Don’t pretend that you don’t know what I mean. Everyone has heard the counterexamples to this; plenty of successful, intelligent people smoke pot, and sometimes they smoke a lot of pot. That doesn’t matter. The vast, vast majority of people who smoke pot every day are lazy, stupid, and unambitious. If you disagree with this, don’t bother reading the rest of this article. I’m too busy being honest to care about people who can’t cope with reality.

There’s a very simple reason why people who smoke pot constantly are that way, though. It’s not that pot actually physiologically causes a person to behave like that (or if it does, I’m not qualified enough to know). As far as I know, it’s largely a psychological thing. Think about it: when you’re just sitting around, not doing anything, what tends to happen? You get bored. But when you’re high, you don’t get bored. Smoking pot is a great way to relax and escape the tedium of reality, but it’s also an escape from the things about reality that cause people to actually do things. If you’re just sitting around relaxing all the time, you’re being lazy. You’ll act stupid because you’ll be high all the time. You won’t be motivated to further yourself because you’ll be in a neutral state of relaxation all the time. That’s why stoners have the reputation that they have.

If you want to chase your dreams, you need the motivation to do so. If you smoke pot all the time, you’ll keep receiving the little burst of artificial happiness that being high gives you, and eventually you’ll forget how much more rewarding it is to actually do something for real. I know this because I’ve experienced it before. It’s very easy to smoke pot once, be happy, then wake up the next day and think “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun if I smoked pot again?” Pretty soon, you lose track of what you were trying to do in the first place and you end up settling for drug-induced happiness instead of actual happiness.

The scary thing is, this is an easy settlement to make. Drugs are a lot of fun.

What’s more fun than drugs? Building a house, writing a book, making a lot of money, or getting married to someone you love. What’s less fun that drugs? Doing the dishes, having a shitty job, going to class, or admitting that you’re not as successful as you always wanted to be.

Smoking pot can make all the less-fun things into more-fun things, but without all those little annoyances in your life you start to lose your motivation to achieve the actual more-fun things. Pretty soon it becomes easy to rationalize your drug intake with a line of thought that sounds an awful lot like, “Drugs make me happy without much effort, so I’ll settle for that instead of making an effort at doing something worthwhile.” That’s laziness. And the worst thing about it is, you won’t have very much respect for yourself. It might seem like you do, but when you see other people you knew in high school becoming the next Bill Gates, you’ll look at yourself and say, “What the hell did I do with my life?”

For some people, pot can cause the creative stroke of brilliance that lets them do things they only ever dreamed of. For most people, pot is just something to do for fun and really doesn’t help them at all. I always seem to hear the excuse that people are using drugs to “find themselves”. That sounds deep and meaningful when you’re sixteen, but when you get older it starts to ring hollow. How exactly are you going to find yourself if you keep using drugs to escape yourself? You need to put things in perspective in a way that indicates actual maturity.

When I see someone who has so much potential for long-term happiness throw that potential away in pursuit of short-term happiness, it’s so frustrating and depressing that I can’t put it into words. In one case, a person who did this was someone I loved like a brother, who had such an enormous impact on my life that I truly believed, even in my normally-cynical heart, that he’d be there forever. That person meant too much for me to ever fully let him go. In the end, though friendships can be repaired in time, damage is done forever, and I’ll never be able to forget the times that I’ve been lied to over a drug.

It’s easy to realize that there’s no real scientific or logical reason to make pot illegal. On paper, it seems like the people who build their lives around a drug that’s not even particularly potent or addictive could easily be ignored. It seems easy to realize that you don’t need to have them in your life. You shouldn’t have to care about them. In reality, sometimes they’re people that you love.

Their actions explain why pot is illegal better than any after-school special ever could.

With that out of the way, here’s something I’m completely sick of: the James Bond franchise.

For 20 straight movies, it had a consistent style. Whether or not you actually like it personally, it doesn’t matter. The objective fact of the matter is, all 20 of these movies had basically the same tone and meaning to them: a light-hearted story about a spy with plenty of humour thrown in, meant for entertainment only. As the times changed throughout the 30+ years that these films were released, they each updated the franchise to fit the times without completely altering the franchise. For that reason, every Bond movie up until Die Another Day was at least recognizable as a Bond movie.

But since 2006, Eon has produced two Bond movies (with a third currently in production), all of which are part of their “rebooting” of the franchise. None of these new movies are even remotely similar to the old movies, other than sharing one actress (whose character has been changed beyond recognition). Now, I really don’t care if people like these new movies. I personally don’t, but that’s not the point. The point is that this “reboot” is completely unnecessary and insulting — not just to fans of the old franchise, but to anyone who puts their money forward to Eon.

What they’re doing is part of a big trend nowadays: companies that have or gain the rights to a franchise, change everything about it other than the names, and claim it’s a “reboot”. People who liked the series before will buy the new rendition even if they don’t like the new direction the series is taking, so the company is successful. The thing that’s so insulting about this trend is that these “reboots” aren’t just a new direction that the series is taking — they’re entirely different series released under the same name solely for the purpose of making a quick buck.

Yes, I am aware that making money is the point of a company, but they’re supposed to hide that fact by making quality products that are actually worth money in the first place. If you need to defend a company by saying that they’re just trying to make money, you’re an idiot.

If you want to make a serious, true-to-the-books rendition of James Bond, go ahead and do it. But don’t call it James Bond. There’s already a franchise using that name. There might be an argument for using that name anyway if the new franchise were closer to the books (since the books had the name first), but that’s not the case at all. The Bond stories were trashy stories about a spy written for pure entertainment, and the original film series already is the movie adaptation of that. Even if the new Bond movies are superficially more similar, their tone and style is nothing alike; the new ones act like they have some kind of deep meaning behind them. That’s the only part that actually matters, not the superficial crap like whether Q should be named Major Boothroyd or not. If you don’t believe me, look up what Ian Fleming had to say on the subject: he was alive for much of the franchise’s early history and thought it was exactly what he wanted: a fun story about a spy.

