POT-SMOKING CHIMPS WEREN'T CHUMPS

You know, when I was in school I always wondered what really went on
in the teachers' lounge. Now I know. They're watching pro-marijuana
documentaries and rolling their own.

OK, it's just a theory, but I'm a little more convinced it's true
after reading a news story about the Ontario Film Review Board
overturning a provincewide ban on a documentary film called Grass.

The reason the film was banned in the first place was because there is
a section of the Theatres Act that does not allow animals to be abused
in the making of a film, and Grass contains 20 seconds of film of a
1970 U.S. government experiment in which monkeys inhaled marijuana.
So the film wasn't banned because the film depicts real-life drug-use
or has a pro-marijuana stance. It was banned because of it's depiction
of drug-use BY MONKEYS.

OK. Now, we can all agree that drugs are bad, but I'm reasonably
certain those monkeys were never happier. They were inhaling
marijuana, people! I mean, if I were a lab monkey and they told me I
had to sign up for a certain number of experiments, you know, like
university freshmen do to get their psychology credits, I think I'd be
the monkey signing up for the marijuana experiment.

"Nope, no Ebola vaccines for me thanks, fellas, and I'll pass on the
electrodes. You can send me right to the pot lab. I'll just grab my
water pipe and sitar on the way in."

The chairman of the review board, Robert Warren, was quoted as saying
that, "The appeal panel members felt that this would be a very
appropriate educational video for use by teachers and that sort of
thing." And this is where my theory about the teachers' lounge comes
in to play, because I'm pretty sure most teachers don't want to show
their students a pro-marijuana film in which monkeys toke. So they
must be watching it themselves.

Although you could argue that the monkeys inhaling marijuana is just a
more graphic illustration of the "monkey see monkey do" principle,
also known as "If all your friends jumped off a bridge would you go
jump off a bridge, too?" Or maybe the monkeys smoking pot is just a
more accurate portrayal of the "this is your brain on drugs" slogan
that was the centrepiece of the public service announcements that were
so popular a few years back. You remember, the one with the egg in the
frying pan.

You know, to this day, I'm convinced those ads were produced by law
enforcement officials as a painfully lazy way of catching drug users.
Think about it. All they had to do was run the ad with the frying egg
and then just go and stake out a Denny's, because you know the guys
they're after are watching those commercials and saying, "Oh man. I am
sooo hungry."

Busted.

OVERTURNED BAN

Actually, as far as I could tell reading the newspaper article, it
doesn't appear that any teachers actually requested Grass for classroom
use. That idea seems to have come from the review appeals board itself.
The same appeals board that overturned the ban in under half an hour. I
think it's just a little odd that government bureaucrats are suggesting
pro-marijuana films for classroom use. And now I want to know how many
of them were actually at Woodstock and if any of them remember the
'60s. So I tried calling their office. They were all at Denny's.