Image provided by: Texas A&M University
About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 13, 2003)
WORLD E BATTALION ort ith their irration ig the country!' Aversion.” 1 tor confederatio: pposition parlif' to demand it rly elections iffe ndurn on his ml; is Council schej or Feb. 2 afir petition signed! would be unco r otiers have chi e Court. He \»t rcted in 2000.ari Miezuela's const erendum halfws m — August.! president of rotr ■mocratic instite :onomy with leii ition has stag: called for a la ry bank strike la d to order troop n plants that r and to fire orj; ave soldiers tal; te country anesi e? North gate?. Id "mud lot”) ay parking. tor iere. seds. Opinion The Battalion Page 11 • Monday, January 13, 2003 Cannabis issue rehashed Partnership for a Drug Free America's new campaign spreads misinformation GEORGE DEUTSCH I f most parents knew there was a federally funded organization lying to their children about the effects of drug use, they would likely be appalled and seek to have the organization’s funding removed. Yet the frightening truth is that such a group exists, operating under the family-friendly monicker. Partnership for a Drug Free America (PDFA). In its newest line of Public Service Announcements (PSAs), the group equates marijuana use with wrongful death, rape and even mur der...crimes that sensible people real ize marijuana usage alone would never lead to. Last year, the American public was misled into thinking that every joint they smoked contributed to inter national terrorism, and recently that using marijuana will almost certainly result in acts of domestic violence. Lies. The “anti-drug.” PDFA's well-intentioned but inac curate PSAs feature a variety of sce narios, each ending with someone dying, being raped or going to jail. In reality, only the latter is a likely conse quence of using marijuana. In one of the ads, two male teenagers smoke pot in what appears to be the home office of one of their fathers, and, as the two adolescents continue to smoke, they stumble across a handgun. To see if it's loaded, one of the teens promptly picks up the gun and shoots directly at his friend. The gun is, of course, loaded, and the guilty teen, totally under the “control” of the marijuana, never thought to check for bullets or point the gun any where except directly at his friend. The entire grisly scene is followed by the words “Marijuana: Harmless?” If this television spot sounds totally implausible, even ridiculous, that's because it is, and the others are just like it. The ad would be better-aimed at parents who fail to lock up their handguns. The fact remains that peo ple don’t test to see if a gun is loaded by blindly pointing it at their best friend and squeezing the trigger, stoned or not. The ad’s message is not simply that marijuana distorts percep tion and judgement, it is that if you smoke weed, you will be shot or per haps shoot someone else. This is false. All of these ads play on what I call a “worst case scenario” fear. The most horrible thing that can happen in any one of the given commercials always does, and, without fail, mari juana is to blame. Another of the PSAs fea tures a car full of young people at a fast food window smoking marijuana. The teens get their food, and as they are pulling out, a child on a bicycle pulls out in front of them from behind a corner, totally getting run over by the “negligent” driver in the process. If only the teens hadn’t been smoking marijuana, the commercial implies, perhaps the little girl on the bicycle would have lived. The fact that this child appears to be younger than 5 years old and riding a bike without parental supervision along a busy commercial fairway is never addressed. Again, the ad would better serve parents who let their chil dren play in the street unattended. Anyone, regardless of age, who darts in front of a moving car is likely to get run over. Marijuana has nothing to do with it. Perhaps most intriguing is the spot in which two teens, a male and a female, smoke marijuana at a party. After smoking a few bowls of weed from a pipe, the female begins to look comatose, and her male companion proceeds to rape her in front of all the people at the party. Not surprisingly, no one comes to her aid, and viewers are again asked “Marijuana: Harmless?” Here, marijuana use leads to an impromptu rape at this poor woman’s expense. Mark Tutssel, vice-chairman of Leo Burnett USA, PDFA's ad agency, said in a press release that the company’s PSAs dealt with “every day occurences.” I would venture to say that none of the aforementioned scenarios occurs every day, if at all, and PDFA, which prides itself on truth, is willfully misleading the American public about the “dangers” of marijuana. Here are the facts. The Marijuana Policy Project’s Web site, www.mpp.org, lists that 1 1 of our 50 states consider marijuana to be a medi cine and have decriminalized it. Of these states, California alone saves $100 million each year in reduced arrests, according to the group’s Web site. Imagine what the extra money could do for California and how much might be saved if marijuana was legal ized outright. In fact, the Web site states that the government has been supplying American citizens with medicinal marijuana for more than 20 years. There is even a pill fonn of the drug, called Marinol, available only by prescription. So is marijuana the scourge of society and the corruptor of youth? The U.S. government doesn’t seem to think so. When dealing with tough issues such as drug use, one must take the good with the bad. Marijuana can arguably be said to cure more than it causes, and its medicinal qualities cannot be ignored. Could there be negative effects of using marijuana? Sure, but to think that smok ing pot will almost certainly lead to accidental death, rape, or murder, you would have to be, well, high. George Deutsch is a senior journalism major. Student to Supreme Court: end racial preferences Justices should rule