Posted by caraher on December 11, 2008, at 17:21:22
In reply to Re: How's the war on cancer going? » Sigismund, posted by fayeroe on December 11, 2008, at 13:44:17
> yes, alcohol is horrible when abused. the father of my daughters is a "functioning" alcoholic (really bad) and he was outraged when they smoked pot in highschool. the HORROR of those drugs! ranted and raved and staggered around, wildly waving his tea glass full of bourbon and water.
This reminds me of the aftermath of Saturday, April 1, 1989 in Ann Arbor, which saw the "Hash Bash" (a pro-pot smoke-in and legalization rally) and a semifinal victory for the University of Michigan in the NCAA college basketball tournament. These were followed by an April 5 Grateful Dead concert. The Hash Bash came first, held in the afternoon, and was generally uneventful apart from a smattering of arrests for possession that represented an negligible fraction of the overall open pot smoking. In the evening, as soon as the basketball game ended, the bars emptied and drunken students engaged in some rather conspicuous vandalism, duly recorded and aired on all the local TV news stations. As great sports riots go this was small potatoes, but it was unusually violent for Ann Arbor and caused much consternation (and a beefed-up law enforcement presence for the championship game on Monday).
Now the University considered the Hash Bash, held in the heart of campus, to be an embarrassment, and had begun to try to prevent the event through a variety of heavy-handed methods. The following year, they tried to argue in court that the campus was trashed because of all the Grateful Dead fans and Hash Bash attendees, and this justified denying a permit for the legalization rally - or failing that, charging a prohibitive fee as a deposit against any potential security costs or damage. Somehow drunken sports fans were not deemed by the University's lawyers a significant factor in the trashing of the near-campus bar district. Must have been those Deadheads in town early... reefer madness, right?
Eventually the university found better things to do with their money than waste it on lawyers getting laughed out of court doing battle with NORML...
poster:caraher
thread:866728
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20081115/msgs/868145.html