Half-Baked Journalism

In November, Massachusetts voters will get to vote on one of the most progressive drug policy reform initiatives in the country this year. It will decriminalize marijuana possession of up to one ounce, making it a civil infraction punishable by a maximum $100 fine. The change would save the state millions of dollars each year in processing useless marijuana arrests.

While most people are well-aware of why these initiatives are being promoted and why they're polling so well, some members of the media have clearly missed the boat. And while I've seen my share of misinformed editorials on drug policy before, it's been a while since I've seen one as over-the-top as this one from Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr. It's truly breathtaking in its ignorance:

Marijuana makes you stupid. It’s as simple as that.

Actually, it's not as simple as that. Numerous studies have shown that moderate marijuana use does not affect long-term cognitive abilities. But Carr has little interest in the truth. He was told long ago that pot makes you stupid, and it's just not his job to make sure that it's correct. He's a journalist, not a fact-checker.

And now in Massachusetts, we are going to have a ballot question that asks the following: Do you really want to make it even easier than it already is to get stupid, and stay stupid?

They could do that much more effectively by adding Howie Carr's columns to the required reading list in schools.

Yes, the Bong Brigade is on the march again. They want to put the high back into high school, the truckin’ back in truck stops, the joint back in all those joint legislative committees.

Actually, they want to put all the wasted taxpayer money going to prosecuting people for possessing a largely harmless plant back into their own pockets.

Stand by to see stoners at the Stone Zoo, potheads in Marblehead. The grass is always greener in Greenfield, dude.

What? Is Howie Carr really stupid enough to think that our marijuana laws are holding back marijuana use? Is he not aware of the fact that marijuana use in the United States is considerably higher than it is in Holland, where it can be bought in coffeeshops and there isn't even a $100 fine for possessing it? Even the idiots in the Drug Czar's office have figured out that enforcement policies have no effect on use rates.

If you liked HempFest on the Boston Common every September, you’re going to love legalized marijuana.

Ummm, Howie, this initiative doesn't legalize it. It just treats it like a speeding ticket.

This one’s, like, totally for Jerry Garcia!

Is this moron still trying to be funny? I hope he's done now.

This year, the front group is something called the Committee for Sensible Marijuana Policy, and it’s pushing a Sensible State Marijuana Policy.

Front group for what? What eeeeeevil forces are trying to save the taxpayers of Massachusetts money, Howie?

Its flacks are available for media interviews to discuss their “sensible policy.”

I'm glad they now know that an interview with you would be a complete waste of time.

Organizers include the usual “concerned citizens,” with a few token “former law enforcement professionals” thrown in.

I love how he puts "former law enforcement professionals" in quotes as if he somehow thinks it's a scam that there's an organization of thousands of current and former law enforcement professionals trying to end the drug war.

Their goal is to use the initiative to abolish criminal penalties for less than an ounce of marijuana or, to use their preferred word, hemp, as in, “Dude, did you know, like, George Washington’s army used hemp when it was fighting in, uh, like, was it the Civil War, man?”

Hahahahaha! Let's recap this line. In a sentence where he ridicules his "stoner strawman" for not knowing the difference between the Civil War and the Revolutionary War (so clever!), he reveals that he doesn't realize the difference between marijuana (psycho-active drug) and hemp (non psycho-active non-drug). Well done!

The sensible group’s press release sounds like it was written after watching a “Dragnet 1967” marathon on TVLand.

And this column appears to be written by someone who might not recognize that those episodes are reruns.

Harmless people, we are told, “are arrested, booked, entered into the Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) system, resulting in a possible sentence of up to six months in jail and a $500 fine.”

Key word: possible.

No. Key word: harmless.

Do you know how difficult it is to actually be thrown in jail around here?

It's so hard that Massachusetts has a prison overcrowding crisis. What an unbelievable retard.

You can lie under oath and obstruct justice, and you don’t have to do a day in the can - am I right Tom Finneran?

Wow, what amazing logic! That's like saying that, just because Scooter Libby avoided jail-time, we don't send people to prison in this country often enough. Dear god...

