Media Watch

On the next Wise Guys, we'll have Office of Drug Control Policy Director, Marv Van Haaften, DNE Director, Ken Carter and Ms. Janet Zwick with the Iowa Department of Health, who will educate us on the negative effects of pot on our society.  We'll extol the virtues of our drug laws and the state's efforts to clean the scum off the streets. I don't do drugs. Well, not the illegal kind anyway. I've been known to crack open a Bud Light while barbecuing on the deck, but there's no law against that and I don't abuse it. Come to think of it, if pot were legal, who's to say I wouldn't light up once in a while -- and not abuse it either. Hence comes NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws). This national lobby says there's nothing fundamentally wrong with occasional and responsible marijuana use by adults and for medicinal purposes -- and they don't believe those particular kinds of uses should be against the law.

Everywhere we look, there's hostility on the airwaves and in the newspapers and on the net. The left blast the Whitehouse for hastily assembling a case for war against the former Iraqi regime and the right squabash 'dems' for their apparent distrust. In my view, both sides are full of hot air. I think citizens are, for the most part, very careful to measure the sensational words they hear and read, and are willing to drill down to the literal meaning of these contrasting statements. For instance, one story cited that a majority of Germans think the US staged the September 11 attacks. But when you get to the exact verbage, you learn that a few Germans believe it's "possible" that Americans "could have" been behind the assault on our soil. When you put it that way, you would have to either be naive or have full faith that no one in our country could possibly benefit from such action. The truth is that people everywhere do bad and nasty things.