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?

Marijuana is less harmful than coffee, plain and simple. You might still be wondering how scientists have come up with this idea. Here is your answer: While marijuana contains over 400 chemicals, coffee contains 1,500 chemicals. Rat poison contains only 30 chemicals and it’s one of the most harmful substance known.[1] Almost 70 percent of Americans said they were hooked on coffee, based on a 2006 survey conducted by the National Coffee Association. The statistics prove it – Americans need their coffee while 2 percent of Americans said they were hooked on marijuana, based on a 2006 survey conducted by the US No Drugs Association. Unlike caffeine, most evidence suggests that marijuana is not physically addictive. Addiction to a drug is caused by the drug altering one’s brain chemistry in a way that nurtures dependence. For example, the brain is not accustomed to caffeine. The dependence one develops comes from his or her brain attempting to compensate for the unnatural chemical reaction. Since the human brain is already attuned to receive cannabinoids, it does not alter a user’s brain chemistry in any significant way. The binding of cannabinoids to the CB1 and CB2 receptors is an entirely natural chemical reaction. The Institute of Drug Abuse made a chart rating the addictiveness of various substances. On it, they rated marijuana as less addictive than caffeine. The reason I introduced this comparison is to make you question where our priorities lie. Caffeine, an addictive and potentially harmful drug, can be purchased and consumed almost anywhere. Even young children have access to caffeine in caffeinated soda and coffee. On the other hand, billions of government dollars are spent each year to keep marijuana, a drug that is less addictive and toxic than caffeine, illegal.

Cannabis use can be a gateway because it is illegal, which puts users in contact with other substances like cocaine, psilocybin mushrooms, LSD etc. In 2006, the University of Pittsburgh released a more thorough study in which researchers spent 12 years tracking a group of subjects from adolescence into adulthood and documented the initiation and progression of their drug use. The researchers found that the gateway theory was not only wrong, but also harmful to properly understanding and addressing drug abuse:

This evidence supports what’s known as the common liability model, an emerging theory that states the likelihood that someone will transition to the use of illegal drugs is determined not by the preceding use of a particular drug but instead by the user’s individual tendencies and environmental circumstances. ‘The emphasis on the drugs themselves, rather than other, more important factors that shape a person’s behaviour, has been detrimental to drug policy and prevention programs,’ Dr. Tarter said. ‘To become more effective in our efforts to fight drug abuse, we should devote more attention to interventions that address these issues, particularly to parenting skills that shape the child’s behaviour as well as peer and neighbourhood environments.’[2]

Of course, the simplest refutation of the gateway theory is the basic fact that most marijuana users don’t use other drugs. As the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reports: “More than 100 million Americans have tried marijuana; 14.4 million Americans are estimated to be ‘past-month’ users. Yet there are only an estimated 2,075,000 ‘past-month’ users of cocaine and 153,000 ‘past-month’ users of heroin.”[2]

Unfortunately, there is one important way in which marijuana use can result in exposure to more dangerous drugs. Laws against marijuana have created an unregulated black market, in which criminals control the supply and may attempt to market more dangerous drugs to people who just want marijuana. As the Journal of the American Medical Association reported in 2003:

Alternatively, experience with and subsequent access to cannabis use may provide individuals with access to other drugs as they come into contact with drug dealers. This argument provided a strong impetus for the Netherlands to effectively decriminalize cannabis use in an attempt to separate cannabis from the hard drug market. This strategy may have been partially successful as rates of cocaine use among those who have used cannabis are lower in the Netherlands than in the United States.