• Being woefully out of touch with current trends.
• Somehow having no recollection at all of what being young is like.
• The belief that marriage is still of utmost relevance.
• Misogyny (especially the self-loathing internalized-inferiority mother).
• Inexplicable racism that only seems to appear when all the Arabs are out of the room.

Obviously not everyone’s parents are like that, but certainly most people’s seem to be. I actually have a cousin who recently became a parent and the change is startling; in a scant few years she went from a partying sorority chick stereotype to a doting, paranoid carbon copy of everyone’s mom. Unfortunately she was off-screen (and out of town) for most of this transformation, so the details are still a bit sketchy; presumably a cocoon was involved at some point.

My point here is that no matter how enlightened people think we are, we still have godawful parents. It’s just a fact of life. Parents are human; they’re always going to be really bad at something. They’re going to make mistakes over the years that will eventually result in a fucked-up kid — like you. Nobody is ever properly prepared to raise a child. Everyone just kind of wings it. And hell, if your parents broke up when you were younger, there’s a good chance that it was your fault, no matter what your therapist said. Kids are stressful, and stress ruins relationships.

But in the end, this is the best we’ve got, and how bad could it be? Parents are human, after all; they’ve got to be good at something. I wouldn’t want to trust the government with educating parents on proper parenting, anyway, given how much they’ve managed to ruin the school system.

There is one thing I’d like to bitch about, however: expectations.

Fact: Your kid is not going to be an astronaut. Your kid is almost certainly going to be part of the 99% of people who are utterly worthless and will be forgotten by history. Hardly anyone will ever give as much of a shit about your kid as you do. That doesn’t give you an excuse to “try harder” and motivate your kid to be the most incredible person ever born, because of yet another annoying fact: kids are human. They’re going to fail. A lot.

It’s really been getting to me recently just how much these expectations can hurt the child, though. And I’m not just talking about careers and moral values, but basic issues of self-identity as well. I’ve already mentioned circumcision a million times, but it ties directly into this. Parents get unnecessary and potentially harmful non-consensual surgeries performed on children because they think the kid will thank them later.

Repeat: Cosmetic surgery is performed on infants based on a fucking hunch. A case could be made for parents as psychopathic maniacs, stitching their kids into whatever shape they please because the voices in their heads say so. Now obviously that’s not what the intention is, but that’s what actually happens.

It applies just as much to other facets of parenting. Parents deck their kids out in pink or blue depending on their sex; buy them trucks or dolls and act shocked if they don’t like what they’re “supposed” to like; get them to play with other kids of the same class and social group; and teach them, firmly, consciously or not, that the world doesn’t want them for who they are, but for who they should be. I’m talking about sexism, mostly, though there’s that streak of homophobia in there too. The idea is for kids to be normal above all else; even if they’re also pressured to be incredible superhuman astronauts, they should do it in a conventional way.

How many people have parents who honestly explained why things were? For most people, their parents would come up with rules that should be followed “just because”. This blind adherence to authority may be helpful in the short term, but I dare you to find any legitimately successful people who got where they are by blindly deferring to others. If you want your kids to be independent, you have to teach them to think for themselves.

I’m trying not to bring my own parents into this post, since I do love them dearly and wouldn’t want to slander them on the internet. But draw your own conclusions and I won’t bother arguing.

Parents fucking suck.

Sydney Schanberg, an American journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, had his attempts to cover stranded American prisoners of war in South Vietnam shot down by corporate news sources. He indicated that more than three hundreds soldiers were left behind during the retreat from the Vietnam War, and that these losses were barely mentioned at all by the American mainstream media. Schanberg says that a private message written by Nixon proves that he knew about the stranded POWs, but that he was so anxious to get out of Vietnam because of his campaign promises that he told the public that everything was fine. In an article written more than forty years later, Schanberg stated, “The government had told these soldiers that if they were wounded or captured, it would do everything in its power to save and heal them. Well, sometimes that isn’t the whole truth. Maybe their platoon buddies would do everything possible, but governments have multiple agendas.”¹

The United States claims to be a democracy. The entire point of a democracy is exemplified in the word’s etymology: from the Greek words demos and kratos, “common people” and “rule”.² In a democracy, the government is ruled by the common people; a democratic government exists to serve the people, yet this action of censoring media coverage is quite the opposite. Selectively altering the common people’s main source of information is manipulation of the very people the government is supposed to serve. So if the United States government does this, does it not stand to reason that the United States is not truly a democracy at all? At the very least, the political system in the USA, while it may potentially be democratic, is undermined by the powers that be. There have been numerous examples throughout history of the United States government lying to its people to garner public support for a cause they refused to fully explain.

The 1989 invasion of Panama by the US military is another example of the government’s multiple agendas being hidden from public scrutiny. The official story was that President George H. W. Bush wanted General Manuel Noriega of the Panamanian Defense Forces arrested for drug trafficking and election fraud, and the entire invasion was simply a means to capture him.³ But this story does not seem to hold up when compared to what actually happened as the evidence indicates.

To really understand the situation in Panama — and all of Central American — one has to look back at how the country itself was formed. Originally Panama was a part of Colombia, the nation to its south, but there was a growing separatist movement. The USA signed the Bidlack-Mallarino Treaty in 1846, which stated that they would help Colombia if the Panamanians ever really tried to separate. Then in 1898, the battleship USS Oregon had to travel more than 22 000 kilometres to join the Spanish-American war in Cuba, leaving from the west coat of the United States and travelling all the way around South America.⁴

Panama is an isthmus — a small strip of land that connects two islands, North America and South America. Is it a coincidence that the United States violated their treaty with Colombia in 1903 to assist the Panamanian rebellion? This action caused Panama to be an American protectorate, allowed the US government to construct the Panama Canal, and let them station thousands of US military personnel in the country.⁵ The Spanish-American war proved that the Americans had a motive to build a quicker route from their west coast to their east, and the canal in Panama was just such a route. Panama from its conception was the product of American interference in foreign political matters, not for the reasons of spreading democracy or fighting for freedom, but to make the US military force more powerful than it already was.

