Kind of ironic that a few days after we play a tune from a band called The Stumbleweeds that I’d be clicking around the DEA’s website and find a link to something called Stumble Weed Magazine.
More of your tax dollars at work, providing flashy interactive content full of drug war lies and distortions meant to encourage kids to avoid cannabis. Uh, guys, with 83.9% of 12th graders saying pot is “fairly easy” or “very easy” to get and 41.8% of them trying pot sometime in their life, it seems your efforts are for naught.
It’s built like a magazine. On the cover there is a young man buying marijuana from another young man (hmm, nobody seems to be checking any IDs) and the sidebars list the contents:
it’s just a plant how could it be bad for me?
Rx pot: prescription for disaster
totally lame (and dangerous and illegal) things to do on pot
extreme grades: from A to D in six months
Hey, dude, where did my future go? Pot, motivation, and U
Oh, this should be fun…
There’s way too much for me to tackle it all in this post, but here are some of my favorites. Most of it has been debunked so many times on these pages that instead I’m going to focus on what I found to be silly or insulting.
Page 1 – it’s just a plant:
Truth is, mariiuana is not just a plant. Mariiuana smokers use the dried leaves of the plant called Cannabis sativa. It’s the active chemical ingredient in mariiuana. THC, which makes people high. The more THC, the higher the mariiuana’s potency.
Who are these people who are smoking leaves? I like to save the leaves and use ice-extraction to make hash out of them. Right off the bat you just alienated someone who has smoked pot and knows you smoke buds, not leaves, if you can help it.
Page 2 – lots of crazed health mis-information
Whatever you do, don’t smoke pot, you’ll fail geometry, wreck your car, and abandon your sister!
Page 3 & 4 – Oh, the dangerous things that can happen if you smoke pot
I also liked the stories from the young teens talking about pot. The girl Lauren talks all about how she used to smoke pot and drink heavily every day, how easy it was to acquire pot from her school dealer, but how she had to go steal liquor from the store to get alcohol. Then she describes all the terrible things to happen to her as she moves on to pills, ecstasy, etc. So, it would seem that keeping it illegal didn’t stop Lauren and regulated alcohol was harder to come by, huh?
Page 5 – lame attempts to counter reality
MYTH: Other countries have legalizaed marijuana and it’s working.
The Swiss and Dutch governments have tightened up their laws after drug use and crime increased. And officials of the British and Canadian Governments are questioning their policies after recognizing the dangers of marijuana.
The Swiss and Dutch tightened up laws on heroin needle exchanges and set purchase limits for cannabis. Switzerland and the Netherlands still do not lock people up for drug use.
Britain and Canada are in the grips of conservative administrations drunk on reefer madness. Their changes are politically motivated; their own governmental health bodies have repeatedly called for decriminalization.
MYTH: We should just legalize marijuana and tax it like alcohol and cigarettes.Who pays the bills for increased social and medical costs if mariiuana is legalized? You do. Why would we compound the problems America already has with alcohol and tobacco? And the black market for higher potency mariiuana would continue regardless of legalization.
You assume there are higher social and medical costs from legalization, when in fact, we spend $7.5 billion every year enforcing marijuana prohibition, which is the cause for the violence and increased potency in the market.
As for the black market in hi-potency marijuana… you mean like we still have a black market in hi-potency alcohol even though we legalized alcohol, right? NOT. Why wouldn’t this hi-potency marijuana be available in the regulated marijuana store?
MYTH: The public wants marijuana legalized.
Voters are frequently misled about the real nature of legalization campaigns. Several out-of-state billionaires have donated money to convince voters that are committed to helping suffering patients or reducing crime. Once the real agenda is made known after the vote, many voters are outraged. Alaska rejected legalization attempts in 2004 and Congress continues to reject normalizing marijuana use.
In 2005. many voters in Denver felt misled about a mariiuana legalization initiative 1-100, which was advertised as vital to Denver’s public safety. Many citizens beived that the SAFER initiative was an effort to put more cops in the community and to reduce domestic violence. when in fact it allowed people 21 and older to possess up to an ounce of marijuana. In 2006. voters in three states strongly rejected efforts to legalize mariiuana: Colorado, Nevada and South Dakota.
OK, so then the voters in Denver were misguided idiots who were fooled into supporting marijuana legalization, but the voters in Colorado overall were intelligent citizens who “strongly rejected” marijuana legalization. Somehow, SAFER fooled Denver, but not Colorado.
You want to talk about out-of-state billionaires? Let’s discuss the Office of National Drug Control Policy, with its massive funding, injecting itself into the state initiative processes in Colorado, Nevada, Alaska, and South Dakota, misinforming those voters about the nature and effects of those state initiatives. Even George Soros doesn’t have Uncle Sam-level finances!
Page 6 – There’s a lot of hype about so-called “medical” marijuana
Did “Dr. Pat” bother to mention that those pills in her hand cost $20 apiece and are often not covered by insurance plans? Or that she’s telling a chemotherapy patient who’s convulsively vomiting to swallow a pill and keep it down? Or that her pill is 100% THC (in sesame oil) vs. “Dr. Pot’s” 10%-15% THC? Or that the pill contains no CBD (cannabidiol) which mitigates the psychoactivity of the THC?* Or that smoking (or better, vaporizing) allows a patient to self-titrate immediately (stop smoking one they feel the relief) whereas you take a pill, you wait 45 minutes, and you hope what you took wasn’t too little or too much?
On the other hand, you gotta love the cartoon representation of Dr. Lester Grinspoon, Dr. Tod Mikuriya, and all the other great cannabis-supporting doctors. They all do really look like that. Glazed eyes, goatee, puffin’ a doobie, pony tail, hipster shades – I believe that was Dr. Grinspoon’s picture from his Harvard curriculum vitae, wasn’t it?
* Trust me, dear Stashers, I’ve smoked lots of pot and I have tried Marinol pills. I never want to do Marinol again. I never once had any sort of “bad trip” on natural weed, but that Marinol put me right down into massive depression, paranoia, listlessness… all those bad things the drug warriors always told me marijuana would cause!
Page 9 – bom chicka wow-wow
This picture of a young teenage girl with her unplanned infant due to a night of drug-fueled no-inhibitions sexual activity brought to you by Budweiser. Are you kidding me? The same US government that pushes an abstinence-only sex education regime and cuts any US aid to countries that even mention abortion wants to blame unplanned pregnancies on pot? Sheesh, tell kids the truth about pot and condoms and you’ll cut that underage birth rate in half!
Page 11 – the Stoner Agenda!
You can’t see it completely, but the calendar is a little Flash animation that reads as follows:
Wed 17: Give up pot (try to again?)
Thu 18: Move on to cocaine, heroin, or speed
Fri 19: Find new dealer (who isn’t in jail)
Sat 20: Re-decorate rut I’m in
Sun 21: Sell pot, lose student loan
Mon 22: Apply for job? (fail drug test again)
Tue 23: Sleep all day
Page 12: The only sensible thing in this whole but of propaganda!
It tells young people that if they blog about using weed, they might be Googled in the future and not be able to get a job. Very good point… unless you end up getting a job blogging about weed! 
I’ve got to share with my buddies! LOL haha