Ironically, the only real gateway that exists is created by marijuana prohibition.[3]

Since the late 1960s, increasingly harsh drug policies in the United States have led to the U.S. having a higher prison population than any country aside from China. Successive U.S. presidential administrations have exported “the war on drugs” to many other Western nations, through a combination of diplomatic and financial strong-arm tactics.  Yet despite 40 years, one trillion dollars, and hundreds of thousands of lies, almost everyone agrees the U.S. “War on Drugs” has been a colossal failure.  The Associated Press published a major article on May 13, 2010, which used Freedom of Information Act documents to conclude:

In 40 years, taxpayers spent more than:

• $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico — and the violence along with it.
• $33 billion in marketing “Just Say No”-style messages to America’s youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have “risen steadily” since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.
• $49 billion for law enforcement along America’s borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.
• $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.
• $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.[4]

In light of this massively failed effort, a number of countries, including Spain, Portugal, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Argentina, Mexico and even the U.K. have  all liberalized their drug laws to one extent or another. In November, California voters will vote on a ballot initiative to legalize possession of marijuana in the state and tax its sale. Passage of this measure could have far-ranging effects, both in the United States and in other Western countries.

The influence of countries with lenient drug laws is reflecting the possible outcome of drug decriminalization in Canada, a step citizens view as drastic. Yet, the reality is that an increasing proportion of Canadian youth is becoming more tolerant of drug use, specifically marijuana.

While full legalization remains a controversial approach, Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark has mirrored the opinion of many youth.

“I believe the least controversial approach is decriminalization,” said Clark, “because it’s unjust to see someone, because of one decision one night in their youth, carry the stigma to be barred from studying medicine, law, architecture or other fields where a criminal record could present an obstacle.”

As an increasing number of people are becoming aware of this debate, more questions concerning decriminalization are appearing. While issues such as availability, purchase, taxation and driving under the influence are still to be addressed, Canada is sure to see attempts from both sides of the drug policy spectrum to improve the situation.

And with influential authority figures supporting major aspects of drug decriminalization, it might not be too long before Canadians are smoking up freely.

Citations:

http://zinelibrary.info/files/Marijuana%20and%20Hemp-%20The%20Untold%20Story.pdf [1]

http://www.cannabisculture.com/v2/content/research-proves-marijuana-not-gateway-drug [2]

http://www.drugwardistortions.org/distortion7.htm [3]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37134751/ [4]

First, look at the classical essayists such as Francis Bacon. Google for some of his essays; or better, I’ll Google them for you. Bacon is usually seen as the “father of essays”, but none of his works even come close to fitting the modern idea of a five-paragraph essay. You could argue that his essays were simply in a different style, which is true, but that’s hardly honest. When people hear the word “essay”, the only thing they think of is the five-paragraph format. Most people don’t actually know the real meaning of the word. Granted, the five-paragraph format can be a bit flexible — I have been asked to write seven-paragraph essays in the past — but it is always held to the same standards of rigidly-defined structure. Structuring essays in this way will often make them worse. The writer might have more to say than the template allows, or they might have less. A short essay can be every bit as meaningful as a long essay, but the five-paragraph format discourages essays below a certain length.

On top of that, the limits of formality often cause the writers to be verbose. Brevity is one of the defining features of an essay (with a few notable exceptions), but the requirement to be “formal” in the academic style tends to balloon the word count without ballooning the actual content. As an example of this, I’m going to link to the essay I wrote last month (which I’ve already linked to in every post since I wrote it). That post is only 614 words long. Shortly after publishing it, I was assigned something in school that allowed me to reuse the ideas from that post. No problem, except that I needed to rewrite it to fit the five-paragraph format. This included adding a weak third point (since the original only had two points), and repeating myself several times in order to accommodate the thesis, introduction, summary sentence, etc. The essay that I ended up handing in had increased from 614 words to almost 1100 words, and it was actually worse thanks to the unnecessary third point and the stifling formal style. I had to replace every instance of generic you with the word “one”, which resulted in the most hilariously stilted conclusion I’ve ever written. I also had to remove all references to myself — the idea being that I would replace it with an external source — but since I’d written the essay from my personal experiences, this ended up making the entire thing into an incoherent mess.