The citizens of Panama were not blind to the power the USA had over their country, however. During World World II, the US government stationed as many as 67 000 troops in Panama. This display of power seemed to make Panamanians wary, and could be one of the causes for the riots that erupted in the Canal Zone in 1964. These riots were started because some citizens wanted their own nation’s flag to be flown in the zone, not only the flag of the United States, even though the United States did technically own the canal and surrounding areas. Eventually this issue of ownership was dealt with by President Jimmy Carter and Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos when they signed a treaty in 1977 that promised to transfer control of the canal by December 31, 1999.⁶

Then Ronald Reagan became president of the United States. Eight months later, Torrijos died in a mysterious plane crash. Torrijos was famous for his support of Panamanian independence. He said to his people shortly before his death, “You may rest assured that in our negotiations with the US you will always find us standing on our feet and never on our knees. Never!”⁷ Was his untimely death a coincidence, or a planned assassination? There are supporters on both sides, but no actual evidence of anything. As far as we know, it was a tragic accident. Regardless, Torrijos was soon replaced by the aforementioned Manuel Noriega, a CIA contact. Noriega became a general in the Panamanian Defense Forces, thus becoming de facto ruler of Panama.

The story in the mainstream media was that the invasion of Panama was about arresting Noriega for drug trafficking, but evidence shows that the CIA knew from the start that he was smuggling drugs. Not until 1988 did the American mainstream media start reporting on his drug trafficking; coincidentally a few years after Noriega hosted the Contradora peace talks, where Latin American leaders came together and called for an end to foreign intervention in Central America.⁸ Noriega was not the yes-man the United States wanted him to be — he was starting to show a spine, though perhaps not as honourable as Torrijos before him.

In the year leading up to the invasion of Panama, the US military carried out a number of operations. When interviewed after the invasion, Major General William A. Roosma admitted that these operations (Sand Flea, Purple Storm, and others) were to tell Noriega that “we’re bad guys” and “don’t fool around with us.” They were practice for the upcoming invasion, not merely routine military operations as the government claimed at the time.⁹ On December 20, 1989, President Bush announced Operation Just Cause, his codename for the invasion of Panama. The invasion was allegedly for the purpose of arresting Noriega due to his dealings with drugs.

Estimates of casualties caused by this invasion range from 2 000 to 4 000 Panamanian civilians.¹⁰ Many of the military targets were densely-populated residential areas, such as portions of Panama City around the headquarters of the Panamanian Defense Forces. Journalists were not allowed to enter Panama until after the first few hours of the attacks. The US military destroyed radio towers, halted production of newspapers, and highjacked television stations during their stay in Panama.¹¹ Control of the media was of utmost importance to the United States government; what did they have to hide?

Wanting to put a foreign power in its place for daring to stand up to your country’s interference is already a far cry from the allegations of drug trafficking, but there seems to be more to this invasion than just showing Manuel Noriega who is boss. The actions of the United States in regard to the Panama Canal throughout history, and the fact that they specifically tried to bring down the Panamanian Defense Forces, seems to suggest that Operation Just Cause had as much to do with the Carter-Torrijos treaty as it did Noriega’s betrayal. With the only military body in Panama gone, presumably for long enough to reach the deadline at the end of 1999, the United States could have made the claim that the treaty was now invalidated. Panama would have no means of defending the canal, therefore control of the Canal Zone could remain with the United States military. Granted, this violation of the treaty did not actually end up happening, but former Panamanian diplomat Humberto Brown is certain that this was the intended goal.¹²

That the United States had a vested interest in controlling Panama is obvious from its history, but not even a year prior to the invasion, the US government proved it by supplying presidential candidate Guillermo Endara with $10 million for his campaign. Accepting election funds from foreign sources is actually illegal in the United States, and it caused the Panamanian government to annul the election. This happened just before the military operations in the Canal Zone that were preparations for the invasion of Panama. One of the first steps in Operation Just Cause was for the United States military to swear in Endara as the new leader of Panama.¹³ Whether or not the government wanted to control the canal specifically, there is ample evidence that some element of control over Panama was one of the agendas that was hidden from the public eye.

Peter Kornbluh says that “Panama is another example of destroying a country to save it. And it’s another case of how the US has exercised a ‘might makes right’ doctrine among the smaller countries of the Third World.”¹⁴ The Globe and Mail, however, defended this “might makes right” attitude, saying that Noriega’s drug charges did affect the United States due to its proximity, and that the indictment was justifiable on legal grounds as well as moral.¹⁵ Regardless, the statements of Major General Roosma and the funding provided by the United States government in the presidential election prove that there was more to Just Cause than an anti-drug agenda.¹⁶

Clearly, mainstream media coverage of the invasion in Panama was suppressed and controlled by the government. The fact that the military would not let journalists into the country while they were invading, that the media coverage in the USA focused entirely on drug charges, and that the media did not even mention the Carter-Torrijos treaty is all proof of this. The mainstream mass media blindly accepted the government’s stories about the invasion, displaying none of the journalistic integrity that would require them to dig for facts and present all sides of an issue fairly. Information was kept from the public eye because the government did not want to make itself unpopular, as the charade of a democratic society has to be maintained; the people still have to be able to vote, so the government needs to trick people into voting for them.

The actions of the USA in Panama were condemned by the United Nations as a “flagrant violation of international law”, invading a sovereign nation without due cause and violating the Geneva Convention with an unacceptable number of casualties. This story was not emphasized in the mainstream American media, and was in fact barely mentioned at all.¹⁷ This suppression of information ties into the charade mentioned above. The facts about Panama and the involvement of the United States military were kept secret for the same reasons as the abandoned soldiers in Vietnam.

