadly, Americans are really terrible at learning from history. It seems like history is always trying to teach us stuff, but we’re too cool to pay attention. We’re like that snotty high-school student who spends the whole time in class drawing pictures of naked boobies in his notebook instead of listening to what’s being taught. And the lesson history has been trying to teach us is that prohibition does not work. When the 18th Amendment was passed, America’s shit got worse: Arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct increased, thefts and burglaries increased, homicides and assaults increased and federal prison populations increased, and don’t even get me started on organized crime. Not only did prohibition bolster organized crime, not only did it organize organized crime–it was prohibition that invented organized crime.

Despite the Rev. Sunday’s prediction about an alcohol-free utopia (silly reverends–is there anything you don’t get wrong?), violence grew increasingly more vicious with kidnappings, torture, executions and full-blown, gun-blazing battles on the streets of Chicago, the hub of the bootleg trade. And that right there is history trying to teach us something. And what history is trying to teach us is that there is little difference between the alcohol prohibition of the 1920s and the narcotics prohibition of today. Sadly, the powers that be just draw boobies on their notebook and never learn a thing.

So, no, I will not be blamed for the bodies that are piling up on the streets of TJ. I will not lose sleep for eating psychedelic mushrooms. I will not feel guilt for filling my glass pipe with weed any more than anybody else feels guilt about filling their vehicles with gasoline. And I will not despair if I purchase an 8-ball of coke for Vegas so that I can share it with the strippers, whom I will not feel guilty about paying for sex.

No, I feel guilty about wasting food and water. I feel guilty about those times I don’t recycle. I feel guilty if I keep a $5 tip from a drunk customer who thought he gave me a single. There are plenty of things to feel guilty about in this world, but for me, sucking down a bong hit after a hard day’s work will never be one of them.

Ed Decker
11.26.08

Have you heard the one about the drug-prevention activist who went to the reggae show and was outraged to learn they were smoking marijuana there?

The San Diego Union-Tribune reported recently that Lisa Silverman, of the North Inland County Prevention Program, went undercover to a Ziggy Marley concert at the Del Mar Racetrack. Silverman was surprised to discover that almost everyone at the concert was smoking weed.

“I was offered a couple of doobies myself,” Silverman said.

Reading that story, I was shocked. People still use the word “doobies!”? I thought.

After her reconnaissance mission, Silverman and a group of concerned parents–alarmed and disturbed by that people were lighting up at outdoor reggae concerts–urged fairgrounds operators to clamp down. Fairgrounds manager Tim Fennel seemed to be leaning in that direction. In a message to music fans he said, “Don’t jeopardize the music you like by doing something improper.”

Meaning, if you derelicts keep it up, we won’t book bands that appeal to pot smokers anymore.

Meaning, goodbye Ziggy Marley. Hello Hannah Montana.

Meaning, goodbye Snoop Dog and Willie Nelson. Hello Jordin Sparks.

Goodbye Method Man, Radiohead, Cypress Hill, George Clinton, Ben Harper, Steel Pulse. Bring on Celtic Thunder!

How out of touch with reality do you have to be to think pot smoking is “improper” at an outdoor reggae concert? That’s like saying partner-swapping is improper at an orgy.

Pot smoking isn’t only proper at a reggae concert, Mr. Fennel, it’s the point. Silverman said it best when she reported, “There were very few attendees who were not smoking marijuana.”

That’s right, Lisa. You were the minority; this was not your crowd, not your culture. It’s reggae, lady. Marijuana isn’t a peripheral. It’s the message. If you don’t like reggae music’s message, well, lance my chancres, don’t go to a goddamn reggae music show.

When people like Silverman, Fennel, the parents’ groups and all these other morally superior prohibitches embark on one of their anti-fun crusades, I can’t help but wonder: How does one become that way? How does one witness a sea of people dancing and smiling–sweet, pungent smoke rising to the air–and feel outrage? Is it nature or nurture? Was Lisa Silverman born an uptight, nosey, self-important, morally superior, culturally intolerant funwitch, or did her parents raise her that way?
Just once, I would love to take that shrew on a date. Show her exactly what it means to behave appropriately at an outdoor concert.

We now bring you now to the Silverman / Decker date already in progress…

“Lisa, my love, can I get you a beer or something?”
“No thanks, I’ll take a Diet Coke.”
“Sorry googy-bear, I don’t approve of Diet Coke? That stuff is loaded with aspartame. Don’t get me started on the evils of aspartame.”