Five-paragraph essays still have meaning, of course. A lot of them can be great reading. I just think they do more harm than good when taken past what they’re good at. What they’re good at is teaching people; they’re just a learning tool for people to learn the basics of argumentative writing (similar to a lot of the ranting on this website). Once you know how to argue a point in writing — analogies and repetition being what I usually do — the five-paragraph template becomes a crutch. Truly great writers are flexible, and they experiment with their writing for the best effect. There are better things out there than a format so stifled that you can’t even use the word “bullshit”. Isn’t that a great word to use in an essay? It certainly sums up my feelings. I’ve also been ending sentences with prepositions, linking to things, using a sarcastic tone, and abusing the third person plural. Isn’t that what great essays are made of?

I’m being facetious in the details, obviously. Gratuitous swearing and sarcasm are good things to forbid in an academic context, and avoiding “personal essays” is probably best if the writer is still in school. But for every good thing about the format, there’s one more “oneself”, and one more I-statement awkwardly rewritten to use a different person. The five-paragraph essay prescribes to silly — and sometimes completely arbitrary — restrictions, and that doesn’t make it a good format for people to think of when they hear the word “essay”. It stains the name of a great genre of writing.

A good movie creates a contract with the audience: the conclusion will be satisfying. Think of the plotline as a map to this conclusion: a series of events along a path from Point A to Point B. The conclusion is foreshadowed by the events that precede it. The audience doesn’t know what’s going to happen, but when they look back at the movie, they need to see how one event followed from another. Thus, the plot of a good movie has inevitability: the conclusion seems inevitable.

Complex stories have one plotline in the foreground, and several more plotlines in the background to provide context. Without context, everything is meaningless: this is why the best stories usually have subplots. But what story could be more complex than life itself? It stands to reason that life would have an infinite number of background plotlines, stretching backwards so far that we can’t even perceive them.

Think about the monitor you’re looking at right now. Doesn’t it have a plotline? That monitor has a story to tell, from the person who invented it, to the components it comprises, to its arrival in front of you. Everything in life has a plotline, but we’re generally only concerned with a few foreground plotlines. Life functions are not foreground plotlines in the West, since we’re not concerned with them unless they get in the way. The foreground plotlines of individual people are their emotional arcs: love and ambition.

If life is like a good movie, its foreground plot needs to have inevitability. There is a definite starting point to both of my plotlines; as soon as I was old enough to feel ambitious or in love, Point A was set. Of course I had no idea where Point B would be — I still don’t. Some people never do. But just like a good movie, I have a contract with life. I know when I’m satisfied, and I know, deep down, when I’ve reached the right conclusion.

My parents were together for twelve years before they broke up. Twelve years before my mother realized that she wasn’t in love. At some point, she looked back along the route of events that led her to where she was, and realized that she wasn’t heading to Point B anymore. Maybe it took her a long time, but she eventually saw it. It was inevitable, given a long enough time frame. Like the original ending of Fight Club, the events didn’t match the conclusion. Point B would be a surprise, yes, but it would never be a non sequitur. The movie adaptation changed the ending, and even the original author agrees that the new ending is more satisfying.

Love is the people you care about, and ambition is the things you want to accomplish. It took me a long time to make some real guesses about the conclusions of these arcs. Where is my Point B? I think I know, but I might have an epiphany someday, like my mother did. There’s nothing to do but continue along a path until I find the conclusion that seems inevitable.

I try not to worry about my life’s direction too much; at least, not in the abstracted sense. I’m still trying to find the right plotline, and it’s better to die trying than to never try at all. I have a contract with life, and I won’t give up until I fulfill it.

Scrobbling seems to have an interesting effect on most people (or at least some people). People on Last.fm will often leave music playing all day, while not listening to it, just to get higher play counts on their profile. Having high play counts has no practical purpose, of course, but people do this anyway. How do I know? I could point out that my best friend Ryan does it, and I would be right, but the honest part of me points out that I do it, too. Sometimes. I try to refrain, but sometimes I slip and leave music playing for hours just for the sake of it. It’s an egotistical competition, yes, but it’s kind of fun. Besides, there’s no real harm in it, right? The numbers really are meaningless, after all, and the competitiveness that so many people create actually has its positive effects: namely, the fact that it makes people listen to more music. I listen to music sometimes just because I want more plays on my profile, but I also enjoy music that I would normally forget about. That’s kind of admirable, I guess, in a dumb sort of way.