in favor of maligned applicant and against U. of Michigan A MATTHEW MADDOX /ICES RK n open letter to the Supreme Court Justices of the United .States of America: I appreciate this opportunity to communicate with you concerning an issue affecting young Americans from the unique perspective of a current college student. Racial preferences, even where illegal, are a practice rampant in higher education. At Texas A&M University, the situation is no different. Young people are being discriminated against, not for their lack of academic ability, but for the lack of melanin in their skin. 1 urge you to end diversity initiatives and all other rationales for institutional race discrimination as you begin to hear the case of Gratz v. Bollinger. Whereas the Bush administration has been fearful of issuing an opinion on the case since the Trent Lott debacle, now is a time for greater resolve against racism. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 pro hibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance. This description fits land grant colleges, which includes Texas A&M. Students and applicants at A&M face new forms of discrimination that include minority-only scholarships sponsored by University resources, race-based recruitment policies, departments devoted to serving stu dents along ethnic lines, race-based student groups that receive University funding, and the disparate impact of Top 10-percent admissions program. I ask that the court render an unam biguous ruling unlike the one delivered 25 years ago in University of California v. Bakke that has led to the above-mentioned practices. There are several faults with those who argue in favor of racial discrimina tion in higher education. The word “diversity” as used by edu cators is a misnomer. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “diversity’ means “differing from one another, unlike, variety, composed of distinct or unlike elements or qualities.” According to this definition, diversity is already present at every aca demic institution since each individual has distinct qualities. It would be impossible to create more “diversity” in higher edu cation by changing which appli cants comprise the student body. Judge Jerry Smith wrote in Hopwood v. Texas, “I concede that the law school’s (University of Texas) 1992 admissions process would increase the per centages of black faces and brown faces in that year's entering class. But facial diver sity is not true diversity.... Instead, individuals, with their own conceptions of life, further diversity of viewpoint.... To foster such diversi ty, state universities and law schools and other governmental entities must scrutinize appli cants individually, rather than resorting to the dangerous proxy of race.”. In Texas, even though the Hopwood v. Texas decision that struck down racial discrimination in higher education applies, administrators make little effort to disguise their true motives when attempting to circumvent the ruling. A&M President Dr. Robert M. Gates was quot Clearly, administrators attempting to ‘achieve diversity are actually renaming racial preferences under a seemingly less offensive title ed in a recent University press release stating that diversifying the campus is one of his most important priorities. “This campus needs to look more like the state of Texas; 93 percent of our undergraduates are Texans. Texas is 32 per cent Hispanic; we're 9 percent. Texas is almost 12 percent African-American; we're under 3 percent.” Administrators attempting to achieve diversity are actually renaming racial prefer ences and quotas under a seem ingly less offensive title. As the Associated Press recently report ed, “A&M has tried to attract minority college students by tar geting certain high schools.” According to the Bryan/College Station Eagle, “The new (Texas A&M) diversity vice president will be responsible for identify ing and spreading ‘best prac tices’ — strategies that have resulted in minority enrollment gains of students and faculty.” These race-conscious actions overtly place this public institu tion’s value of applicants on their ethnicity rather than their personal merit. Racial discrim ination is illegal, regardless of the euphemism used to describe it. Some proponents of racial discrimination in higher education have even resorted to archaic and racist reasoning. University of Michigan Professor Patricia Gurin gave expert testimony earlier in the case to this end. "Students who experienced the most racial and ethnic diversity in classroom settings and in informal interac tions with peers showed the greatest engage ment in active thinking processes, growth in intellectual engagement and motivation, and growth in intellectual and academic skills.” Thoughts, intelligence, and ideas are not func tions of skin color. Regardless of whether the archaic theories of relative racial intelligence are in question, they have no purpose before the law. As Justice O’Connor opined in Metro Broadcasting v. FCC, "Social scientists may debate how people’s thoughts and behavior reflect their backgrounds, but the Constitution provides that the government may not allocate benefits or burdens among individuals based on the assumption that race or ethnicity deter mines how they act or think." Only a clear ruling, not providing room for administrators to invent and circumvent, can solve the current crisis. The court and the Constitution were both created with the inten tion that neither would be subject to the often volatile changes in public opinion. The time has come to obey the letter of the law that “all men are created equal” and that the govern ment may not “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” In the words of revered civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The court should end institutionalized discrimi nation once and for all, and make the dream of equality under the law a reality. Matthew Maddox is a junior business major.