In the words of Sydney Schanberg, “We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth.”¹⁸

Is the United States truly a democracy? Literally yes, but ideologically no. While the political system itself could have the potential to be used justly, the evidence that the government lies to its citizens for political gain is overwhelming. The people technically control the government, but the government actually controls the people through its use of the mainstream media. It is undeniable that, whatever potential there is, it is wasted on a population that accepts everything the government says as true, and a mass media that allows itself to be controlled by a political entity and the interests of plutocracy. A more critical public that took the time to peruse alternative points of view and demanded fair reporting would be a huge step towards fixing this.

¹ Schanberg, Sydney. “Silent Treatment: My four-decade fight to report the truth.” The American Conservative. N.p., 1 July 2010. Web. 21 Nov. 2010.
² “democracy.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. 20 Nov. 2010.
³ “FINALE: Frontline examines Manuel Noriega’s rise and fall.” The Globe and Mail. 27 Jan. 1990, Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies, ProQuest. Web. 20 Nov. 2010.
⁴ Tucker, Spencer. “Oregon, USS, Voyage of.” The encyclopedia of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars: a political, social, and military history. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009. 449. Print.
⁵ Matthew Abramovitz. “Panama, U.S. Military Involvement in.” The Oxford Companion to American Military History. John Whiteclay Chambers II, ed., Oxford University Press 1999. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of Windsor. 18 Nov. 2010.
⁶ Restrepo, Luis. “50 U.S violations of the Carter-Torrijos treaties.” Skeptic Tank. N.p., 10 Jan. 1988. Web. 21 Nov. 2010.
⁷ Time Magazine. “Panama: A Historic No.” Time.com. CNN, 2 Apr. 1973. Web. 19 Nov. 2010.
⁸ The Panama Deception. Dir. Barbara Trent. Perf. Elizabeth Montgomery, Abraham Alvarez, Carlos Cantu. New Video Group, 1993. Film.
⁹ Wright, Dr. Robert K., Jr. “Oral History Interview JCIT 025.” U.S. Army Center Of Military History. United States, 15 March 1990. Web. 19 Nov. 2010.
¹⁰ “Operation Just Cause.” GlobalSecurity. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2010.
¹¹ The Panama Deception.
¹² Ibid.
¹³ Franklin, Jane. “Panama Invasion by United States in 1989: Background and chronology.” Rutgers-Newark: The State University of New Jersey. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Nov. 2010.
¹⁴ The Panama Deception.
¹⁵ Colin MacKenzie. “Noriega indictment justifiable, experts say.” The Globe and Mail. 18 Jan. 1990, Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies, ProQuest. Web. 19 Nov. 2010.
¹⁶ Wright, Dr. Robert K., Jr.
¹⁷ The Panama Deception.
¹⁸ War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. Dir. Loretta Alper. Perf. Norman Solomon, Sean Penn. The Disinformation Company, 2007. Film.

In fact, even though I actually agree with the pro-drug side, their side’s proponents are the worse in this regard. The stoner argument, as I’ll call it, has four points:

1) Weed isn’t addictive.
Our entire perception of self is regulated by a variety of chemicals called neurotransmitters — some of these are fairly well-known, such as dopamine and serotonin. Dopamine specifically is the neurotransmitter most associated with physiological addiction, as it creates a “numb” feeling in the body that the nervous system can become dependent on. In fact, dopamine is released during orgasm and food consumption as a way to make us addicted to these activities (which, biologically, are pretty important).

Technically, cannabis (the botanical name for the marijuana plant) does not cause the body to release an abnormal level of dopamine nor any other chemical that would make the nervous system dependent on the drug. Physiologically, marijuana pretty much just makes you blissful. So yes, it’s technically true that weed isn’t addictive; however, I think the stoner argument’s use of this technical truth is intentionally misleading.

Stoners scoff at it, but I think most people would agree that habituation is just another form of addiction. There are lots of things in life that don’t affect our body’s basic chemical signals at all, but which we still think of as addictive — the internet, for example. If I quit the internet cold turkey, it’s true that I wouldn’t get any physical withdrawal symptoms, but it would still affect me mentally. Marijuana is a substance capable of being abused, and anyone who says otherwise is lying to themselves.

2) Weed is 100% safe and impossible to overdose on.
This one’s actually pretty much true, as marijuana has been proven time and time again to be a fairly safe drug. You can still hurt yourself if you smoke a lot, though; maybe not as much in the long term, but passing out, throwing up, and going into the fetal position while quivering with pain are still a pretty big buzzkill. Don’t be an idiot. Even drinking too much water is bad for you, and THC is a potent psychoactive chemical that you’re flooding your body with — not really something to take lightly.

3) Weed doesn’t give you cancer.
Yes it does. Well, it does if you smoke it. It’s true that cannabis in and of itself doesn’t seem to have much of a negative effect (though there have been tentative links with schizophrenia in some test groups), but there’s still the, y’know, smoke involved in this whole smoking business. Smoke itself contains carbon monoxide and other toxic fumes that will damage your lungs, esophagus, and teeth; it can lead to lung cancer no matter what you’re smoking.

The one way to get high without damaging your lungs is to turn the marijuana into cannabutter and eat it. Fact of the matter is, hardly anyone does that. I know of at least one pro-marijuana song that claims that weed doesn’t give cancer while also talking about lighters. For all intents and purposes, while smoking marijuana may be better for you than smoking tobacco (which adds its own toxic fumes to the smoke), you’re still going to hurt your lungs with any form of smoking. This whole thing is a misleading argument.

4) Weed is a lifestyle that everyone should worship.
I’m not going to criticize people who do consider themselves part of a drug subculture (or whatever), but they need to stop acting like they’re enlightened. There’s a reason I wrote a short story in which a serial killer claims that drugs have made him “better“. Shouting that weed should be legal because it’s “like, the best” is turning drugs into a religion. It’s a dangerous mindset to be in. Seriously.

