Using children vs. teaching children

On one hand, we have No on 64 – website aimed at stopping marijuana legalization in Colorado. What’s on top of the webpage?

Amendment 64 would:

  • Make Colorado the first state to try to profit from the legalization of marijuana at the expense of its children.
  • Make Colorado the only state where it is legal to grow, transport and sell marijuana for recreational use.
  • Make it legal for anyone twenty-one years or older to possess and consume up to one ounce of marijuana (the equivalent of 60 joints or eight pans of pot brownies).
  • Permit opening marijuana retail stores, growing facilities, manufacturing facilities and testing facilities in your community.

A huge picture of kids, the words “Expense of its children” with nothing to support it, and yet the law clearly keeps it illegal for those under 21. So why are kids on the webpage? And why does the page go on to spout lies about kids and marijuana?

Because these people are using kids for their own political purposes.

On the other hand…

NORML blog today has: There is Nothing ‘Complicated’ About Telling Your Kids the Truth

Here are responsible people talking about education and realities.

Education gives children the tools and understanding to help them cope with the challenges they have already experienced, and will continue to face further down the road. Creating a government regulated system for marijuana legalization, which will include everything from age limits to promotional and advertising restrictions (and obviously impaired driving regulations), will actually help parents address this issue with their kids […]

Children need accurate information to make informed decisions. They need to be educated on how consuming marijuana can effect their body’s development specifically, and how to reduce any harms associated with its use – as well as how to distinguish between use and abuse. Just as it is socially acceptable for parents to speak with their children openly about their use of alcohol, with an emphasis on that fact that it is only appropriate for adults in moderation, the legalization of marijuana will allow parents to openly discuss their (possible) past or current use and be able to objectively and rationally speak to their children about pot. The controlled regulation of marijuana will send a message of moderation and responsible use. It will also undercut the black market, which in turn will reduce teen access. It’s as simple as that, and it’s a win-win for everybody.

So, who has the best interests of children in mind? The prohibitionists or the “potheads”?

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43 Responses to Using children vs. teaching children

  1. claygooding says:

    Just put a caption under their picture:

    “We want our kids to have the same ease of getting marijuana they have now,,to hell with ID checking!”

  2. allan says:

    So, who has the best interests of children in mind? The prohibitionists or the “potheads”?

    so Pete… is that rhetorical or sarcastic?

    Or is it the real question that needs a public airing? And is it one they really want to be asked?

    And pardon for me pointing out the obvious… but that’s straight out of Calvina’s playbook. Let’s see what google says…

    hmmm… the No On 64 website is funded by “Smart Colorado” (hah!) which is led by by the undoobietable Weld Co. DA Ken Buck (sounds so masculine I get shivers)(wait… not shivers, just gas)(heh…). And Smart Colorado is funded by… Save Our Society… and google tells us that which was suspected originally:

    Calvina Fay is the Executive Director of Drug Free America Foundation and Save Our Society From Drugs (S.O.S.)

    But we knew that. What it does show is how small the opposition really is. A decade and more ago Calvina was inner circle in DC. She moved legislators and strutted before committees crowing her pap. My last report from one in FL was that she works out of a one room house that is the HQ for her anti-drug/anti-druggie (lack of) brain trust.

    We truly are legion. Do a googlestats or Alexa comparison of SOS’ website and Pete’s DWR… compare MAP’s DrugNews to the ONDCP… the wwweb is our beach, so to speak. And yes Malcolm, if you want to be a “Legionnaire” for your 13 concubines I’m sure Modesto’s young Jack would disapprove… of course over here American Legionnaires are hardly young or strapping, geriatrically speaking…

  3. Francis says:

    The kid on the far right reminds me of a school-age Francis. He’s the one kid who apparently didn’t get the memo on the photo color scheme (“blue jeans and off-white or blue t-shirts”). He’s kinda off by himself whereas everyone else is touching. His hair’s a little crazy.

    Hang in there, buddy. It gets better. Well, actually it gets worse first, but high school’s only four years. 😉

  4. claygooding says:

    “”Make it legal for anyone twenty-one years or older to possess and consume up to one ounce of marijuana (the equivalent of 60 joints or eight pans of pot brownies).

    Please Calvina,,keep your brownies at home,,,they are worthless,,and I quit rolling “penners” years ago,,right after Cheech told me there was 2 joints in an ounce.

  5. Duncan20903 says:

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    If you read between the lines, there’s a bit of good news on that website! They’ve got really, really good pot in Colorado! I don’t even get one pan of brownies from an ounce.

    Make it legal for anyone twenty-one years or older to possess and consume up to one ounce of marijuana (the equivalent of 60 joints or eight [!!!!!!!!] pans of pot brownies).