“But, but…”

“I’m just kidding lover-pie. You can have whatever you like. Because it’s your body, darling, and I want you to be happy.”

Lights go down, band comes on, joints light up.

“Look at all those marijuana smokers,” she says. “It’s an outrage!”

“It’s OK, honeyknuckles, they’re just having a good time. You should try it.”

“I don’t need to get high to have fun,” she snorts.

“Yes, my sweet, sweet potato face, I am aware of that. But you don’t need to ride a rollercoaster to have fun, either. You don’t have to vacation in Rome, or go parasailing, or sit on the couch all day drinking gin rickeys and watching Reno 9-11 episodes. If you were lounging on La Costa Blanca beach and Antonio Banderas pulled up in a jet ski and cooed, ‘Hop aboard, mi amor,’ would you snub your nose and say, ‘Sorry A.B., I don’t need to ride jet skis with gorgeous Latino men off the shores of exotic Spanish beaches to have a good time’?”

Deep inside Lisa Silverman’s lizard brain, a tiny light flickers on, awareness seeps in and she gazes at the joint in my hand. I spark it up and pass it over. She takes a drag and coughs. Then another. And another.

Before long, she is in the moment, the smug gushing out of her pores like sour milk from the nose of a stand-up comedian’s groupie. She smiles at me dreamily and begins gyrating to the gorgeous music massaging her eyes and ears.

I step behind her, slip my arms around her waist, push my pelvis against her buttocks and roam my hands along her hips as we sway together. I take the, um, doobie, from her fingers and pull a long and deep hit.

Lisa turns to face me and her aspartame-bloated lips find mine. Our mouths open and I exhale a cocktail of cannabis and saliva into her smughole, swirling it around with my tongue like a swizzle stick in the Collins glass of our passion.

After the show, we retire to her place, where we snort Vicodin, drink gin rickeys and entangle ourselves on her living room floor to the flickering images of Reno 911 on TV.
Ed Decker
09/17/08

Lisa Silverman BEFORE her date with Ed Decker

AFTER

Photo Shop effects by Howard Knight

“We made a decision we’re going after every single shop that sells drug paraphernalia.”
–San Diego City Attorney Mike Aguirre, CityBeat, Nov. 28, 2007

Dear Mike Aguirre: Are you nuts? Do you really believe that anybody will stop doing drugs if you shut down the paraphernalia suppliers? We druggies are highly resourceful. When necessary, pot smokers can carve apples into elaborate smoking devices with nail files fabricated from possum bones. Your typical tweaker can comb an eight-ball out of the carpet with a pair of chopsticks. These are imaginative people, sir–they will not be forestalled.

As reported by CityBeat staff writer Eric Wolff, the city attorney sent letters to 52 smoke shops, ordering them to stop selling drug paraphernalia.

Question: If I can get all the hash, weed, coke, crack, smack and speed I need, do you think I’ll have any trouble whatsoever finding devices with which to consume them? Do you really believe, if your interdict succeeds, that one less bong hit will be sucked or one less gram snorted, cooked or smoked? As a recreational consumer of narcotics, I can tell you that I don’t see that happening.

Cracking down on head shops is like changing the name of “french fries” to “freedom fries,” or invading Iraq to stop terrorism. It is an utterly vacuous act designed to swindle people into believing their government is doing something about a problem which government exaggerated in the first place.

“They’re marketing to younger people,” Aguirre said. “We see lots of youngsters going in and buying… all that crap.”

Don’t you just love how he pours on the “save the children” sauce and expects us to slurp it all up without question? I challenge Mike Aguirre to show exactly where and how they market to kids. As a person who frequents smoke shops, reads their ads and uses their products, I just don’t see it. OK, maybe somebody out there somewhere has a Sponge Bob Square Bong on his shelf, but isn’t it more likely they’re marketing it as humorous bong irony for adults and not at 8-year-olds?

(Sponge Bob, as everyone knows, is hilarious when you’re baked.)

Also, I find it suspicious when Aguirre says “we see” a lot of youngsters buying. As a person who frequents the local narcotoriums, I’m just not seeing it. My experience is that these shops avoid selling to minors because they’re terrified of getting shut down. And if by “we see” he meant the police, who staked out the shops, I have to wonder: If they really witnessed clerks selling to kids, why didn’t they bust them right then? It is illegal to sell tobacco products to minors, right? What happened to save the children? Why didn’t they confiscate the contraband and arrest the clerks? Certainly, it would be to their advantage to do so. A couple-three “harmful matter to minors” busts would have gathered significantly more support for the cause.