By now you’re probably wondering why this article is even called “Keeping Drugs Illegal Is a Terrible Idea” if I’m just going to shoot down all the pro-legalization arguments. Well, all appearances to the contrary aside, I actually do support the legalization of marijuana — I just also happen to be a person with a low bullshit quota. Drug regulation, to me, has a lot in common with arguments about choice and sexuality, in that people are always too busy focusing on junk that doesn’t matter instead of making reasoned arguments.

After all, while the pro-legalization argument may be fallacious, the anti-legalization argument is usually just “drugs are bad because I said so”. So both sides comprise their fair share of dumbasses, really.

To me, the very concept of banning a natural substance seems a bit absurd. If you can literally grow something in your backyard, you kind of have a right to do whatever you want with it; the fact that a plant can be dangerous has never been an argument for making it illegal. Lots of plants have nothing but negative effects on humans (poison ivy, for example), and we don’t make them illegal for people to have. People have a right to hurt themselves, unfortunately. That’s part of being free.

Even the synthetic drugs — completely made in labs, probably even more dangerous than the synthetic foods we eat — can’t really be made illegal. I mean, the argument that they should be illegal could be convincing in their case, but you still have to face the practicality of the matter:

People want to do drugs, and you will never stop them with police officers.

I’ll let lawmakers and everyone else who still has faith in the legal system in on a little secret: laws, in and of themselves, accomplish very little. If you made a law tomorrow that made clothes illegal, everyone would keep wearing clothes and you would be powerless to stop them. I think drugs are in a similar position. There are many reasons that people choose not to do drugs:

• They’re stigmatized in society; people look down on drugs and the people who use them.
• Drugs can be expensive or hard to find.
• A fear of becoming addicted in some way.

There are probably more reasons than that, but really, the main thing that stops people from doing drugs is internal, social pressures, not the law.

Some people are just really lawful and follow authority blindly, but those aren’t the kind of people we should be encouraging. I think the fact that people disobey laws is a good thing; just another way of keeping the government in check. The government is supposed to serve us, after all. Anything that sticks control in the hands of the people and out of the hands of the plutocracy is a step in the right direction.

People hurt themselves with drugs all the time — especially with the ones that are seriously addictive, like heroin and crack cocaine. Still, the main reason people don’t do heroin and crack is because they’re heroin and crack. The fact that they’re illegal is almost totally irrelevant to the fact that no one likes them. They’re dangerous for their own sake: let’s focus on not doing them because they’re bad, not because big brother told us not to.

Keeping drugs illegal is a terrible idea because it makes dangerous drugs even more dangerous. This isn’t such a problem with lighter drugs like cannabis, but heroin purity can be as low as 15% in the black market. That means as much as 85% of the heroin someone is using can be some other substance that just looks a bit like heroin — some seriously-dangerous poison that will kill them instantly, for example. Not to mention obvious problems with the black market that surrounds heavy drugs: violence, smuggling, robbery, grand theft auto. If you’re a fugitive, you might as well go all in.

I’m not trying to say that heroin isn’t dangerous, but the fact that it’s illegal makes it even more incredibly dangerous. You could argue that this gives people an extra incentive not to do heroin, which is a fair point, but I think the pros of legalization outweigh the cons. If heroin were legalized, we would get something even better than increased safety for heroin abusers: we’d get taxation. Legal products can be regulated by the government and taxed like everything else — the tax can then be used for rehabilitation centres to stop the heroin abusers. It could work.

The fact that some drugs are inherently bad is undeniable, I think — but fighting a perpetual fight to make these drugs stop existing is just a futile waste of resources that does more harm than good. Did prohibition teach us nothing?

Looking at it from another side: cigarettes are crap, but we can’t stop them because they’ve already been legal for too long. Yet the number of people who smoke cigarettes regularly is steadily declining in Canada. There have been various laws passed over the years about smoking in public areas and whatnot, but I think the key reason that less people are smoking cigarettes nowadays is how the cultural view of them is changing. Anti-smoking demonstrations in schools are making people say no (children being easy to manipulate, I suppose), and more and more people are dropping the habit because it’s a stupid habit. Cigarettes don’t even get you high, after all.

Should marijuana be legal? Yes. As far as drugs go, it’s way safer than alcohol and tobacco. I think the pros of the drug outweigh the cons, and it probably does more good than harm in the long run; there’s the potential for abuse, obviously, but it doesn’t seem like as much of a big deal for this one. I don’t think you can make a reasonable argument for keeping weed illegal without also arguing to make alcohol and tobacco illegal.

Should other, harder drugs be legal? Probably. The black market is the most dangerous part of any drug, legalization wouldn’t cause more people to do drugs, the regulation inherent in legalization would make them less dangerous in the first place, and the sales tax could be used to get help for the victims. It’s something worth thinking about.

In the end, when you push aside all the emotional baggage this issue is stuck with, you get one question: Do you want to fight to destroy all drugs on the planet, or try to make the best of it and move on?

That’s why I made this satirical newspaper last year.

Click the images to enlarge.

I know where you’re coming from. Sometimes I can’t stand writing essays for classes, too. But overall, I still think essays are a great genre of writing; they’re just frequently maligned by people who either get disheartened with lame topic assignments, or people who just don’t like writing in the first place. But I think a lot of people just look at it from the wrong perspective.

Forget everything you know about essays.

Essays are not five paragraphs long. Essays are arguments, plain and simple. A well-written essay should read like one side of a great debate: it states what the argument (or thesis) is, it brings up all the counterpoints, disproves them, and draws a conclusion from the mess. It’s all about the journey from thesis to conclusion, and that journey can, theoretically, be however long you want.

