Here’s the Anti-Marijuana Tract Some Lady Gave My 3-Year-Old Trick-or-Treater

Last night, my daughter’s school had a little pre-Halloween
parade. She’s 3. She was wearing a pink tutu. A nice-looking older
lady was standing on the parade route handing out baggies of candy
to the army of Elsas and Iron Men, none of whom were older than 9
or 10. When we got home, I checked out her spoils (though
not because I was afraid of razor blades or poison). This is
what I found:

That’s right, it’s a 24-page anti-marijuana tract in a baggie
with some bribery candy. Which someone thought would be appropriate
to hand out to elementary school kids.

Luckily, my daughter can’t read. But plenty of the kids at her
school can. (Or at least I hope so.) And if they cracked open this
booklet while munching on Bit o’ Honeys, here’s what they would
have found: 

And this: 

The last page of the tract says that “millions of copies of
booklets such as this have been distributed to people around the
world in 22 languages.” The publisher is the Foundation for a
Drug-Free World, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit. 

Naturally, I went to the Google to figure out what the heck was
going on. Short answer: It looks like Scientology dressed up
as a drug warrior this Halloween.

You can read a little more about the Foundation for a Drug-Free
World in their own words on an official Scientology
site here,
or on Wikipedia here.
But essentially the organization is a way to grab people with
substance abuse problems and funnel them into Narconon, which
promotes L. Ron Hubbard’s
rather unorthodox views about addiction.

There’s nothing wrong with giving kids a little age-appropriate
information about drugs, and this lady was well within her rights
to hand out these pamphlets on a public street. I’m more than happy
to provide counter-propaganda in the form of Jacob Sullum’s
oeuvre when the time is right. But it’s unlikely the
well-meaning parade organizers would smile upon their Halloween
festivities being used as a Scientology recruitment ground.

Yet no one thought to question her. Why? Probably because, to
their eyes, she looked like an obvious good guy. Marijuana’s legal
status may be changing, but she was doling out materials more or
less identical to what will be foisted on kids during official
school activities for the rest of their lives. We’ve become so numb
to outrageous anti-drug scaremongering that someone can hand a
3-year-old ballerina a booklet with stories about people dying of
cancer and teachers urging kids to use heroin and no one bats an
eye. 

Scary.