So, no, Mike, I don’t think you or any of your morality commandos saw squat. I think you’re just playing the “save the children” card to demonize the head shops and turn the public against them.

Even if it were true that they’re selling to kids, well, so what? If that’s the case, all you need to do is enforce existing laws about selling to minors and–boom!–exaggerated non-problem solved.

It’s incredible that we’re even having this discussion.

How much of a thought policeman do you have to be to criminalize a product that might be used for illegal purposes? Guess you’d better ban butter knives, too, because you can break all sorts of laws with one of those razors of Satan. For instance, you can use a butter knife to: mug a tourist, torture the neighborhood pets, stab somebody in the neck, hijack a plane, stir Rohypnol into a drink, or cut graffiti into trees that says things like “Mike Aguirre is a self-involved power monger.”

Just as a butter knife can be used for illegal purposes, anything sold in a head shop can be used legally. But it’s really not about the paraphernalia. The issue is the clientèle. Nobody’s going after the tobacconists for selling rolling papers? And I’m quite certain the narcotoriums aren’t the only place where you can buy vials, scales or screens. The problem isn’t the individual items–rather, it’s that these items are stocked under one roof, together, a one-stop shopping mart that attracts drug users, thereby horrifying the community, which, by the way, has been whipped into a rabid fear of recreational drug users by their government, who will now step in and solve the non-problem for them.

“The shops attract a very negative element,” said Arthur Schwartz, president of the North Park Community Association.

Well, what do you know, yet another community leader spreading around gobs of fear marmalade with the butter knife of moral superiority.

Dear Mr. Schwartz, as a person who frequents head shops, I can tell you, I’m not seeing it. In all my years, I never saw no robberies, no beat-downs, no weapons displayed nor used, no episodes of sidewalk harassment. In fact, I’ve seen far more problems in nightclubs, 7-Elevens and Roberto’s Mexican joints than I have ever seen in any smoke shack.

So, fuck you North Park Community Association. I am not a negative element. Nor are my friends or their friends or the thousands of people citywide who patronize these stores. We are regular people with regular jobs and regular families who contribute to this town in all our regular ways and who have earned the right to consume our recreational chemicals of choice every bit as much as the smoker, the boozer, the dipper, the snuffer, the Big Mac eater and the soda popper.

If anyone is a negative element, it’s you, people. Because you bully folks into obeying your myopic moral code; because you target small businessmen to crush their livelihood, and because you use your clout like a cleaver, especially that sue-happy Mike Aguirre, whose record on morality I’ll hold mine against any day of the week.

Ed Decker
11//07/07

While perusing MySpace, exploring with amazement the number of bands that come from Lithuania that want to be my “friend,” I came across the Barroid Bonds* page.

Also known as “The Virtual Asterisk Petition Page,” the Barroid Bonds site acts as an online petition in favor of placing an asterisk on the homerun record set recently by Barry Bonds, the San Francisco Giants player who has turned his body into a veritable punch bowl of banned performance-enhancing drugs.

The question as to whether asterisking juiced ball players is a good idea will be discussed later in this column; however, the question as to whether Barry Bonds is a great big stinking cheating cheater is no question at all.

The Bonds’ supporters argue that it takes more than strength to hit a ball out of the park. They say hitting a homer is about timing, vision, bat speed, concentration and a slew of other abilities that anabolic steroids don’t improve, which makes me wonder if the Bonds supporters weren’t all attending the National Convention of Total and Utter Idiots on the day God was passing out brainpower.

Steroids improve all of those things.

“Steroids increase strength and stamina,” says self-described baseball historian Jamie A. Capria on his virtual-asterisk blog, “which in turn creates bat speed [and] bat power and [reduces] fatigue.”
Why this isn’t obvious to every human on the planet is beyond me. More strength equals more bat power equals more and farther hits–no duh. But it’s the “reduces fatigue” part that really brings it home.

Fatigue affects every aspect of hitting: Fatigue diminishes concentration. Fatigue diminishes vision.

Fatigue diminishes bat speed. Fatigue diminishes batter timing. Fatigue diminishes the stamina of a player near the end of the game. Fatigue diminishes the stamina of a player near the end of the season. And fatigue diminishes the stamina of a player near the end of his career.

Fatigue plays a huge role in every aspect of the game, thereby giving juicers a distinct advantage over juice-free players, and it just seems that that should be noted somehow.