Of course, sometimes (especially in high school) you get stuck with overly-restrictive guidelines for your essay, and you have to follow those. But try to find the fun in writing an essay. This is basically your only chance to argue with the prof without getting an automatic F, so be a real asshole about it.

Here are some tips that could help you write better essays faster:

1) Write snappy bookends

No matter how caught up you get in the aforementioned “be an asshole” suggestion, always remember that your essay is still a written work that needs to be paced properly. There’s no narrative, so the pacing obviously has nothing to do with plot advancement; rather, pacing your essay properly is about bookends: the things that go on either side of something. This “something” can be the entire essay (in which case your bookends are the introduction and conclusion) or just a single paragraph (in which case they’re the transitional sentences).

Maybe it sounds like a cliche to you, but the conclusion is the most important part of your essay other than the thesis itself. In fact, all bookends are very important — without them, your paper would read more like a mess of thoughts than something planned by an intelligent human being. Bookends are like palate cleaners that refresh the reader in between everything else, gently guiding them to your points so they don’t get overwhelmed.

Let’s look at an example. Here’s the first paragraph of our hypothetical “dogs are better than cats” essay:

Professor K. Eirsley, head of the animal sciences faculty at Quendelton State University, has long argued that cats make better companions than dogs. Over the years, many have challenged his opinions by insisting that the preference for one domesticated animal over the other is subjective; however, if one examines the evidence as presented, one has to come to the conclusion that Eirsley does have a point: this is an issue with an objective answer. The only problem is, Eirsley’s answer is wrong. Cats are not inherently bad, but dogs are better companions in the long run.

This paragraph is firstly the front bookend (bookstart?) for the entire essay — it eases the reader into your argument and provides some context for the argument. A good question to ask yourself when writing the introduction is, “What’s happened so far?” You’re not the first to say something related to your essay, so make sure to talk about other things that have already been said about it. Starting off with a quote (or near-quote, as above) is a bit cliche, but that’s not going to be a problem unless you plan on becoming a professional essayist or something.

This introduction — and every other paragraph — also has bookends within itself. The first sentence here is a statement related to the topic of the essay, and the last sentence is a counter-statement that leads into the rest of your argument (which will eventually prove the first sentence wrong).

The next paragraph in your essay would be something like this:

One key thing that makes dogs better companions is how much easier they are to keep clean than cats are. A study in Useless Statistics Daily in August 2007 proved that over 80% of dogs like being wet, while only slightly under 12% of cats do. Being easier to clean means that dogs will smell better on average, which is important for a happy home life. In families with children, it is not uncommon for a child to want to wash a dog personally; the fact that they are easier to clean means that the child will not be in as much danger of the animal snapping at him or her, and it can be a great experience for the child.

(Yeah, I know this isn’t a very good essay. It’s just an example.)

The thing to take away from the second paragraph is how the first sentence ties into the last sentence of the previous paragraph above. This is how the bookends function as transitional sentences, linking the different ideas in the essay together for a smoother read. This all ties back into pacing, which is very important.

2) Make your thesis bold

The thesis of your essay is just a sentence that defines the key argument you’re making in as succinct and accurate a manner as you can manage. It’s very important that the thesis be bold; no “I think”s or similar wishy-washy language, but a flat-out statement as if it’s fact. Recall that the thesis in the example essay above was, “Cats are not inherently bad, but dogs are better companions in the long run.” You’re not saying that you think dogs are better, you’re saying that dogs are better.

Oftentimes you’ll find that your thesis is quite long, which is fine, but make an effort to keep it short. A punchy, simple sentence sounds bolder than something full of commas and the word “whereas”. In fact, try never using the word “whereas” ever. That word is like a poison that kills your essay; it makes everything look stilted and fake unless you use it very carefully.

Depending on the specifications of your professor or just personal preference, you may want to summarize your supporting points within the thesis itself. I tend not to do this, but lots of people do and it’s an integral part of the five-paragraph format if you’re adhering to that. In that case, the thesis of our example essay would be something like, “Cats are not inherently bad, but dogs are better companions in the long run for a variety of reasons: they are easier to keep clean, they show more affection on average than cats, and they literally crap money.”

(Please note that dogs do not literally crap money. This is just an example.)

3) Write strong body paragraphs (the supporting points)

The body is obviously the meat of your essay. Everything else is just presentation, making sure the reader takes your essay seriously and remembers everything. If the supporting points presented in your body paragraphs aren’t convincing, no one will care about the essay (and you’ll almost certainly fail the assignment).

What a supporting point is should be obvious to you. If your thesis says dogs are better than cats, you should have multiple supporting points to explain why this is; three is pretty much the minimum, as I’m sure high school taught you, but the more evidence the better.

A supporting point pretty much gets its own mini-thesis, a topic sentence. Recalling our second paragraph above, the topic sentence is, “One key thing that makes dogs better companions is how much easier they are to keep clean than cats are.” That tells the reader what the body paragraph is about, similar to how the thesis tells the reader what the entire essay is about. After the first sentence tells what the paragraph is about, the rest of the paragraph should a) prove that the claim made in the first sentence is true, and b) explain why this is relevant to the thesis. Of course the first and last sentences should still function as bookends.

Each unique supporting point should get one paragraph to itself at the very least, unless arguing the point takes a really long time, in which case you should consider splitting it into multiple related points (thus multiple paragraphs). For example, a second paragraph starting with something like, “One key thing that makes dogs better companions is how much easier they are to have around the house,” would be too general to fit the proofs into one paragraph. You could split it into multiple paragraphs looking at specific examples of how dogs are easier to have around: how they’re easier to keep clean, how they’re better with kids, how they don’t climb on furniture, etc.

4) Have a high-quality argument

How to formulate a convincing argument is beyond the scope of this article (and beyond my ability to even write). However, bear in mind that the quality of your argument will pretty much determine whether your essay is good or not. Now would be a good time to learn how to debate; a lot of schools have classes on it, or you could just watch the debate teams (most schools have those, too). Watch for logical fallacies and use analogies to get your point across.