    What is it with prohibitionists and their obsession with using pseudo standardized units of measure? On the other hand they seem to have become aware that smoking isn’t the only delivery method available. Well, maybe “aware” isn’t the best choice of word but you get my drift, yes?

    Hey, wait a second, you only get to consume 1 ounce legally? Lifetime? Can I buy Calvina’s ration?

    (Synchronicity is an integral part of my life. I’ve just cued up “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” and we start talking about Ms. Fay.)

    • darkycle says:

      A dark classic and one of Jack’s best portrayals. Once again you show exceptional taste for a guy in a Burger King mask. (one day I’ll go into just how much they downplayed the real nightmarish qualities of mental health treatment, but it is one of my favorites. I will give anybody out there a piece of really good advice, though. If it’s your first time seeing the movie, it’s not a very good companion piece to three hits of “purple barrel” acid. Just FYI.)

      • allan says:

        for me it was a hit of windowpane and a midnight showing of the exorcist… different, for sure.

      • Matthew Meyer says:

        Cuckoo’s is for cocoa puffs. The real depravity of mental health can be seen in Titticut Follies, the once-banned documentary.

        Like the guy who swears he’s not crazy, but they won’t let him out because they’ve decided his delusion is that he’s got nothing wrong with him. Of *course* he has something wrong with him, why else would he be in hospital?

      • darkycle says:

        Oh yeah, The mask went away. Remarkably good taste for aa green cartoon bear, then.
        BTW, speaking of green cartoon characters, long time, no DdC.

  6. darkycle says:

    They are gasping for air in a very thin atmosphere. More support for legalization. That means, fewer supporters willing to send in dollars. Fewer gullible housewives to organize PTA meetings and stuff envelopes. Fewer parents willing to allow their children to be propagandized by the DARE officer. Fewer corporate supporters as it becomes less fashionable PR to be overtly against legalization.
    That means, smaller offices for Calvina and her ilk. Fewer University positions for the likes of Kevin Sabet.
    The new frontier for this battle IS turning out to be the internet. It is being fought in the only open forum for opinion and news left.
    Did you get that Obama, Holder and Kerli? The internet.. and guess what, Bitches? …we OWN this shit.

    • Francis says:

      Well-said! BTW, I just saw this. It seems like a pretty good indication of just how thin that atmosphere has gotten:

      The Denver Post reported Monday that supporters of Amendment 64 had raised almost $2 million to date, while the opposition has brought in some $15,000.

      RUH ROH!

  7. Servetus says:

    The drug war is good business. Invest your son or daughter.

    Of the 14 kids pictured, it’s an even bet 6 of them will have a criminal record by age 21 because of prohibition and because they have dark skin.

    Those 6, plus maybe a few of the white kids who get caught with drugs, will be relegated to the social status of lepers, doomed forever to pursue careers as writers and underground revolutionaries.

    • Matthew Meyer says:

      That would be an awesome writing project: follow-up on these kids, or find some kids from old DARE propaganda and do a “where are they now” piece.

    • Duncan20903 says:

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      6/14 = 42.857% Sounds large. Does anyone think Servetus is high? Of course that’s neither here nor there. The correct answer is 4.2, not 6. Of course in a normal reality I’d round down to 4 but we’re talking about lunatics and I see no reason to presume that they wouldn’t go all Solomon and slice up one of the kids to protect them.

      30% of Americans arrested by age 23, study finds

  8. Windy says:

    Not the first article like this, definitely need more of them and they need to be seen all across the world (not just here in these uSofA):
    http://digg.com/newsbar/topnews/how_criminalizing_drugs_is_hurting_neuroscience_research

    • Duncan20903 says:

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      Has anyone noticed that the beyond the fringe lunatics have suddenly given up on prohibition? No, they haven’t come to their senses, but does their “reasoning” really matter as long as they quit standing in the way? Here’s a comment from Windy’s linked article. This isn’t even the first time this week I’ve seen the “thinking” represented in the text quoted below:

      Robert Schiele said:
      Decriminalize all drugs. Sure, there’ll be deaths, but no further reason for violence. Besides, the U.S. has a surplus long-term unemployed population anyway. Go the decriminalization route and the true addicts should all be dead within a year. Probably open up thousands of jobs, increase productivity across the board, too.

  9. B.Snow says:

    One thing that really gets me is the “pay no attention to ‘the man’ behind the curtain” nature of the so-called *facts* at the -No on 64- website.

    “Marijuana abuse accounts for 67 percent of the adolescents in substance-abuse treatment programs in the United States.”

    While this may be true, everyone here on the couch knows damn well that it’s a grossly distorted statistic. They knowingly inflate it with people -plea bargaining- for what is *effectively* involuntary ‘Rehab’ (aka “substance-abuse treatment programs”), over involuntary ‘Jail’ (aka “incarceration”).