But for me, the most fascinating part of this debate isn’t whether we should officially asteriskerize Bonds’ homerun record; rather, whether the whole asteriskerization concept should be introduced into the record books at all. Because doing so would open a huge can of worms. For one thing, you’d have to identify all current and past steroid stackers.

Secondly, cheating is not limited to the chemical variety. There are numerous ways to fleece the game, and if you are going to punish stackers, then you’d have to punish the bat-corkers, too–as well as ball-scuffers, point-shavers and sign-stealers–which means, you’d have to go all the way back to the beginning of baseball and scrutinize each player individually.

Also complicating matters is the varying degrees of cheating. Since some flimflams are worse than others, we’ll probably have to come up with different symbols to denote the differences between the flims and the flams.

For instance, it wouldn’t be fair to give Norm Cash–the Tigers infielder whose corked bat helped win the ’61 batting title–the same symbol as Barry Bonds. Corking doesn’t give you nearly the advantage that stacking steroids does, which means, if fairness is what matters, we’d have to come up with different symbols for different offenses. If I were in charge of the process, for example, I’d give the bat corkers an asterisk and give the steroid-users an asteroid–like one of those floating little boulders from the old Atari arcade game–to denote his rock-like muscle mass.

Of course, I’d have to give Sammy Sosa an asterisk and an asteroid for being a steroid-injecting, bat-corking cheating cheater not worth a piece of petrified dogturd impaled on the cleats of Ernie Banks.

I’d put a smudged asterisk next to former Dodgers reliever Jay Howell for pitching with pine tar in his glove. I’d put the @ symbol next to Joe Niekro’s name to represent the extra movement his knuckler enjoyed via a nail file. I’d put a dollar sign next to Pete Rose’s various records, which, while not flattering, would at least denote that he wasn’t doing the kind of cheating that inflated his numbers or his overall athletic amazingness. And I’d have to put a little frowny face emoticon next to every white player who set a record while blacks were still playing in the Negro Leagues.

The point is, the whole process could get really ugly . Confusing too. Not that the rewards wouldn’t be profound. For one thing, the new system will provide deterrence. With a potential blemish on looming over his name, a player would have to make a conscious decision whether to take a chance on cheating–also known as an aster-risk. Another advantage is that it would make statistics truer and more informative, which is crucial, I think, because if a statistic isn’t informative and true, then what does it even want to be a statistic for?

Incidentally, you might find it hypocritical that such a staunch supporter of drug legalization would come out against steroids. I have been pondering that hypocrisy myself. Here’s how I have chosen to justify it: Baseball is a contest, contests have rules, and rules provide equal footing among players. I couldn’t care less if somebody takes steroids recreationally, so long as he excuses himself from the contest of Major League Baseball. For all the players who want to play baseball and take steroids, let them start up their own all-steroid league and knock themselves out until their limbs fall off and they start shitting organs. But Barry Bonds isn’t taking steroids recreationally. He takes steroids to have an advantage in the contest, which is a bullshit maneuver that must be called out. The only question for me is, is the asterisk system the way to do it?

Hard to say. I’m not entirely sure it’s worth it, or that anyone would even want to pursue such an endeavor. The good news is that even if the asterisk is never introduced, there will always be an implied asterisk–one that will hover over Barry Bonds’ records like a DEA surveillance helicopter and make us murmur and snort whenever his name is mentioned. And for that reason alone, he will never truly get to sit back and revel in his astonishing accomplishment–not like Babe Ruth did, or Hank Aaron. Not a chance.

EJD
08/22/07

Other Relevant Links

Ruth vs. Bonds (Dispelling the Myth)
Do Steroids Improve Hitting (NY Times article)
Bonds’ Documented Steroid Use

*[Authors Note:The Barroid Bonds link at the beginning of this article is not functioning properly. This is because, shortly after the article was published, MySpace shut down Capria's page. They did not convey a reason to him, but my guess is they were worried the Bonds camp might sue; to which I utter a resounding "Bleah!"]

Man, oh man, am I aggravated to all-Hell. It’s been almost a month now and I haven’t been able to replenish my pot supply.

I know the reason too. It’s the goddamned border patrol. They’ve been doing a kickass job over there at the San Ysidro border crossing lately. Every time you turn around, there’s another story about another huge bust. A couple of weeks ago, I read a U-T article which reported that agents at the San Ysidro and El Centro borders collectively nabbed 10,000 pounds of pot in one week and because of busts like this, I can’t get my goddamned hands on any goddamned Mexican weed.

