The latest prejudicial stereotyping of cannabis consumers comes as part of the ONCDP’s “Above the Influence” ad campaign. It is a website and interactive Flash video called “Stoners in the Mist”, and it copies the look and feel of a National Geographic-style safari documentary, complete with a white-mustachioed “explorer” in a pith helmet introducing us to the hunt for his elusive prey:
Stoners in the Mist | Fun | AboveTheInfluence.com
It is a beautiful day. And while most people are out and about enjoying friends, activities, life in general…the creature that we seek is sedentary, uninspired, and remarkably unmotivated. My associate and I are in search of the lair of a magnificent specimen: the mature stoner.
Oh, goody! I wonder which mature, sedentary, uninspired, unmotivated stoner he’s seeking out? Ricky Williams, that former NFL running back? That guy is so lazy, what with his two-a-day workouts, yoga, and 3% body fat. Willie Nelson? Yup, there’s a mature stoner who never amounted to anything. Montel Williams? Talk about amotivational syndrome, hosting a TV show and running an MS foundation! Too bad Carl Sagan is dead, because there you had one completely uninspired stoner.
In this interactive feature, we will explore and attempt to explain the social interactions and natural responses of this elusive and baffling creature. I am your host, Barnard Puck and this… is Stoners in the Mist.
Apparently, “Dr.” Puck and his assistant have no problem being peeping Toms. Well, this should be fun. More screenshots and offensive stereotypes follow after the jump…
Today we are going to attempt to map out the stoners’ territory, in order to determine their area of movement. In order to do this, we need to attach these radio transmitting collars. So, my associate, Baldric, is going to attempt to attach the collar without disturbing the stoner.
Shocking… the creatures are docile and unresponsive, to the point of helplessness…
So the team “tags” the stoners with radio collars to track their movement. In the next shots, the professor and the assistant watch the tracking computer, which shows the two red dots remaining on the couch for five hours, 12 hours, 43 hours, then 72 hours. Because when you get stoned, you stay on the couch for three days straight without ever getting up to go to the bathroom, go to bed, go to work, take a shower, get groceries, eat a meal, or visit friends.
The next part of the adventure takes us to “Dr.” Puck’s closer look at the Stoner. A redheaded stoner is shown to be suffering the effects of marijuana use, which are listed as:
- Anxiety and paranoia (stoner’s heartbeat increases and he gets nervous and twitchy… I might get nervous and twitchy if two safari explorers camped out in my basement and tagged my friend with a tracking device!)
- Impaired alertness and coordination (stoner gets hit in the head by an oncoming basketball… hey, that finally explains why those guys in the NBA never use marijuana!)
- Shortened attention span and high distractability (the stoner walks off the set… you know, I would, too, if people kept throwing basketballs at my head.)
- Poor judgment (stoner moves forward and knocks the camera down… he was probably pissed off about having basketballs thrown at his head.)
- Decreased short term memory (stoner forgets a phone conversation right after hanging up… but maybe he’s just suffering a concussion from having basketballs thrown at his head.)
- Communication problems
The last one is particularly funny. For each of these points they reference some NIDA fact sheet or some study that has been soundly demonstrated to be quack reefer madness. But for the last one, their reference is simply:
Kids who regularly smoke marijuana can develop symptoms of what psychologists call an “amotivational syndrome,” which can include impaired ability to communicate and relate to others.
…with no link or study to back it up, because it cannot be backed up! The “amotivational syndrome” myth has been so thoroughly debunked that no reputable scientist even tries to bring it up anymore.
The next vignette shows us the typical female stoner in high school, being hit up on by a young man. Of course, she’s a complete wreck, with tousled hair and drab clothing.
The stoner’s fascinating courtship rituals highlight the extreme difficulty these animals have fitting into other social groups… In fact, we have learned through our intensive research that both male and female stoners tend to lack the motivation to maintain proper hygiene.
The stoner girl is so sloppy that the young man observes she has a piece of a brownie stuck in her hair. Now, who hasn’t had that problem? You get a little stoned and you fall asleep on a plate of brownies. The next day, you’re so dazed and confused you don’t shower, change clothes, or brush your hair, so you don’t notice or smell the food stuck in your hair.
I know in my history of smoking marijuana – since July 4, 1990 – it has never been incredibly difficult to hook up with a girl who likes to smoke pot. Many people find cannabis to be a great aphrodisiac. So let’s just see how the “don’t smoke pot, you won’t get laid” argument flies with the young people today.
The “Dr.” has us take a break for a neat little quiz.
- Did you know 1 in 10 fatal car accident victims tests positive for marijuana? You know what that means? About 1 in 10 people would test positive for marijuana, period! Since a marijuana test doesn’t prove intoxication, you can’t say pot caused fatal car wrecks. Alcohol, on the other hand, a legal drug, killed 43,300 Americans last year in car fatalities and injured 2.5 million.
