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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.