    Rehab rarely helps people that aren’t going into it – of their own accord, people that have hit ‘rock-bottom’ & want help with a serious addiction to = alcohol, cocaine, heroin, meth, – Not marijuana!

    If they tell you that – they’re fraking lying to you – &/or themselves, or more likely to their family who’s intervening or to a judge that’s sentencing them. I’d wager 99% of the time they were caught with (or known to use) all sorts of drugs.

    The NIN “what’s their drug of choice, well what have ya got” types = And admitting to marijuana use is almost certainly going to minimize the severity/duration of the rehab & the overall ostracizing by the judge/court, family, public, etc, than anything else on the list of stuff they had in their system or their pockets.

    They also know if they ever get caught again – this gives them another shot at rehab = if they start with rehab for cocaine – they’re gonna have one less “verse” to sing in their “mea cupla chorus”.
    If they admit to MJ the first time (or three), then later step it up to admitting they’ve gotten addicted to cocaine = they’re *probably* gonna get another chance + more sympathy & support… And if at some point in the future (in the typical 1-3 years of probation/parole & piss tests) = they get popped for THC in a piss test?

    “Well, at least it wasn’t cocaine again”, or some other hard drug. Is that a horribly jaded & cynical view of the system?
    Sure, But I doubt anyone here on the couch thinks that scenario is too far off-base = Anyone think I am terribly mistaken? I’ve never been through that personally but I’ve witnessed several people go down paths much like that – Rehab didn’t help until they actually wanted the help!

    And IMNSHO – the idea of someone “strung-out on weed”, is a mythical to me as fraking magic flying pony.

    • darkycle says:

      B., you said “Rehab rarely helps people that aren’t going into it – of their own accord…” The truth is Rehab rarely helps those who DO go in of their own accord. The relapse rate for addicts in treatment is over seventy percent within the first year. That’s for Alcoholics hitting their bottoms, and dragging themselves, crying, to A.A. No other “medical treatment” shows less success. In fact, I’m unaware of any medical treatment that is currently in use that fails seventy percent of the time. We used to have a name for treatments like that. “Snake Oil”. Yet they fully intend to subject millions of people to this “treatment”. A “treatment” for which a standard model doesn’t even exist. This OUGHT to scare the shit out of anybody who hears it, yet somehow they can actually talk openly about these plans.

      • Peter says:

        DC, you’re conflating “rehab” with self-help groups like AA. They are not the same. Fee-paying rehab may claim, rightly or wrongly, to be medical treatment, AA certainly does not. In fact AA literature warns members against making any medical recommendations to other members, stating that “we are not medical professionals.”
        I would also challenge the “seventy % relapse rate within the first year,” which I presume you are applying to both AA and rehab? This is an almost impossible statistic to obtain in an anonymous, recordless, collection of autonomous groups like AA, and besides, the success of an individual’s recovery should be measured over a lifetime, not a year (an even harder thing to quantify). I would also add that the early AA members in the 1930s and 40s, when the organisation was very much smaller, had a SUCCESS rate of about 80%. This was, of course, long before the courts started diluting the success rate by using AA for its own purposes and calling it “voluntary treatment.” By the way, some AA meetings are now refusing to sign court papers because of the negative effect court enforced attendance has on those who want to be there of their own accord. I wish there was a more concerted movement in AA and other groups to reject the appropriation of their name by both the government and fee-charging treatment centers, both of which have their own agendas and motives, read $$$.

        • The Government will hijack any treatment modality hungry enough for Government subsidy. I am glad to hear that some AA meetings are starting to refuse signing court papers. The courts are tarnishing both AA’s name and its core values.

  10. Duncan20903 says:

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    North Carolina State party’s resolutions include legalizing marijuana

    Man, my head is spinning…it’s way too early in the morning to be up this late. Insomnia sucks eggs!

    Oh look here…it seems that cannabis has been officially displaced as the “gateway” drug. In the spirit of consistency with the laughably absurd “gateway” theory, the new “gateway” drug is now (hold onto your hats) ***prescription pills***! You heard me correctly, no longer is the important job of getting our Country’s school children addicted to “drugs” limited to one lousy substance, now it’s grab bag of mixed or matched random substances.
    Statistics Show The New Gateway Drug Is Now Officially Prescription Pills

    Hopefully by tomorrow prescription pills will be moved to schedule I so we can save the children from becoming extinct.

  11. kaptinemo says:

    Always using the children as human shields, just like Hitler said to do…because if they revealed their true agendas, they’d be subjected to a withering barrage of adult criticism.

    Because, in the end, from a societal point of view, this is not about The Sainted Childrenâ„¢ at all. It’s about one very small minority within society taking it upon itself to regulate the behavior of all adults by imposing its’ neuroses upon the rest of us. Which when you look at the history of that ‘movement’, you see that has always been the pattern.

