Bill O’Reilly, a Famous Cannabis Critic, Lashes Out at Cannabis Critics

I wrote
Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use to debunk the
purported moral distinction between the psychoactive substances
that Congress has decided to ban and the psychoactive substances
that remain legal. As I discovered when I discussed the book
on The O’Reilly Factor several years ago, that show’s
host also does a pretty good job of showing how specious this
distinction is, although not on purpose. O’Reilly was at it again
last night, blowing a gasket
over The Denver Post‘s
hiring of a marijuana editor. Although the editor, Ricardo
Baca, will oversee a wide range of marijuana-related coverage,
including the ins and outs of transforming a
countercultural symbol into a capitalist commodity, what really
offended O’Reilly was Baca’s plan to hire a cannabis critic:

The Denver Post has actually hired an editor to
promote pot. Think about this. The only reason you use weed,
outside of a medical situation, is to intoxicate yourself. And of
course that can lead to bad things: DUI, the use of harder
drugs…They’re promoting marijuana use!…

They’re hiring a critic who is going to have to ingest marijuana
and tell everybody what’s the best intoxicant to use….If you have
teenagers, do you want them to read where the best pot is in the
state?…

They’re going to tell you what the best bud is…where to buy it,
how to prune it, how to roll it. This is promoting the use of an
intoxicant by The Denver Post! 

When Fox News analyst Juan Williams noted that marijuana is
legal in Colorado and drew an analogy to wine reviews, O’Reilly was
puzzled. “That’s not an intoxication deal, is it?” he asked. “You
can drink wine without getting inebriated.”

Well, that depends what you mean by “inebriated.” Wine drinking
is indeed “an intoxication deal,” in the sense that one of the
things people like about wine is the psychoactive effect of the
alcohol. Nonalcoholic wines do exist, but they are far less popular
than the real thing. And the idea that drinkers experience degrees
of intoxication, while marijuana consumers do not, has no basis in
reality.

Explaining such matters to O’Reilly is like addressing an
extraterrestrial who not only has never consumed an intoxicant but
cannot comprehend why humans might want to do so. This
extraterrestrial also does not know that newspapers carry reviews
of alcoholic beverages and of the establishments that serve them,
along with intructions for making such drinks at home:

Shouldn’t they hire a booze columnist…to say, “Look, this is the
best way to get high”? “Here we can drink Bailey’s, or we can drink
gin. Here’s how you mix it.”…Why don’t you just set it up like,
“Here’s the bar in Denver where you can get the cheapest chasers
and the most gin for your money?”

Although a drink featuring gin and Bailey’s does not sound very
appealing, it is simply bizarre that O’Reilly thinks publishing
cocktail recipes would be so reckless and socially irresponsible
that no reputable periodical would ever do so. O’Reilly displays a
similar cluelessness when he deems it “absurd” that The Denver
Post does not want its employees to smoke pot at work
“even though we have a marijuana critic and we’re going to tell you
where to get the best bud.” Presumably he also would consider it
ridiculously inconsistent for a newspaper that reviews beer, wine,
or distilled spirits to ask its employees not to drink on the job.
But the rest of us can only scratch our heads at the derangement
caused by attempts to defend the arbitrary lines drawn by our drug
laws.

[via
The Huffington Post]