Pot charges are usually meaningless add-ons, like piling a driving-to-endanger on top on an OUI, or like Neil Entwistle being charged with possession of an unregistered handgun.

OK, so if they're meaningless add-ons, then why are the taxpayers of Massachusetts paying so much in court and administrative costs for them?

The potheads say 7,500 marijuana citations make it onto the CORI system every year.

And your taxpayers dollars are being used to maintain that "meaningless" information.

But how many of those Class B controlled-substance convictions are added to someone’s CORI record along with more serious raps like, say, for possession of Class D controlled substances (cocaine) with intent to distribute?

Well, you work for the Boston Herald, so why don't you use the resources at your disposal and look it up? Or are you just lazy?

The ganja-guys then cite the alleged “collateral damage” of this CORI indignity: “inability to find employment, obtain housing and receive a college loan.”

Fasten your seat belts, folks. Howie is about to take this to an even more intense level of stupid.

Please. The reason stoners can’t find employment is because they’re too wasted.

Actually, someone with a past marijuana conviction, even if they've long given up smoking pot, could easily have problems finding employment throughout the country. Whether or not this is a particularly bad problem in Massachusetts, I don't know for sure since I don't live there.

They forgot to turn on the alarm clock.

I think the people who forgot to set their alarm clocks were the editors at the Herald.

They went out for a smoke break and never returned.

Can you do that too, Howie?

They missed the bus, man.

Shouldn't people in the media have to know more about pot than just what they've seen from Cheech & Chong movies before they can write columns about it? I guess not.

They can’t “obtain housing” because they can’t get it together to ever leave mom’s rent-free basement.

Actually, Howie, much of the software that's used to allow people from all over the world to read your hackneyed horseshit was written by people who smoke pot. They left mom's rent-free basement a long time ago and will one day be laying you off when the last of the senior citizens who actually listens to your mindless dribble dies off.

Unless you’re in the cop’s face when you light up - like they do at HempFest - you face almost zero chance of getting arrested.

Uh, no.

Decriminalizing pot doesn’t seem like a big deal, I’ll grant you.

That's because it's not.

After the courts decreed Adam and Eve are going to be Adam and Steve, bringing Cheech & Chong along for the ride amounts to little more than a footnote.

Oh my god! He's afraid of pot leafs AND gays. I'm guessing atheists make him dirty his diaper too.

But the problem with this ballot question is, it will lead to more pot smoking, which this society needs like . . . like, fill in the blank, dude.

How about this, like another journalist who has no idea what the fuck he's talking about? As I pointed out earlier, in Holland (where marijuana is completely decriminalized and can be bought at coffeeshops), fewer people use it than in even the countries surrounding it.

And even by your own fuzzy logic, where you've been saying that people already aren't at risk from arrest, how would this change anything?

How can the same health pests who loathe tobacco not care a whit about a different debilitating drug that you have to ingest into your lungs in the form of smoke?

Because marijuana doesn't give you lung cancer, jackass.

The fact is, once you make something legal, even if it’s just de facto, it’s easier to get.

That's irrelevant to this initiative since it's not making it legal. The penalties for possessing over an ounce of it don't change. People will still have to obtain marijuana from people who are committing serious crimes. So even if your formulation were correct, it's still completely irrelevant to this issue. Seriously, folks, does the Boston Herald actually have editors?

Pot does fry your brain. On my radio show, I can tell a stoner within 10 seconds.

How about this? I'll play you in any game of mental skill of your choosing any time. There are a lot of games we can play over the internet - chess, Scrabble, whatever. You can see how well you do and then try to figure out how much pot I smoke.

They . . . talk . . . slow.

You . . . write . . . stupid . . . shit.

They mention “hemp.”

And you didn't even know that that's different than marijuana.

They talk about “thousands” of political prisoners locked up for pot.

There are thousands of prisoners locked up for pot.

And since their vocabulary is so stunted, because their memories are shot, they keep repeating the same words over and over again.

Primarily because idiots like you continually fail to comprehend them.

Sensible . . . sensible . . . sensible.

Embarrassing . . . embarrassing . . . embarrassing.