    Again and again, they remind me of this:

    “Political tags–such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and. so forth–are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.” (Emphasis mine – k.)

    Control, control, control…they must control others because they are, at their very cores, deeply afraid. For all their bombast, they’re terrified of life, of its’ vagaries, its’ unpredictability, and desire a world where all the corners are nailed down…with them holding the hammers and deciding which ‘nails’ need pounding. Very sad people, really, and I’d be inclined to pity them if they weren’t so blindly destructive…and vindictive.

  12. primus says:

    From whence came that quote?

    • Matthew Meyer says:

      Windows now lets you highlight, right-click, and search, or maybe it’s Chrome that lets me do that…

      http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/38415

      (RA Heinlein)

      • Pete says:

        Kaptin and I are both fans of the writings of Robert Heinlein, who has placed an incredible amount of astute political observations within his science fiction. That one was from “Time Enough for Love.”

        • Windy says:

          As am I, and Time Enough for Love (and its prequel, Methuselah’s Children) was probably my favorite storyline and my favorite character he wrote (tho The Door Into Summer is a close second).

    • kaptinemo says:

      I see a hungry mind: Notebooks of Lazarus Long. Be prepared: you may be outraged by some of his musings. But he always made you think.

      Heinlein’s later, adult works were peppered with (often, wry) observations on the Human condition, and the majority of them I believe to be partly inspired by HL Mencken and Mark Twain, other favorites of mine.

      The somewhat acerbic views regarding government, and the tendency for it to be populated with ‘do-gooders’ and ‘uplifters’ intent on ‘improving’ that Human condition – and only making things horribly worse with their incompetence and fanaticism – was a common theme of all three writers. If Twain had a ‘pen warmed up in Hell’, Mencken’s typewriter must have arrived from there with asbestos gloves, and Heinlein’s with radiation shielding.

      All of them were particularly unsparing of the kind of blind, stupid ignorance, arrogance, certainty of moral rectitude (and thus, superiority) over their fellow citizens combined with that same faux desire to ‘help’ (as in being ‘helped’ into prison for a medical problem like addiction) that always secretly covers a desire to rule over fellow citizens. Think of William S. Burroughs’s version of ‘Church Ladies’.

      Yes, I daresay that quite a few of us think that way, but that’s because we’ve been spitted on the short, sharp and sh*tty end of the prohibition stick held by those who claim to be our moral superiors, but whose actions prove they are anything but. We’ve had to evolve because of that, and so are able to see the hypocrisies inherent in not just drug prohibition, but most of government…and we tend to speak up about it. Which makes us the eternal enemies of those whose modus operandi has always been “Do as I say, not as I do.”

  13. sumguy says:

    SUPPORT THE WAR ON THE POOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    becuz

    WE FEAR FOR THE CHILDREN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    fuggin lyin Machiavellian hypocrites!!!!!

  14. claygooding says:

    Legalization of medical marijuana does not increase drug usage among high school students

    http://www.news-medical.net/news/20120619/Legalization-of-medical-marijuana-does-not-increase-drug-usage-among-high-school-students.aspx

    “”While marijuana use by teens has been increasing since 2005, an analysis of data from 1993 through 2009 by economists at three universities has found no evidence to link the legalization of medical marijuana to increased use of the drug among high school students.

    “There is anecdotal evidence that medical marijuana is finding its way into the hands of teenagers, but there’s no statistical evidence that legalization increases the probability of use,” said Daniel I. Rees, a professor of economics at the University of Colorado Denver.”” ‘snipped’

    I wonder if Calvina will appreciate this?

  15. Servetus says:

    The DEA is guilty of brutalizing children and shouting obscenities in their presence, or so says the Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a decision handed down involving putting a gun to the head of an 11-year-old. A Latina, of course…

    http://reason.com/blog/2012/06/18/ninth-circuit-to-dea-putting-a-gun-to-an

    • allan says:

      […] the Obama Administration could have declined to defend the DEA in this case. Instead, Obama’s Justice Department has decided to make the case that federal agents should be allowed to hold guns to the heads of children.

      NObama!

    • kaptinemo says:

      Adrenaline-tripping cops pointing safety-off (and probably sear-worn, and perhaps even hair-trigger) firearms at kids.

      All I can think of when I read things like that was that it was ‘cold comfort’ that at least those poor kids didn’t wind up like Alberto Sepulveda. But only just…

  16. Duncan20903 says:

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    I recently shared my high opinion of Public Policy Polling in a recent post. Reiterated.

    Less recently but much more frequently I’ve shared my very low opinion of puns in MSM headlines written by hack editors which appear over stories about cannabis. Also reiterated.

    Marijuana initiative flying high: poll

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