- Did you know that marijuana smoke has more carcinogens than tobacco smoke! Yes, it’s true, but somehow they missed Dr. Donald Tashkin’s 2006 research that shows that marijuana does not raise the risk of lung cancer, nor does it raise the risk of other head and neck cancers.
- Did you know marijuana will increase your risk of heart attack? Yeah, just about as much as running up a flight of stairs. Marijuana does increase heart rate, but a 1997 study by Kaiser Permanente found “Marijuana use had little effect on non-AIDS mortality in men and on total mortality in women.”
- Did you know that marijuana is addictive? To bolster that point, the “Dr.” notes “Each year, more teens enter treatment with a primary diagnosis of marijuana dependence than for all other illicit drugs combined.” Yes, and that is because we have a criminal justice system that sentences teens to treatment if they are caught with marijuana. As we’ve noted, more than a third of people in treatment for “marijuana addiction” haven’t even smoked marijuana in the past month! Even the NIDA says marijuana is more or less addictive like caffeine is addictive.
- Did you know that withdrawal from marijuana causes irritability and aggression? It was a bit of a trick question, since the answers were both”B” and “C”, but the program only lets you pick one answer. That made me a little irritated, so I slammed my mouse down angrily. Then I just remembered to spark up a joint. Seriously, though, the Institute of Medicine looked at this for two years and found “[U]nder normal cannabis use, the long half-life and slow elimination from the body of THC … prevent[s] substantial abstinence symptoms,” and that a distinctive ‘marijuana withdrawal syndrome,’ when identified, “is mild and short-lived.” You want to see irritability and aggression? Watch a heroin junkie or an alcoholic try to quit cold turkey.
Our final vignette features some testing of the stoners. The “Dr’s.” assistant dons a gas mask and starts throwing things at the stoner to test his reflexes. The stoner fails to catch any of the objects, but stops short of asking, “Dude, why do you keep throwing things at me?” The assistant seems more irritable and aggressive than the stoners.
Then they are tested in a driving simulation. The stoners drive way too fast for the course and hit every innocent obstacle that pops up in the middle of the road. The “Dr.” concludes:
There you have it. The stoners are incapable of operating a motor vehicle. They are an endangerment to themselves and to the public in general.
Except they don’t bother with any of the studies that show marijuana-using drivers to be safer and slower than their alcohol-using counterparts. That’s not to say that anyone should be driving stoned – you shouldn’t – but it is a gross exaggeration to show marijuana-drivers behaving like drunk drivers, because it just ain’t so.
Please, you filthy, unmotivated, clumsy, paranoid, sexually-undesirable marijuana addicts, if you can remember to click on the link and watch the movie, do so. Just remember that this prejudiced, stereotyped, Birth of a Nation-like drivel was produced by your tax dollars! I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know that ad campaigns like this have been repeatedly shown to not lower teen use or perceptions about marijuana; in fact, they may even have the opposite effect. But hey, $1.5 billion dollars spent since 1998 sure have given me plenty of stupid videos to critique!
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[...] I first began writing this blog I told of the infamous ONDCP propaganda piece “Stoners in the Mist”. It was a faux documentary of a Marlin Perkins-type wildlife scientist leading us on the hunt for [...]
[...] I first began writing this blog I told of the infamous ONDCP propaganda piece “Stoners in the Mist”. It was a faux documentary of a Marlin Perkins-type wildlife scientist leading us on the hunt for [...]
[...] I first began writing this blog I told of the infamous ONDCP propaganda piece “Stoners in the Mist”. It was a faux documentary of a Marlin Perkins-type wildlife scientist leading us on the hunt for [...]
While it pisses me off that this was made with my tax dollars; I personally thought it was hilarious. I don’t think today’s youth are dumb enough to buy into this stuff anyway.
[...] They are basically implying that if you smoke pot you will amount to nothing and become a loser “pot head” who can’t accomplish anything in life. Really? So how is it that young professional women in powerful positions with tons of [...]
[...] They are basically implying that if you smoke pot you will amount to nothing and become a loser “pot head” who can’t accomplish anything in life. Really? So how is it that young professional women in powerful positions with tons of [...]
Yup, nicotine is bad stuff
I bet this bs will be adopted by swedish politicians.
You MUST let the Obama staff, that will be doing business with european counterparts to be pro-cannabis, you see Sweden will be The Swedish EU Presidency during this summer and their policy regarding cannabis is NortKoreaish to say the least. It is a sectarian cabal of anti-narco fundamentalists that are lobbying this in Sweden, they are funded by the government etc etc.
This is an international cry for help.
