Legalize It

Disclaimer: Yes, I blazed regularly for several years. Yes, I still smoke on occasion today. No, I never really enjoyed it. I’ve never identified as a stoner or planned my life around getting high. Why would I engage in behavior I don’t particularly enjoy when it is expensive, among other downsides? The obvious answer is that marijuana is an evil, addictive drug. This is the problem with drug policy and propaganda. Oh, well I know a kid who started smoking a lot of pot and pretty much dropped out of life. Ignore that the drug was a facilitator, not a cause. That it happened despite preexisting illegality. That if it wasn’t weed it would have been something else. That it is not indicative of the overwhelming majority of responsible users. Why tackle complexity when we can settle on an easy answer then hit the bars.

Before you read anything I have to say, I want you to sit back, relax, and read the text of this speech titled “The History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States.” I read it every few months like one might a favorite book. If I could force every person to read one thing, it would be this speech. Do it. I read it again, just now. Several times I jumped out of my chair and paced angrily.

Get Your Tanks & Grab Your Guns

In my last blog, I referenced a months-long drug-fueled research binge that has left the conspiracy theorists down the street on the brink (?) of paranoid insanity. If you’re going to become obsessed with a topic to the extent that you spend the majority of your waking hours consumed by it, I strongly suggest a component of substance abuse. It’s useful to render yourself an emotional wreck as days and weeks bleed into one another.

I’ve been on a kick myself the last couple months. It started innocently enough – I wanted to be able to properly dismiss the outlandish claims my roommate was bringing back from the conspiracy house. I read about central banking, monetary supply, global economics, the weakening of the U.S. dollar, the impact of shifts in currency valuation, arguments for and against the gold standard, and a wide variety of tangential issues. On my birthday, in the beginning of November, I started referring to the “Ron Paul Survivalist Movement.” If economic doom and gloom predictions are believed, then survivalism is the only logical conclusion: get as much land and as many guns as you can afford, and get ready to bunker down.

The Internet: Not For Horses

Even the cruelest bully could learn a thing or two from the seasoned vets of the internet playground. I was scanning through Fark comments on a teacher/student sex story with a twist: the student was homeschooled. Before you get the wrong idea… it was a private teacher molesting that poor, abused 14 year old boy – not his parents. The homeschooled crowd took offense to comments indicating that homeschooled children tend to be socially inept. One man knew he’d prove the world wrong with a quick comment and a picture:

“Yea, homeschooling really farked up my life. I’m 25, married, have a mortgage and a job as a web developer for a Fortune 100 company My parents really dropped the ball on that one…

And before you go all crazy about social interaction, this is the woman I married:”

Global Scams: The Jew Banker Files

My roommate has an in with the Young Conspiracists of Orange County, aka our friends and neighbors down the street. It began months ago with “common sense” support for Ron Paul’s libertarian ideals and a strong component of legitimate (if misunderstood) concerns about the future of the U.S. economy. This quickly grew into a marijuana-fueled research binge regarding an Illuminati/NWO-style global conspiracy centered on the Rothschild family.

The theories are full of idiosyncratic beliefs and little catch phrases. Self-identifying libertarians consider the quasi-governmental Federal Reserve an outrage. Why private control over monetary policy? That should be in the hands of the… government… that we otherwise want to privatize. And the income tax should be eliminated because all it does is pay interest on our foreign debts. Debts that, in this framework, we should presumably default on.