Never Miss An Opportunity
I have a cousin back in Idaho who likes to send to me those forwarded chain e-mails. I hate ‘em; they’re the worst form of spam, because they come from someone you know, so you open them, then there are fifteen levels of recursively-indented forwards, the “to” list containing a billion-and-a-half names, and usually by the time I’ve scrolled down to see what was so important, it’s a picture of a puppy or a stupid joke.
But I still answer her, because often she’s forwarded me something hateful or just plain wrong, and I can’t resist setting the record straight. (For example, she sent me the “Barack Obama… Muslim?” email that’s been debunked a million times.)
Her latest forward was a series of pictures showing how a vibrant young girl’s life was tragically altered when a 17-year-old drunk driver ran into her car. She was burned over 90% of her body, and the tagline to her picture is “Not everyone who is hit by a drunk driver dies.”
One of the points we make over and over at NORML and on The Stash is about how we are an invisible minority. If the 90,000,000 people who have smoked marijuana in America at least once suddenly had green skin, you can bet all the laws that discriminate against green people would be changed. But since we’re all too scared (rightfully so, in many aspects) to “come out of the closet”, we can’t affect any real change.
So one thing you can do is Never Miss An Opportunity to educate someone about marijuana policy, or at least get them to thinking about it. Below the jump is my reply to my cousin demonstrating this “rhetorical jiu-jitsu”:
That’s some pretty powerful imagery. It reminds us all of the consequences of doing something stupid like drinking and driving.
Next time, I’ll send back some similar pictures to remind us all of the consequences of doing something stupid like illegally invading a country that has no Weapons of Mass Destruction.
–”R”R
P.S. Wow, that alcohol sure causes some messed-up accidents. I wonder why it’s legal and marijuana is not? After all, many studies show that drivers who smoke a little bit of marijuana have reaction times that are far better than drinking drivers and not much worse than straight drivers. Not to say that you should smoke a joint and get behind the wheel of a car — you shouldn’t — but why is it that we accept as legal a drug that kills 135,000 annually (and that doesn’t even count the alcohol-caused car wreck fatalities nor alcohol-related murders), creates incredible societal harm from drinking driving, workplace accidents, and health care costs, yet we make absolutely forbidden a plant that has never killed one person, causes little to no societal harm, and has only a few negligible health effects?
Why is alcohol legal when it’s so destructive?
Because we tried prohibition of it and it was a spectacular failure. It created criminal enterprises that solved their disputes through violence. It raised the price of alcohol to the point where every neighborhood had an illegal “speak-easy”, because the profits were greater than the risks. And it didn’t stop one single person from drinking if they really wanted to.
The same failure exists for marijuana prohibition. It’s just that there are fewer stoners than drinkers, they tend to be in the lower classes, and a lot of them are black or brown. So it’s easier to ignore the problems wraught by prohibition this time, and instead blame the prohibition problems on the plant itself.
Tags: driving
