Future anti-marijuana activist

About a week ago, on MSNBC, I saw this anti-pot guy I’d never encountered before. His name was David Evans of the Drug Free America Foundation and I knew—before he opened his mouth, before the host ever revealed who he was or to which side of the argument he subscribed—that I hated his giant, ugly assface.”

The debate kicked off with the not-at-all-assface-having Jeffrey Miron, head of Harvard undergraduate studies and author of the report “The Budgetary Implications of Drug Prohibition,” which found that if pot prohibition is repealed, the state of California will earn (via taxation) $16 billion annually and save (via non-enforcement) $12 billion—a net turnaround of $28 billion.

After which, Evans—who looks as though Buck Henry, Larry Craig and a bucketful of faces that resemble ass had their DNA fused together in a horrible plasma transporter accident—countered that legalizing marijuana will increase usage by 30 percent and that the financial burden to the state will actually rise.

First of all, 30 percent is clearly a bullshit statistic. That number is so spurious, it’s offensive to actual piles of bullshit. Notice that he doesn’t cite a source. Not that it matters. I wouldn’t care if he got that number from The Bureau of the Smartest People in the Universe Who Have Never Ever Been Wrong about Anything Ever, there is just no way marijuana use will rise by 30 percent if made legal. Seriously, who isn’t getting stoned these days who wants to get stoned?

“We have 99,000 emergency admissions per year [from people under 25] because of marijuana,” says Evans. “So your health care costs are going to go up, your productivity costs are going to go up, you’re going to have to allow legal advertising, promotion, expansion of market share,” and, honestly, you have to marvel at this litany. It’s so obviously padded with gibberish. That’s what these assfaces do. To prevent peaceful, taxpaying, nice-faced adults from rolling a little freedom into their joints, they stack the anti-legalization list with impressive-sounding bullshit. They know the mooing masses will never scrutinize what’s on it. And, for the most part, they’re right. Certainly, the pro-prohibitionist choir to which Evans preaches won’t analyze the contents of that list—but us stoners, well, we do a lot of analyzing.

Healthcare costs will rise: Evans cites 99,000 pot-related emergency-room visits per year. So, how is that a financial burden to society? The majority of those people paid for their visit. We’re pot smokers, not back-alley crackheads. We have jobs, money and / or insurance. Besides, 99,000 is not a problem number. The amount of emergency-room visits per year is well above 100 million. Compared with how many people go for alcohol-related incidents, hard-drug overdoses, automobile accidents or obesity-related trauma, 99,000 doesn’t even rank. Hell, I bet more people go to have flashlights removed from their anuses than 99k. On a side note, can we all agree, nobody actually ODs on pot? They only think they do. The overwhelming majority of those visits are marijuana newbies who rush to the hospital because they think elves are running in and out of their nostrils and just haven’t figured out that if they wait a half-hour, the elves will disappear and they can go back to over-analyzing King Crimson lyrics and quietly gazing at the wonder and the glory of stucco.

Productivity costs will rise: This is just a backasswards way to say “productivity will decline”—the point being, I suppose, that pot smokers are unproductive, to which I respond with a list of my own: Bill Maher; Woody Harrelson; Ted Turner; Thomas Jefferson; Art Garfunkel; Michael Phelps; Miles Davis;  George Clooney; Richard Branson; Bill Bradley (productive in the NBA and the U.S. Senate); The Beatles; Pancho Villa; Steven King; the editor of CityBeat, his editorial staff and sales personnel (drug freaks all); Bob Marley; Michael Bloomberg; Arnold Schwarzenegger; 65 percent of NBA players (documented); and almost every painter, poet or musician who ever existed (undocumented). I could go on, but I smoke so much pot, typing makes me tired.

Legal advertising: Um, never quite heard it put that way before. But, OK, yeah, when something is legal, then it’s legal to advertise. What’s your point? By this assface-ian logic, all products should be illegal because we must allow them to “legally advertise.” And how, exactly, is advertising anything a financial burden on the public? Advertising stimulates the economy.

Promotion: More blatant list-padding. (Promotion and advertising are the same.)

Expansion of market share: Ooh, ooh, now there’s some fancy, smart-guy jargon for you. Evans knows that anyone who doesn’t grasp the meaning of “expansion of market share” will just think, Now, that sounds all economics-experty and stuff, so it must be true.

The definition of market share is: “the percentage of the total sales of a product or service that are attributable to a given company.” To clarify, here’s a hypothetical.

Let’s say Evans owns and operates a company called Giant Steamy Cattle Cakes LLC. Now let’s say GSCC  sells 100 piles of bullshit each month and his competitors collectively sell 300. Evans’ market share of bullshit is 25 percent. By definition, if Evans’ market share expands, his competitors’ share diminishes. Applying that concept to the marijuana market—if prohibition is repealed, the market share of legal versus illegal weed will jump from (conservative guesstimation) 1 percent to 95 percent, which—as any back-alley crackhead could tell you—will increase tax revenue for the state of California and reduce the money gushing into the gullets of violent drug cartels and other illegal operations, something only an assface could oppose.

Originally published in San Diego CityBeat
04.01.2010

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