Appearing to have a bias towards one side of your argument could make your readers roll their eyes and discount the whole essay. There is a difference between being bold and being biased; tell us that something is, but make us believe that you’ve come to this conclusion through logic, not emotion. Nothing’s more tragic to me than someone who argues for a cause I support, but displays a clear bias and gives the whole cause a bad name.

(I’m looking at you gay rights advocates, pro-piracy groups, and drug policy reformers.)

5) Do research and plan ahead

And do it in advance! I’ve never personally had an issue with writing an essay the day before the deadline, but you definitely can’t do research the day before without turning in a shoddy product. At least a few days before you sit down to write, spend a couple hours in the library, on the internet, and reading your textbook (you know, that thing you were supposed to be reading since the first day of class). Jot down notes or highlight any pertinent information, copy down all the information needed to cite the source later, and try to figure out just how you’re going to present and analyze this information in your essay.

Go ahead and use Wikipedia, but don’t cite it. It’s a good place to get an overview of your topic, but that’s about all; specific information should come from sources that aren’t open to constantly being edited. Go to the bottom of the articles you look up and check out the sources that Wikipedia takes its information from; if there are no sources, you probably shouldn’t take the article terribly seriously. Technically this should apply to all encyclopedias, but profs are notoriously paranoid about Wikipedia in particular, so make sure not to cite it.

There are a truly stupid number of formats for citations that all convey the exact same information. Follow the instructions for the assignment if any certain format is requested; otherwise, go with something simple and common like APA or MLA style. Bibme is a great app to use for constructing a bibliography without learning a bunch of pointless referencing styles.

6) Avoid definitions

A rule of thumb that many teachers have tried to drill into me is that an essay should only be an argument, and that the writer should always assume that the reader knows all about what’s being discussed. This is actually a good rule to keep in mind, but it can be ignored in some contexts. It is true that filling your essay with neutral explanations of what things are can detract from the pacing and boldness of the key argument, but there’s also your audience to keep in mind.

Definitions should be kept to a minimum, but consider:

1. Are the majority of your readers really familiar with this idea? Is it something they’d have to look up?
2. Are the specific points you would cover in your definition addressed in your argument, not just “fun facts”?
3. Is the definition so long that it requires its own paragraph? Will it seriously affect the pacing?

In our example essay, it is not necessary to define what dogs and cats are, why people keep them as pets, or the concept of domestication. These are all things that would technically be relevant to the topic, but would not be relevant to the thesis — they would have no effect on the actual argument and never be addressed by any supporting point, so they’re just distracting and pace-ruining.

When considering “the majority of your readers”, think about who would even be interested in reading your essay. It’s true that some aliens from a far-away galaxy might not know what cats and dogs are, but would they be interested in reading an essay about them? Probably not, so don’t cater to them by providing definitions.

An essay about conservatives and liberals probably wouldn’t need to tell the reader what those words mean. But if the essay’s thesis is how people who claim to be conservative aren’t really conservatives, then you’d be totally justified in defining the words so that you can refute specific points in the definitions that your readers wouldn’t otherwise be aware of. It’s all about context and audience.

Obviously you should be shooting for the briefest definitions possible here; only give a definition its own paragraph if it’s absolutely imperative that it be thorough and have attention drawn to it. Never directly quote a dictionary; nothing could be more boring. You can cite a dictionary if you want, but rephrase the definition so it reads like just another part of your essay.

7) Write an epic conclusion

Reiterate all the points from your essay, not just the thesis! This is the last paragraph of your essay, where you get one last chance to gather your points together and prove to the reader that you’re right about everything. As this is also a bookend, it should be snappy and memorable; give it some clever connection to something you said earlier in the essay. If you quoted someone in the introduction, address their quote again here (don’t quote it again, just address it). If the conclusion isn’t at least as long as the introduction, something has gone horribly wrong.

If you aren’t being held to a strict format, it might also be worthwhile to throw in a bonus one-line paragraph after the conclusion. This is a good place to throw in a quick joke (a punchline for the essay, perhaps) or give extra weight to a particularly provocative line. You probably shouldn’t do this in a serious academic context, but it’s a good idea if you have a prof with a good sense of humour, or if you plan to publish your essay to a blog or other informal medium.

The conclusion to our example essay could look like this:

Although personal preference will undoubtedly continue to be the biggest factor in determining whether a person likes dogs better than cats, it is undeniable that this is an issue with an objective answer. The fact is that dogs are easier to keep clean, that they show more affection than cats, and that they literally crap money. Cats still have their upsides, many of which are examined in detail by Professor Eirsley, but the benefits of dogs as companions out-weight the benefits of cats. In the end, dogs will always be man’s best friend.

And the bonus paragraph could be:

And woman’s, too, if internet porn has taught me anything.

(Which might not be acceptable in an academic context.)

Sometimes you just get stuck with lame topic assignments and sometimes you’re just not in the mood, but essays can be fun if you look at them the right way. This is your chance to really express your opinion, make yourself look smart, and argue with the professor. Essays really are a great genre of writing; make the most of your torture and be a real asshole about it. Arguing is always more fun if it’s got some anger and boldness to fuel it.

I’m an eighteen-year-old university student majoring in Communication, Media, and Film; I’m also a programmer and a web designer who spends a lot of time on my computer. I know exactly where Vishal Singh in this article is coming from. I frequently get distracted from my schoolwork to edit videos, check Facebook, and post on this blog. I’m fully aware that I can sometimes allow my hobbies with technology to get in the way of my school work, and I have that oft-levied student issue of staying up too late. The New York Times brings up some good points, but comes to the wrong conclusion.

Who is to blame for the academic disinterest of students? The students are.

