WEED ADS STONE PARENTS, MISS TEENS

Dude, your sister's hot. That's not cool. Gimme 50 hamburgers. Puff. Yes,
these are the sounds of the new TV campaign against the gentle herb. They
are, in a word, superextrastoopidfunny. You know what else is funny? They
chose a TV campaign because they knew all the lazy dirtbag stoners would be
watching it anyway. Ha.

All of the spots focus on teenagers. This is presumably because they are
easily influenced by television, are at a stage in their life in which they
have to make a lot of decisions, and because parents are more easily
freaked out when they can associate an image with their kid.

Man oh man, but those kids sure do get into adult size trouble, like
manslaughter or molestation or pregnancy. The spots push the message that
marijuana is indeed seriously harmful, but the inference is that teenagers
shouldn't smoke weed because they aren't ready. Trix is to kids as these
anti-weed spots are to...? The answer is parents.

Teenagers do what they want, which usually involves weed. Parents, on the
other hand, actually pay attention to television and feel a need to
constantly worry about their children. These new anti-drug spots recognize
the power that parents wield and go straight for the parental Achilles
heel: worry.

So, according to television, there are three types of behavior that weed
provokes in teenagers. The first is acting like a teenage boy, that is to
say, distracted. The consequence for acting like a teenage boy is that
there must be a manslaughter committed accidentally by those careless,
irresponsible fools.

The second kind of behavior is drunkenness. Girls sure do get slutty when
they're drunk, I mean high, right. That one has to kill the dads. They
picture a boogie van, like the one The Clipse has in its video, with the
red light and the bed, that's pretty cool; oh wait, my daughter, you
heartless bastards you.

The third behavior is driving drunk. It's kind of an offshoot of behavior
two. Apparently, in almost all accidents in which drugs or alcohol were
involved, marijuana was present in the driver, who was drunk. They skip the
whole part about weed staying in your system for a month. It's conceivable,
then, that the statistic is bunk because being high had nothing to do with
crashing in at least some of those cases.

Apparently, Americans were getting too comfortable with the idea of
recreational marijuana usage. Mothers need to be scared, because weed will
make your teenagers act exactly like teenagers. Someone I knew once crashed
a car because he took a turn too quickly. The impetus for recklessness you
ask? One might say it was because the bowl wouldn't light, and the
prolonging of his soberness irked him and he took it out on the road, which
would be right in a sense. It would be more correct to say that the impetus
was being a stupid teenage boy.

The desire to put blame on weed, or terrorists, or an evil leader is fine
with me. It's a useful delusion for those who are lazy about the task of
perception. There's a whole lot of blame floating around, just waiting to
be foisted, and you have to put it somewhere. You can tell a lot about
people's specific delusions just by seeing where they put blame. Some fat
people blame McDonalds. I blame myself, because that is what I am usually
thinking about.

Justin R. Damm is a senior who may be reached at scavenberry@hotmail.com.
His column runs every Monday in The Daily Cardinal.