February 2003

Weed Took Down the Towers? Motherfucker, Please!

By now I'm sure you've seen the ad: two well dressed men sit together in a high-end establishment discussing how buying drugs pays for terrorism. One guy, we'll call him Vic Normal, says something like, "So what if I buy drugs? Of the $15 I spend on weed, how much gets to the terrorists? Two dollars. I can live with that." Then his buddy, I'll call him Jesus Christ Ashcroft, says, "So you're saying it's OK to support the terrorists a little?"

GASP! Reductio ad absurdum! In action with the mind games, eh, Mr. Ashcroft? You are so amazing. I will stop buying weed from this moment forward, OK? I'll quit right after I finish this joint.

Are we all supposed to be stupid? That kind of logic may work for the Progresso Soup company, but it's not gonna make me all of a sudden hate on weed.

First of all, the reason no one on the planet follows their money is because they know that sooner or later they'll find it performing an abortion or raping every member of a small Indonesian family. Most likely, my weed money gets filtered into the Canadian or Kentucky economy well before fucking Osama gets his dirty little hands on it. But I don't care! Should I really get that involved?

Most of the money I spend does not support terror, right? While the two-bucks I supposedly send to Osama every time I buy weed, seven or eight of my bucks, as tax dollars taken from my wages, probably goes to pay for the military, CIA and FBI. It wouldn't surprise me if part of the five dollar tip I left at the bar the other day went into my bartender's butt-plug collection. So, following Mr. Ashcroft's logic, I support anal sex and the intelligence community WAY more than I support terror.

Secondly, and I touched on this a couple paragraphs ago, weed, and even cocaine, does not come from Islamic terrorist countries. By all estimates, the vast majority of the weed smoked in the country is grown here in the USA, or in Canada. The cocaine we snort and/or smoke is a South American product. Heroin is the drug that pays for terrorism, but that is not the kind of drug two well dressed men use. Heroin is a terrible drug that, along with crack cocaine, has caused more damage to the United States of America than any 100 terrorists could. Those drugs killed thousands, landed tens of thousands more in jail, and are still destroying every major American city from the inside.
I don't feel the need to go any further. The plethora of "Don't Smoke Weed" ads out there are all worth dissecting. Accusing weed of causing car crashes, unwanted pregnancies and terrorism may work on the simple minded (anyone over 60, under 11, or people who listen to Limbaugh) but no thinking person would be the least bit moved to agree with it.

On top of it all, it is a sorry distraction from the real root causes of terrorism against America and the West. Oil dependence caused sixty years of terrible choices in the Middle East. Trumped up monarchs drunk with oil riches, and manipulative religious leaders who promote senseless violence while doing nothing to help the struggling people of their respective countries. There are dozens of people to blame for terrorism, but perpetuating the myth that just-saying-no-to-drugs will put a stop to terror is an insult to our collective intelligence.