One serious negative quality about scrobbling, however, is the fact it is is completely dependent on the ID3 tags. These tags are filled in by the users, which inevitably leads to mistaggings that clutter up the entire website. For the more OCD amongst us, this can be infuriating, and take the joy out of music. I asked my friend Matt Rebeiro for an exploitable quotation related to this phenomenon, and this is what I got:

“I usually avoid listening to things that are tagged wrongly [and I] listen to video game soundtracks less because I’m always unsure how to tag those.”
–Matt Rebeiro, obsessive nerd

It’s not the catchiest quote in the world, but it gets my point across. I’ve ignored albums before because I didn’t feel like filling out the tags. Granted, this is a problem that doesn’t apply to most people (because most people listen to music that’s actually in music databases, so they don’t have to tag everything manually). It applies to me, though, and it’s a very annoying side effect of the Last.fm experience.

I’ve also used my Last.fm profile as a reason to stop myself from listening to music even when I really wanted to. If you look at my Last.fm profile, you’ll see that my top artist by a huge margin is Lemon Demon, which is probably one of my favourite bands. Yet the stats on Last.fm are somewhat misleading; Lemon Demon was basically the only band I listened to back when I first joined, and then my music taste evolved on a generic MP3 player that wasn’t able to scrobble. I only got an iPod (with scrobbling capability) recently, so you can only see the beginnings of other top artists now. Since getting an iPod, I’ve barely listened to a single Lemon Demon song because I want to give the other artists a chance to catch up.

It’s very annoying, because I’m genuinely embarrassed at the huge gap between my top artist and all the others — it makes me look silly, like I only listen to one band ever. Still, I want to listen to Lemon Demon every once in a while. The competitive quality I’ve assigned to Last.fm is having a negative effect on my ability to enjoy one of my favourite bands, which is slightly annoying. It’s all my fault, really, since there really shouldn’t be a competition here at all, but it’s an inevitable side effect of the website. I have an exchange from Twitter to prove it:

mattgcn: Manually scrobbling two weeks of listening? Don’t mind if I do!
RyanLalonde: What do you mean by manually scrobbling?
mattgcn: http://lastfmstats.livefrombmore.com/universalscrobbler/
RyanLalonde: Oh wow, you can really cheat from this. I won’t do it tho.
mattgcn: Yeah, I only use it honestly but looking at the numbers it seems some people abuse it

That was an exchange between two people I follow, Matt Rebeiro (from above) and Ryan Lalonde. It demonstrates three ways that scrobbling’s competitiveness manifests:

1. Matt wants to manually scrobble two weeks of music, something which he later described as “tedious“.
2. Scrobbling music that you didn’t listen to is considered cheating. You can’t cheat if there’s no competition.
3. Some people do abuse the manual scrobbling system to “cheat”, combining points 1 and 2.

This is all just my long-winded way of saying: Last.fm can easily turn into a competition. It’s actually pretty predictable if you think about it. Isn’t a large portion of the music industry funded by people’s egos? Many groups are defined completely by musical tastes, and some musical tastes are completely defined by groups — when was the last time you saw a nuclear physicist listening to gangsta rap? I didn’t even like the Beatles the first time I heard them, but I forced myself to give them a chance because a lot of people I respect like them, and a lot of bands I already liked listed them as an influence. I like the Beatles now, but that only proves the point. Last.fm’s “compatibility meter” only furthers attitudes like this.

Last.fm is a lot of fun, but it might have some unexpected consequences. I do recommend that you join the site if you haven’t already, but I won’t hold it against you if you choose not to. Not everyone likes to be part of the high-horse circlejerk that Last.fm can easily become.