ONDCP

"Stoners in the Mist" is a fake documentary from AboveTheInfluence.com in which "Dr. Barnard Puck," clad in safari clothes, observes stoners and performs various experiments on them.

This is worth discussing only because it perfectly illustrates the lack of seriousness that still dominates the marijuana debate. I don’t know how anyone could watch this and conclude that the people who made it are a credible source of information about the effects of marijuana.

Among the highlights:

At the risk of increasing their traffic, you have to watch it to appreciate how far-fetched and derogatory this video really is. It reminded me immediately of D.W. Griffith's racist classic The Birth of a Nation, which glorifies the Ku Klux Klan and depicts African Americans as incoherent slobbering rapists.

So yesterday, when an ONDCP staffer called SSDP and basically threatened to increase the childishness of his office's activities, we just laughed because there's really no lower level of discourse available to them. Two weeks ago, I witnessed ONDCP's David Murray indignantly challenge the seriousness of his critics, yet it is Murray himself who lobbies for more funding to produce utterly banal and sophomoric nonsense like "Stoners in the Mist."

So if the Responsible and Serious Youth Advocates at ONDCP can't figure out why they've alienated everyone, let me spell it out: it's because you're having your own made-up conversation about marijuana that no one else can participate in because it is completely fictitious and insane.

No, this is not a video about the effects of marijuana. It is a parting shot from an entrenched clan of spiteful, sniveling spin-doctors who continue to sling mud in desperation even as their puddle dries up.

Following up on the news that the Drug Czar is looking for a new job, I have a piece in the Huffington Post looking at how the current political climate is rendering the Drug Czar's office irrelevant. Issues like marijuana legalization are taking off and threatening to destroy the legacy of anyone who stands in the way. More here.

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It's hard to imagine a worse job than defending the drug war every single day, and it looks as though Gil Kerlikowske has had about all he can take:

The New York Times has a rather strange visit with Deputy Drug Czar Tom McClellan in which he says he only took the job because his son had recently died from a drug overdose and now admits that he hates working there:

In a recent interview in his office here — still sparsely decorated except for a photocopied picture of his family, including his surviving son and two young grandsons (or "grand felons," as he called them) — Dr. McLellan put his feet up on the coffee table and declared, "I hate this job."

"This is a job that needs scientific background," he went on. "But if you come to it with the kind of desires to turn everything into a scientific experiment, you will have your poor little heart broken."

I don't understand. Did Tom McClellan think they cared about science at the Office of National Drug Control Policy? Maybe if someone had shown him Stoners in the Mist, he could have figured out what he was getting himself into before it was too late.

Regardless, it's just weird to find the new deputy drug czar already hating on his own job in The New York Times. It strikes me as yet another indication of what a sickly and irrelevant institution the ONDCP has become. Sometimes, I feel like it's just a matter of time before the whole thing collapses in a poignant public spectacle:



Dr. McClellan might be our best candidate yet for bringing that beautiful sight to life.