By Mickey Friedman
June 1, 2014
If you want to know what’s wrong with us these days, take a look at the Berkshire Eagle of May 13th. There’s a big two-page story atop The Berkshires, Section B, about a Pittsfield guy. The headline: “Man allegedly accepts pot parcel.”
The Berkshire County Drug Task Force was at his apartment after he took delivery of a parcel addressed to someone who lived there. A package sent via the U.S. Mail, police and prosecutors said, “that the officers knew contained twenty-two pounds of marijuana.”
Big news. Then there’s a story about one-fourth its size on Page 3 about two new climate studies: “West Antarctic ice sheet beginning alarming collapse.”
So you’ve got your box filled with marijuana and then you’ve got your melting ice sheet, the oceans rising ten feet, and the end as we know it of Miami, Manhattan, and a whole bunch of low-lying nations.
Clearly, The Eagle knows news when they see it. “Man allegedly accepts pot parcel” is not only a fascinating story, but an important story. Because, well because, twenty-two pounds of marijuana is enough to … actually I don’t really know? Cause a million times more damage than twenty-two bottles of vodka? More harm than twenty-two vials of oxycontin? Is a major threat to public safety?
But, even if you’ve never inhaled, you know how important this is because the judge let the guy go after he posted $250 in bail.
Don’t get me wrong, I know that pot can be a problem. But we humans have indulged in one drug after another from Day One. Life is hard. One man drinks; another smokes. In America we take Valium; in the Andes they chew leaves. As for me, I no longer drink or smoke pot. But in my experience wherever people be, and whatever they’re taking, it’s all for pretty much the same reason: to ease the pain.
I’m not sure why but in America you can walk into a liquor store just about anywhere and walk out with enough whiskey to kill yourself and others, yet the idea of smoking pot makes some people nuts. Personally, I’ve been around enough alcoholics to have come to the conclusion that they’re a hell of a lot more dangerous, to themselves and the rest of us, than potheads. Especially behind the wheel.
In Massachusetts, there were 12,941 Driving Under the Influence arrests in 2013. In Indiana, 23,475. In Florida 61,852. And in California, 214,828.
Of the 32,885 traffic fatalities in the US in 2010, 10,228 involved the abuse of alcohol.
By the way, that same year, 15,990 Americans died from alcoholic liver disease.
Sadly in 2010, 38,329 people died as a result of a drug overdose: with 22,000 involving prescription drugs. 74% were accidental overdoses and 17% were suicides. In 2010, 50,907 people died of the flu and pneumonia but none, zero, from marijuana.
To me this is ultimately a human health issue. It’s easy to be sanctimonious. As if we ever truly appreciate another’s pain. When I used to get migraine headaches, especially the worst of them, the pain was so intense I wished for perpetual sleep. Who am I to judge if you need several glasses of red wine to forget about work and remember how much you care about your family?
But truly, this pot story pales in importance beside the melting ice.
According to the New York Times version of the story: “This is really happening,” Thomas P. Wagner emphasized. He runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research. “There’s nothing to stop it now.” It won’t happen overnight, or even over-decade, but the warming waters “upwelling” from the depths of the ocean have “most likely triggered an inherent instability that makes the West Antarctic ice sheet vulnerable to a slow-motion collapse.”
Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, added that a “continued release of greenhouse gases will almost certainly make the situation worse. The heat-trapping gases could destabilize other parts of Antarctica as well as the Greenland ice sheet, causing enough sea-level rise that many of the world’s coastal cities would eventually have to be abandoned.”
The most recent and always measured U.S. Government Climate Assessment declared: “Global climate is changing and this change is apparent across a wide range of observations. The global warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human activities …”
“U.S. average temperature has increased by 1.3°F to 1.9°F since record keeping began in 1895; most of this increase has occurred since about 1970. The most recent decade was the nation’s warmest on record. Temperatures in the United States are expected to continue to rise …”
Now I’m not a climate scientist and what I don’t understand overshadows the little I do. But things are getting worse far faster than we imagined. And just possibly the Berkshire Eagle, while pushing the pot, has missed the point.
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For more information:
http://www.statisticbrain.com/number-of-dui-arrests-per-state/
http://www.economicsjunkie.com/annual-drug-related-deaths-in-the-us-marijuana-ranks-last-with-zero/
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