Just Say "Wait a minute!"
Having a teenager in my home, I am occasionally forced to endure what passes
for MTV these days. If you have not watched it lately, the meaning of the
"M" has changed from "music" to "morality." While they may
not quite be to the point of fire and brimstone, they take at least one
opportunity at each commercial break to preach about how tobacco companies are
out to do us all in for profit, the evils of drinking, and the Russian Roulette
of having sex. They have become cable enabled nagging mothers.
The worst of all these moral diatribes surrounds drugs. The spots tend to
focus on marijuana. And, oh what spots they are! They put both "Reefer
Madness" and the famous pot episode of "Dragnet" (the one
where the people get high and the baby drowns in the bathtub) to shame. We have
a choice of several little rotating vignettes.
The most innocuous of them is where the couple finds out they are going to be
the "youngest grandparents in town" because little Mary smoked pot and
it "impaired her judgment." It is responsible for most of the evil in
the world as the intellectual discourse in the "drugs support
terrorism" ad reveals.
If you are of the type who does not pick up on such subtleties, we have a
couple of messages that get directly to the point. In one, a group of teenagers
in car so filled with smoke that it would choke Cheech and Chong comes roaring
out of a drive through and nails a kid on a bicycle. In the other, two pals are
talking in daddy's study when one picks up the loaded pistol that has been
thoughtfully left on the desk and blow his friend's head off. "Heh heh heh.
Is this loaded?" BANG! The screen goes black. "Pot, it's worse than we
thought" intones the somber voiced announcer.
After all of this, there can be no argument. Drugs are bad, m-kay?
I know of a woman who has cancer of a very painful sort. In the all too
typical unfairness of life, she is young woman with a school-aged son and a baby
to tend to. Her pain is debilitating and the nausea she suffers is
sometimes so bad that death seems to her to be the better option. She can't
work, of course, and she has a lot of medical bills, so theirs is a single
income family of very humble means. She is beholden to our form of Socialized Medicine
and gets only those crumbs of medical care they care to brush her way. She needs
powerful pain medicine but the state has declared itself more knowledgeable than
her doctor and will only give her about 75% of what she needs. I guess they feel
it is okay to wracked with pain 25% of the time. What medication she does manage
to get makes her sick as strong narcotics tend to do so her choice is to hurt or
to live by the toilet.
She has to take care of her family. If she is sick or in pain she can't do
that. But she can't afford to take up the slack in Medicaid, not if she wants
her family to eat. So what does she do? She smokes pot. It makes the pain
somewhat more tolerable and extends the life of the approved meds. In addition,
it is the only thing that quells the constant nausea and makes her able to
function. Taking advantage of the drug economy is the only way she can afford to
buy her herbal medication but one has to do what one has to do. Without access
to marijuana, this woman would be unable to care for her children (and would
probably lose them to some faceless state agency) and she would have to live in
abject pain and sickness.
These moralists that are so set in their little vendettas that they
spread their own kind of terror sicken me. They seem to forget that, when they
paint things with their broad "holier than thou" brushes, innocent
people get hurt. It is nothing short of evil the way people engaged in this
harmless activity are painted as immoral whores, supporters of terror, and
murderers. Is my friend immoral for wanting to care for her kids? Is she
supporting terrorism by taking the only means available to her to quell her
pain? Is she a murderer for wanting to live what life she has left as
comfortably and profitably as she can?
There is a HUGE difference between the pregnant girl, the supporter of
terror, the killer driver, the homicidal buddy, and my friend. The first four
are nothing but characters in a fictional story but my friend is a real
person living a real life.