"You a pothead Focker?" - Robert De Niro
It's dangerous business to dabble with dope these days - at least according to a large ad I recently read in my morning newspaper.
I'm pretty sure the ad was placed by the same anti-drug group that pays for those TV commercials which range from being unintentionally hilarious ("Just tell your brother you forgot to pick him up from practice because you were high") to downright creepy (the one with the old woman who haunts the poor teen who killed her while driving impaired on Mary Jane).
The purpose of the ad was titled "Marijuana and your teen's mental health" and seemed designed to whip parents into an emotional frenzy.
According to the ad, "new research is giving us better insight into the serious consequences of teen marijuana use, especially how it impacts mental health." And the results aren't pretty.
Did you know that teenagers who smoke dope have double the risk of depression later in life? Or that they are 3 times more likely than non-users to have suicidal thoughts? But the worst part is that marijuana use has recently been linked to an increased risk for schizophrenia later in life.
This would all scare me to death if I didn't think it was utter horseshit.
I knew several people in high school and college who smoked dope and the only time they got crazy was when we would run out of mint chocolate chip ice cream or Cheetos - and that's a perfectly understandable response.
It was far more common for people to do crazy and reckless things while drunk on alcohol than it was for the pothead crowd.
Smoking dope generally makes you prone to long stretches on the couch while watching movies like "Old School" or "Dazed and Confused."
But apparently marijuana is no longer a lark or a relaxation tool - nowdays you better scare your children straight because "their mental health may depend on it."
I just hope that there's not an ad placed in next week's paper warning parents that masturbation causes blindness later in life because all we need in 20 years is to be surrounded by large masses of blind and schizophrenic animals.
Now that's scary.
-BDS
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