Peenie Wallie

Their latest volley in this Quixotean battle is a new campaign of lies and half-truths aimed at keeping teenagers from smoking marijuana. Their ads claim that smoking marijuana will make you psychotic, which is absurd, prima facia. If it did, then a third of the population would be psychotic. Marijuana is quite possibly the safest drug on the planet, easily much safer than aspirin.

My favorite argument is that marijuana is a gateway drug. This is another little incongruous falacy that they try to shove down our throats. The logic goes like this, everyone that freebases coke smoked pot before they started freebasing. Therefore marijuana is a dangerous "gateway" drug. But this logic is flawed, because it assumes causality, without proving it. The same can be said of alcohol, or even milk. It is undeniable that almost every single heroin addict in the world drank an alcoholic beverage before they started chasing the dragon, and milk before that. However, there is no cause and effect relationship here. Drinking milk doesn't make people drink beer. Drinking beer doesn't make people smoke pot. Smoking pot doesnt' make people snort coke. It's a widely promulgate misconception, that the government feels compelled to waste our tax dollars on.

Remember the ads where they say "This is your brain...This is your brain on drugs?" I always thought "No. That's an egg...and that's a frying pan with an egg in it." It made me hungry, but it didn't make me think that the government had funded some double-blind unbiased study on the true effects of "drugs", as the ad implied. In fact, the government has done very little to study the true effects of Marijuana. They don't care what the effects are. They just don't want you to do them, and they're willing to say whatever that have to, to achieve that end. And young people are smart enough to know it.

The new ad should say "This is the U.S. government." (Cut to picture of Don Quixote on his horse.) "This is the U.S. government assailing a windmill..."