WHAT’S HE BEEN SMOKIN’?

WHAT’S HE BEEN SMOKIN’?: Where- or more to the point who- do we blame for the impossibly contrived and deceitful “reefer madness” in an article by clueless police beat reporter Paul Curtis in today’s local paper.

We could start with Curtis himself for the unchallenged regurgitating of the equally clueless KPD officer Mark Ozaki’s presentation to a church group.

Not even the DEA itself claims that (t)hose hooked on the “new,” more-potent, quick-growing strains of Kaua`i marijuana are... break(ing) into homes and vacation rentals seeking money to fund their habits”

Habits? Oh nooo- they must be mainlining it nowadays Gertrude.

But that’s just for starters. Later Ozaki claims that “(w)hat used to take a year now takes less than a month as these new pot plants can go from seed to harvest in 28 days”.

A whole lot of medical pot patients would like to get their hands on those seeds especially if they grow a biologically ridiculous “strain... comprised of 60 to 70 percent tetrahyrdocannabinol, compared to less than 20 percent just a few years ago”.

Ooooo- dat's some sticky bud. Stop holding out on us Mark. If that’s da kine the cops smoke think what a great recruiting tool it’d be.

Perhaps Curtis is just warning us that this crap is actually what these people think is factual and that it’s being foisted on our kids who know of course all this is an over the top pack o’ lies and so assume whatever pinheads like Ozaki claim about deadly drugs like ice is equally fabricated.

But if so, where is the rebuttal- a staple of the usual “he said she said reporting”.

Curtis makes it worse with the tired old post hoc proctor hoc fallacy of “the gateway drug theory” which is belied by the fact that those at the top of the societal rung commonly use the sacred herb regularly.

Did you know that most pot smokers started out on mothers milk? And all of them breath oxygen?

We might blame Editor Nathan Eagle whose credibility at the helm of the paper has taken a nose dive since reporter Mike Levine left and ceased to keep him honest if not for the fact that Curtis is now the “assistant editor” who has no higher editor on days that Eagle is off.

We could say that this parochially backward and insidiously destructive mindset begins at the top with kindly old brain-dead Chief Darryl Perry and his merry men of mental midgets at the police commission who seems satisfied with presenting this D.A.R.E style drivel rather than putting officers on the beat to do other things... like maybe, oh, maybe, let’s say... solve murders or something.

Congrats all around for doing the impossible- making KPD even more of a laughing stock.

But really it begins and ends with our elected officials who haven’t got the guts to stop this kind of frittering away of resources on green harvest operations, busting medical users (as the article describes) and of course devoting a full-time officer on a short-staffed force to spread utter bull-sh*t to our kids and other equally gullible groups like churches and business groups.

With public pressure the council on the Big Island has taken matters into their own hands, cutting off funding for the choppers and forcing the police department to stop busting users.

Until we put some pressure on our council to buy a clue- and some political guts- we’ll continue to see this kind of drivel in our faces over coffee each morning.