Long-time ICED BORSCHT comrade Valued Milk submits this blog entry regarding Michael Phelps:
“Okay, enough is enough. I just need to get this off my chest. Would someone please explain to me what the big deal is over a 23-year-old puffing on the hippie lettuce? Yeah, it’s a “Schedule 1″ narcotic that America’s archaic drug laws have placed in the same realm as heroin.
I understand that, but I also understand that anyone who isn’t brain-damaged, pathetically prudish or has some sort of axe to grind realizes that the principles behind our nation’s marijuana laws are the equivalent of relating blindness and hairy palms to masturbation.
I am not going to get into the needless damage that marijuana prohibition has done to our society. Many others have spelled out the contradiction in illegal marijuana to legal alcohol, handguns, and tobacco better than I ever could. Countless voices representing a wide-range of political and social beliefs from the crusty, patchouli-drenched, treehuggers to the Ivy League-educated, golf-playing, Prius driving powerbrokers have all agreed that imprisoning people for this victimless crime has not reduced demand but has only increased the number of prisons we have in this country. This “War on Drugs” has failed, clearly!
Hey, I don’t want a 14-year-old kid smoking the “Devil’s Cabbage.” I also don’t want 39-year-old assholes driving drunk or shooting up shopping malls with M-16s either. I also wish that cigarettes were totally illegal because perhaps then I wouldn’t have started smoking them and now be out-of-my-fuckin’-gourd addicted to them.
Marijuana a gateway drug? Sheesh, nicotine and alcohol are the gateway drugs. The gateway to lung, liver and heart disease and drunken ramblings and pissed pants and futile attempts at getting a bra off in the backseat before someone projectile vomits half-digested pizza into the ashtray.
I guess the point is, why pick on li’l Mary Jane?! She’s pretty resilient — they keep locking people up but people keep smoking it. The overwhelming majority are recreational users. They never buy the stuff; they wouldn’t know where to buy it. Most just stumble upon it at a place where people are hanging out and trying to enjoy themselves…like college parties.
Now to Mr. Phelps.
Setting aside all that I have said about marijuana laws in general, let’s just focus on Michael Phelps’ situation. His taking a tokerator hit off the water bong is not an argument against marijuana. If anything, it is an argument for it. Perhaps that is why people are in a tizzy over this social act that hundreds of thousands of meatheads, nerds, bimbos and asswipes engage in every day. Hey if marijuana is so bad, then how can a winner like Michael smoke it? I haven’t heard anyone make the argument that his taking iron-lunger hits combined with a strict diet and training regimen may have actually expanded his lungs to their otherworldly capacity. Hey, anything is possible! Maybe this is why he is so dominant and so unique. If other swimmers would just expand their lungs with a big toke of some “Alaskan Thunderfuck” they might see the results that ol’ Mike has.
C’mon folks, you reek of chlorine and your eyes are red as hell already…live a little.
But again, why do people care? He’s a swimmer for Christ’s sake! No one watches it. Every four years some socially isolated, over privileged jackasses dominate the media and the sports world for events that no one would watch if there was anything else on TV.
These people aren’t amazing. What is amazing about a person who is clearly gifted and then trained like a Soviet prodigy for a dozen-plus years and dedicates all of his time and effort to this one activity ending up being really super fuckin’ good at that activity? I don’t think it is amazing at all. I’m amazed that so many people seem to be amazed by this. A single mother from an abusive background working full-time and going to school part-time and still managing to maintain a relationship with her child is way WAY more amazing than this.
People giving a shit about what Michael Phelps puts in his body is amazing to me too. If people’s priorities were in order they wouldn’t care if he smoked one bong a day, ate chocolate until he went into a diabetic coma or if he liked to jam Rubik’s Cubes into his bung-hole (All right, if he shoots that thing out solved, that’s pretty amazing). Who cares? He’s not hurting anyone.
Now Kelloggs is pulling their “sponsorship.” Yeah, the American food industry is a bastion of good deeds and positive feelings for everyone. Do yourself a favor and read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan and begin to understand how lovely companies like Kelloggs have been to the world’s farmers, our children, our economy, etc. Perhaps if their CEOs would “twist one” they wouldn’t be such assholes. Furthermore, don’t they understand that if one of the effects of marijuana use are the “munchies” that they might stand to sell way more cereal? Something tells me that the stoners aren’t reaching for a healthy apple, they want a big fat cauldron of sugar frosted cocoa blams. Right?
This just isn’t a big deal. We shouldn’t focus on whether or not Phelps is smoking the reefer, if Mary Kate refuses to eat, or if Lindsay is performing cunnilingus. At the end of the day, the American people who think marijuana is bad and Kelloggs is good and athletes are amazing and politicians are always right are uninformed at best and, at worst, they are dangerous hypocrites.”