Oh sure, there’s still plenty of kind bud running around. Kind bud (also known as ganja, indoor, chronic, dank and stank) is a higher quality weed. It is potent and pungent and can be grown by anyone with 500 dollars and an oversized closet. Since kind bud doesn’t have to make that perilous trek across the border, there’s plenty of it. The problem is, I smoke Mexican weed.

Now, admitting that one smokes Mexican (also known as mecky, mexy, shake or schwag) when one lives in Ocean Beach is tantamount to social suicide. OB is primarily occupied by pot snobs. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pulled out my trusty film canister of shwag during one of our back alley pow-wows behind the bar, only to watch my potsnobbian friends recoil in disgust as if the canister was filled with infected monkey entrails.

“How can you smoke that shit!?” they howl in disbelief.

And I always have to tell them, “Not that it’s anything to you, but I smoke mecky because it suits my needs better.” For one thing, Mexican is cheaper. It’s easily half the price. More importantly, it is a weaker strain of marijuana than its indoor cousins. Mecky has half as much THC and for me that’s a good thing. I need my weed to be weaker. I’m a marijuana lightweight. When I smoke kind bud, I get overstoned. Then I can’t do anything right: I can’t talk, I can’t read, I can’t sleep, I can’t drive, I can’t screw, I can’t even write when I get that fumigated. It took me over an hour to write what you’ve just read because I’m overstoned on chronic at the moment which really sucks because I’m behind deadline.

Check this out: since THC is the active ingredient in pot, and there’s more THC in kind bud than there is in mecky, and the war on drugs is forcing me to smoke kind bud – then the war on drugs is making me smoke more drugs than I want to.

Isn’t that a gas? It’d be like blocking the distribution of light cigarettes thus making people smoke Marlboro reds.

I know, I know, some of you are saying that marijuana is illegal and I shouldn’t be smoking it at all. Well call me an anarchist, call me a lefty loon, call me a non-supporter-of-the-troops-type person but I do not recognize the right of any person, group or government to determine what I do with my body so long as what I do with it doesn’t harm anyone else.

Some people argue that consuming narcotics does harm somebody else. They say people are dying over the stuff: border agents, police, and politicians on both sides of the border are losing their lives fighting the war on drugs and are therefore victims of my drug consumption. They say it’s the high demand that creates America’s drug problem and I couldn’t disagree more: There’s a high demand for milk, but we don’t have milk wars at the border. Nobody’s smuggling cows in the wheel wells of U-Hauls, no shootouts at the border with heavily armed milkmen. No, the problem isn’t demand, the problem is the prohibition of something that is in demand, and it is that prohibition, actually, that is illegal and immoral as it forsakes my constitutional right to life liberty and the pursuit of, you know, fun cool shit to do. Don’t misunderstand. I feel terrible for anyone who dies in the crossfire of this ridiculous war on drugs but I absolutely do not feel responsible.

You know what I wonder sometimes? I wonder if there are any Border Patrol Officers who realize the war on drugs is bullshit. I sure hope so. Sometimes I like to imagine there is this one lone agent who believes prohibition is a colossal mistake. In my mind, he’s one of these activist types, prone to mouth off his opinions in the locker room, or the patrol car, or in the morning meetings. He gets into heated arguments with his pro-prohibition colleagues about how if we legalize drugs in this country we could use the tax money to make a better country: Some of it could be allocated to rebuild libraries and repair city infrastructure, some of it could go toward upgrading the drug awareness campaign, and the rest could go to improved rehabilitation and treatment. Then this free-thinking warrior border agent hero of my mind would tell his gung-ho drug-hating buddies how decriminalizing drugs would ultimately untie their hands. How all those wasted hours searching for drugs could have been better spent searching for something, you know, something that truly threatens society, something like – hmm, well let me think about it for a second, oh yeah I know, how about they use the extra time searching for guys with bombs who want to blow up people and buildings with them?

“How about that positive side effect to legalizing drugs?” he would snort.

Oh well, such dreams only lead to disappointment – but thanks for trying Free Thinking Warrior Border Agent Hero. I know we’re a long way from drug legalization but in the meantime, I was thinking, maybe you could lay off the brickweed busts for a bit? All you have to do is let a little get through so this way I won’t have to smoke more drugs and go broke doing it. So I don’t walk around overstoned all the time. So I can make a deadline. Come on man, can you give a brutha a break?

