Going To Pot, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #353 | @MDWorld

January 6, 2014 Mike Gold 3 Comments

I was giving a deposition a couple decades ago – four days wasted on a race in which I no longer had a horse. This means I was taken away from more valuable things, like my job, and I was annoyed. I adopted two ways to express my displeasure: first, I had the subpoenaing party fly me out first class and put me up in a really terrific hotel. Second, I toyed with their attorney.

Kids, you might not want to try this at home. I’m an experienced deposition-giver, I’ve been around the courtroom block several times, and for better and worse I’ve worked with enough lawyers to give Shakespeare a coronary. Oh, I can be one erudite prick when I want to be, a superpower I now use only for good. An attorney once compared me to Mike Singletary, which was a high compliment indeed.

There’s a part in most depositions where at least one of the lawyers will go over your professional background in order to undermine your credibility. One of the attorneys seized upon my background as an executive in the drug abuse prevention field and contrasted that with some of my writings about legalization. I discovered my inquisitor was a member of MADD – Mothers Against Drunk Driving, a worthy cause. So I asked her the following question. “A driver runs over a kid and kills her. Which is worse: his being under the influence of alcohol, of illegal drugs, of anti-histamines, or of properly taken prescription depressants?”

Her answer was that it didn’t matter, dead is dead. So I replied, “I focus on punishing the action that causes harm, and I do not parse out which catalysts are evil and which are acceptable. It’s DWI that is unacceptable; it doesn’t matter how you define the ‘I.’”

That pretty much encapsulates my attitude towards substance abuse. The government has a proper role in educating people as to the effects of such behavior, but it should not be spending billions of tax dollars each year ruining peoples’ lives just because they chose the “wrong” mind-altering experience.

The folks of Colorado understand this with remarkable clarity. Last week, possession and use of small amounts of marijuana became legal, but if they catch you operating a motor vehicle under the influence they throw the book at you.

And, predictably, some people went nuts. This used to be a right wing / let wing concern, but now that we’re three generations into that massive consumption of weed on campus thing, we see people on both the left and the right on both sides of the issue. It’s come down to those who believe in freedom of choice and those moral uptights who believe if it feels good it must be evil.

It’s easy to recognize the latter. They’re the ones hiding behind seven year olds screaming “save the children.” They’re the ones like the New York Times’ David Brooks, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, and professional media gadfly Tina Brown, who, in the past 30 years, has run Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The Daily Beast, and Newsweek. As of this writing, Tina’s looking for a new scepter.

All these blowhard busybodies want to control your life, as long as you don’t look too closely at theirs. Tina annoys me the most because she’s the wackiest: last Friday, she tweeted “legal weed contributes to us being a fatter, dumber, sleepier nation even less able to compete with the Chinese.”

That part about fatter might be true – if marijuana were removed from the planet, Nabisco and Kellogg’s would have to file for bankruptcy. The rest is absurd. The bit about the Chinese is more than absurd. She must have been high when she wrote that.

Here’s the bottom line: it’s none of your damn business. Keep your long prudish nose out of your neighbor’s anus. As the great American philosopher Mojo Nixon sang: Our governments try to tell you what to do; decide for yourself what’s right for you.

If you go too far and you get outta hand, then you take a little trip down to prison land.

Mojo si, Tina no.

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.