Of course, most people would point out that students are (primarily) young people who should be guided by the education system, not punished. And that all sounds great on paper when you’re trying to appease people’s parents for political reasons, but I know first-hand that this is not a stance that holds any water in reality. This sort of nonsense is exemplified perfectly by Marcia Blondel’s experience with her classroom, as related in the article:

“Who wants to read starting in the middle of Page 137?” she asks. One student begins to read aloud, and the rest follow along.

To Ms. Blondel, the exercise in group reading represents a regression in American education and an indictment of technology. The reason she has to do it, she says, is that students now lack the attention span to read the assignments on their own.

“How can you have a discussion in class?” she complains, arguing that she has seen a considerable change in recent years. In some classes she can count on little more than one-third of the students to read a 30-page homework assignment.

I did high school and I remember teachers like this. They’re incompetent. Novel idea for Ms. Blondel: if your students won’t work, FAIL THEM. If that seems like something that’s going to get you fired, you’re probably an awful teacher. Students need someone engaging to make them interested in the subject matter. Assigned to a mandatory subject that requires you to teach unwilling students? Get out the red marker.

As someone who knows how to read, my worst enemies in high school were the teachers that read to me, or got other students to read to me. It’s condescending and it slows down the entire class; stop doing it. I understand that you’re doing it to get everyone on the same playing field, but it’s not working. People need to help themselves.

The fact that parent groups force teachers to be “nice” to their students — which results in junk like this — is a very depressing one. We’re talking about high school, here, not kindergarten. I’m fully aware that most work in high school is busywork — the kind of pointless drudgery that exists solely to make schools look good to the government — but this is also true in the real world.

If you want a job, you’re going to have to put up with the pointless drudgery. Learn how to deal with it: that’s what schools should be teaching. This “regression of American education” is the system’s fault, not technology’s. It’s the consequence of politics.

I actually agree with a lot of points brought up in Richtel’s article. That computers and cell phones have an effect on students’ attention spans is a theory supported by scientific data, as the article rightly states. But the conclusion drawn from this theory — the implication that young people are innocent of sabotaging their own intellectual development, and that the nature of distraction itself is to blame — is obviously fallacious. Distraction has existed for all of human history, and just because it’s (arguably) easier to access nowadays does not make it something you can scapegoat. It’s a force of nature, not some malevolent entity that can be challenged.

If you’re going to report on how technology has changed our lives, do it factually. Don’t try to blame it for all our problems. Telling us that our relentless procrastination isn’t our fault is just enabling us; you’re giving us an excuse for our own stupidity.

As HAL 9000 would say, “This sort of thing has cropped up before and it has always been due to human error.”

And to really succeed, you need to learn how to walk this line carefully.

Your bed is allowed to be made, unmade, or nonexistent. No one gives a shit about how you sleep as long as they can’t see anything crusty.

The desk is one of the key parts of your home, where you store all your important paperwork, your writing supplies, and maybe even a computer if you have room. When it comes to desks, you’re generally in the clear as long as the stacks of papers don’t dwarf that old CRT monitor.

Having a messy desk is acceptable within reason, especially if you’re in a dorm. Schoolwork piles up on all of us, right? It’s okay to have a bunch of I’ll-get-around-to-it-after-this-party homework on your desk. Watch out for valuables, though; a messy desk might look like an impenetrable fortress to you, but people in search of your loose change and weed will search the desk.

If you’re in a dorm, your table is probably also your desk. There are two main states that a table can be in:

But not all forms of binging are appropriate. For example:

There are three main states that your trash can be:

Totally empty is acceptable. This is the ideal state, though you have to watch the states of the rest of your room. If your entire room is messy, but your trash can is clean, people will just assume that someone puked in there and you wanted to get rid of it, which can quickly roll it over into unacceptable territory.

Unless the trash can is in the middle of the room (UNACCEPTABLE), no one really cares if it’s full of junk.

After clearing the old gravy off your desk, you have to empty the trash. If people are coming over later, crumple a bunch of papers up to make the trash can look more full. If they ask why your bin is full of crumpled papers, tell them you’re an art major.

Pretty much everyone appreciates a good clean floor. This goes double if you expect people to take their shoes off when entering your room.

It might look kind of cool if you have so much junk on the floor that you can’t even see the actual floor anymore, but unless you’re willing to commit to such an arrangement you’re better off just keeping the place clean. Besides, do you really want people to get papercuts from walking barefoot on your I’ll-get-around-to-it-after-this-party floor-homework?

And that’s all the advice I have for now.

Sometimes you just want a coffee and a doughnut, and that’s what Tim Hortons is for. So it stands to reason that they need to have their own variation on the fast-food fountain drink. This is the Tim Hortons cardboard cup with a plastic lid:

(That’s the winter design; the rest of the year it’s just a shit brown colour.)

It’s actually a pretty good design — sometimes. It may be hard to tell from that picture if you’ve never been to Tim Hortons, but the rippled part of the plastic lid can be folded up to make a little hole for drinking. On paper it seems like a really neat idea, just giving the cups a means to open and close while still making them pollute-o-riffic. But there’s this one thing that annoys me: it only works when it feels like it.

The ideal use of the plastic lid goes thus:

But then half the time, step 2 is unfortunately followed by step 3:

This is not acceptable. Why the hell does the plastic lid not stay open sometimes? Can’t you hire some elite engineers to fix this? Hell, my dad is an engineer; just hire him! (Note: I do not know if my dad is qualified enough to design a small bit of plastic. I’m not responsible for any damage if you actually hire him.)

The solutions to this problem are many. A lot of people I know just drink with the plastic tab sticking up, like a barbarian. Some minority of people actually bend the tab to get inside the cup, thus presumably making the entire drink taste like brown plastic. Neither of these are acceptable solutions. This is like providing your website with multiple stylesheets so you can support shitty browsers. This is like covering the seat with toilet paper before you sit down. THIS IS NOT A SOLUTION.

No one I’ve ever pointed this out to has ever cared. Am I just insane?