EJD
03/28/07

“Casting doubt on a basic principle of U.S. anti-drug policies, an independent [RAND] study concluded that marijuana use may not lead teenagers to [harder] drugs.” Reuters 12/03/02

For our purposes, this story begins in 1937. It happened at the kangaroo hearings of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. It was at these hearings that Harry Anslinger, the commissioner of the then Federal Bureau of Narcotics, told Congress that marijuana is, “An addictive drug which produces in its users, insanity, criminality, and death.”

Congress overwhelmingly agreed.

What happened next was sheer comedy. Anslinger’s contention that marijuana causes “insanity” opened the door to a new legal argument for accused criminals. It was called the Marijuana Insanity Defense, and it worked.

Oh boy, what a mess.

The most famous case was of the two Newark, New Jersey women who were accused of murdering a bus driver for his pocket change. One of the women testified that, “After two puffs on a marijuana cigarette my incisor teeth grew six inches long and dripped with blood.”

Wow, you too!?

The most absurd case was that of an accused cop killer, twice over. This guy didn’t even claim to have smoked the pot. According to the defendant, a bag of weed was transmitting “homicidal vibrations,” causing him to go on a cop killing spree.

Unbelievably, he was acquitted. They were all acquitted.

Yup. Anslinger’s asinine declaration that marijuana caused insanity, criminality, and death had returned to haunt him. So in 1939, in a successful bid to end the Marijuana Insanity Defense insanity, Anslinger adjusted his official stance on cannabis to read, “Marijuana does not cause insanity or death, but it is certainly the first step on the road to heroin addiction.”*

That statement was the introduction of the idea we now call The Gateway Effect and is the basis for U.S. marijuana policy to this day (a notion steadfastly defended by Attorney General John Ashcroft).

In the years that followed, marijuana laws ebbed and flowed: In 1942, Marijuana was removed from the U.S. Pharmacopoeia because it was believed to cause psychotic episodes, violent behavior, and perverted sex crimes. In 1944 the La Guardia Report discounted all that bullshit. In the 1950′s, three federal laws were passed establishing mandatory prison sentences for, among other things, marijuana-related offenses.

Then came the 60s, and you know what happened then: revolution.

Nobody gave much thought about weed in the sixties (except, maybe, where to get it) and everything was just hanky dooky — until the 80s arrived — and here comes Reagan’s retarded War on Drugs — cramming that garbage about criminality, death, and fang-growing upon the gullible public mindset all over again.

At first the people bought it because, well you know, save the children and all that. But as time passed, and folks got smarter (again), and they learned (again), from common-freaking-sense (again), that marijuana is not the devastating social twister the anti-pot stiffs would have us believe. And since we weren’t buying all their fear-mongering propaganda (again), they had to concentrate on a better reason to justify their preposterous marijuana laws. Hence: The Gateway Effect (again).

So the new old debate swirls once more: Is or isn’t marijuana a gateway drug?

Well I don’t need no stinking grants to answer that question. Of course it’s a gateway drug! That’s why we smoke it silly. Marijuana is a gateway to raucous laughter. Marijuana is a gateway to higher levels of Pink-Floyd-understanding. Marijuana is a doorway to a different view of the inside of your brain. For some people, marijuana is even a stairway to Heaven.

But is marijuana a gateway to harder drugs? Answer: Yep.

Every bit as much as kissing is a gateway to abortion.

Everything is a portal to something else. Jogging is a portal to thin. Employment is a threshold to food and shelter. churning makes cheese. And what is the uterus but a dark, sticky Malkovich-ian portal into this great big world full of millions and millions of portals within portals within more fantastic portals.

I’ll tell you when to start worrying. Start worrying when marijuana is not a gateway. Start worrying when it’s a dead end. Maybe you anti-pot stiffs will argue that cannabis is a dead end — that stoners lie around and watch television all day. Well, if that is what marijuana does for you, then by all means don’t partake. But for me, well it’s a beautiful day. I’m about to take a bong hit, walk to the beach, suck the blood out of the necks of a coupla cops, and screw a seagull for dessert.

Wheeee! This weed sure is wacky.

Is marijuana a gateway drug? Perhaps, but I’ll choose my own damn gateways, thank you, because, clearly, oafish pricks like Harry Anslinger and John Ashcroft, are far too ignorant to choose them for me.

*From Shaffer Library of Drug Policy (www.druglibrary.org)