I am absolutely at my wits end trying to deal with this BS. I have been smoking MJ since 1968. I even moved to Kathmandu, Nepal for two years because I liked the hashish! But, since 1968 I have owned and operated several successful businesses, been employed as a customer support manager for a software company, been a highly-regarded software engineer, and finally retired to a foreign country. During this period I regularly used MJ and hash, and, for periods of years, did not use these substances. There has never been, to my mind, the slightest question of addiction with cannabis — I can start and stop using at will, and have, when circumstances required it. On the other hand, I have not used tobacco since 1968, and I still crave it, and dream about using it, almost daily. Now that’s addiction!
When I see garbage like this it makes me unbelievably angry. Not everyone in America sees this for the piece of shit that it is. Yet, it really is not their fault they are so ignorant about cannabis. These people were raised to trust their bungling government by their parents and not having the curiosity to think for theirselves, they just don’t know any better about cannabis. To anyone living in a state of happy, ignorant, complacentness… there has never been a more important time in the history of the United States of America to question your government. The American government does not have it’s citizens best interests at hand and has not for a long time. You are a bunch of piss ants to them and they operate on their own agenda, not the desires of the populace. Many politicians vote on policy with their biggest campaign contributers interests at heart instead of what the people want. This is not what our founding fathers ever, ever had in mind.
What really infuriates me is the ONDCP force feeds this trash to every American dumb enough to believe it. Paying for it with our tax dollars makes it feel like we are getting raped with our own penis.
“Pot-heads, dopers, left-overs from the 70′s” whatever they want to call us… are people with a right to pursue happiness too. The ONDCP pumping out one crap-a-ganda tape after another doesn’t make them better people. The ONDCP is as ruthless as they are wicked. If people that fall for their dribble, hook, line, and sinker, knew half of the things our goverment did to oppress different ethnic minorities of this country with far more dangerous drugs than cannabis, they wouldn’t be so quick to trust everything they say.
If we want a change, as Pelosi stated, we do need to get out there and deprogram as many of these people as each of us can. Short of waiting for all of the senior citizens of America to expire, this is our best option of a bill like this ever, ever passing. We should try to raise money and combat the ONDCP with the truth on a level that hasn’t been done before. We need to discredit the ONCDP every chance we get. There is no reason we can’t just rip apart every lie that comes out of the ONDCP in a very public manner. NORML sponsored Talk-Radio would be an awesome medium to tear the anti-cannabis wall in America.
We all do need to write our congressmen. Those of us in states that do not have medical marijuana programs inacted, get out there and start collecting signatures. Lets be honest with ourselves, cannabis needs to be acknowledged as medically relevant by our federal government before adult use and possession will ever be decriminalized or legalized.
While not a violent person at all, seeing the ONDCP get away with all that they have since the Nixon administration drives me to the threshold. I am getting infuriated with the situation in America regarding cannabis/medical cannabis and will pursue every legal avenue to abolish prohibition.
If Norml were a person I would marry her
[...] ‘controlling’ currently illicit drugs. The Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP)chief propagandist David Murray attended the press conference, making himself available for questions afterwards and [...]
“Each year, more teens enter treatment with a primary diagnosis of marijuana dependence than for all other illicit drugs combined.”
Okay, so i guess this means meth, coke, crack, smack and ecstasy are less addictive?
And apparently all stoners are lazy, dumb, filthy, unhealthy and aggressive animals who endanger others and will never be able to have a normal social life. I feel insulted…
[...] to publicly express any remorse — because, after all, under prohibition Rachel Hoffman was no longer a human being deserving of such [...]
The prohibition of Cannabis is an atrocity, a crime against humanity.
Should we cannabis consumers sue the producers for disparagement? Class-action?
This perverse propaganda is garbage unworthy of Anslinger; at taxpayer expense…
[...] currently illicit drugs. The Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP)chief propagandist David Murray attended the press conference, making himself available for questions afterwards and [...]
[...] drug law reform groups (as well as the political gossip website Wonkette have weighed in with scathing critiques of the online film, no doubt stimulating the bulk of the website’s otherwise nonexistent traffic. [...]
I’d like to see their responses to these and other articles that thoroughly debunk them… I emailed them asking if they would, but seems doubtful.
[...] to publicly express any remorse — because, after all, under prohibition Rachel Hoffman was no longer a human being deserving of such [...]
[...] to publicly express any remorse — because, after all, under prohibition Rachel Hoffman was no longer a human being deserving of such [...]
You made a very good point. We are doing just that through a Freedom of Information Act request. Stay tuned.
I was interested in what you had to say, but I think a better response would have been to find and publish the names of the people responsible for wasting taxpayer money by making that piece of trash.
It’s very disturbing to me to see how the government treats it’s citizens like animals. I guess that makes it easier to abuse and mistreat “the people”. When are they going to sell tags to hunters so they can legally hunt and kill stoners? Do you get to choose “doe” or “buck” tags? Is this limited to federal land, or can they hunt on private land?
Are “animals” required to pay taxes???