Marijuana Muffins, Reefer Madness and Drugging Kids
19 05 2006Over the last 24 hours or so, the media has gone wild with this story about the pot muffins that were delivered to a school in Texas. Today, the MSNBC news babes are parroting that the muffins “made 18 people sick.” The Fort Worth Star Telegram and UPI are using similar language. Can we at least all agree that these people were stoned, not sick? What this person did is wrong and properly illegal, but I am continually baffled that in 2006 we still suffer from the most absurd and irrational case of reefer madness.
In today’s Dallas Morning News piece, reporter Kristine Hughes does her part to perpetuate the mythological madness by reiterating that 19 people “became ill” from the muffins. Ill, Kristine? Don’t you mean high, stoned, freaked out, or - if you really want to be gentle - affected? But ill? That’s just intellectually dishonest.
In Kristine’s earlier piece, FBI official Lori Bailey warned,
“We don’t take these types of events lightly when people are injured or there’s the potential for injury…”
Wow, Lori, you sure don’t! Because I see, undoubtedly to the nation’s great relief, that you’ve brought in John McSwain, supervising special agent of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, to help find the suspect. We’ll all sleep better tonight.
Sweet Jesus, I really wish I were making this up.
Texas health department spokeswoman Jacqueline Bell said,
“It’s always good to err on the side of safety … this could have been a much more serious incident.”
Jacqueline - how could it have been much more serious? Please - take my imagination down that road. Ya mean, like, if there had been something really dangerous in the muffins, like butter?
Where I agree with them is that it is absolutely immoral to give psychoactives to people without their informed consent. It is especially wrong to sneak mind-altering drugs into schools and feed them to innocent children. But my disconnect is in who the real criminals are. In my view, the people most guilty of such crimes are America’s parents and doctors.
We feed antidepressants to children as young as four. I recently heard a child psychiatrist say she had prescribed antidepressants to children as young as 3 and a half. Currently, two percent of American children aged 6-16 are on mind-altering drugs such as Prozac, and ten percent are on stimulants such as Ritalin. According to Education Reporter, “children aged 5 and younger are the fastest-growing segment of the youth population using antidepressants today.”
And we should be worried about a janitor getting stoned?
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