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(Re: “The truth-teller,” cover story, April 30.) I wanted to read the Bill Maher interview, but after Dale Bridges wasted three paragraphs telling me that people were likely to read it (letting me know along the way that he was likely to “screw it up”), and then added 10 more paragraphs about Samuel Clemens, I gave up and turned the page. You know how to screw up an interview with Bill Maher, Dale? Don’t write about Bill Maher.
Bruce Schoenfeld/Boulder
No-talent clowns
(Re: “Best reason not to bitch about the snow,” Best of Boulder, April 30.) Really?! What snow do you refer to? The trace of snow two days after the fire was contained? I guess I’ll just have to believe that the drivel that shows up on the pages of this newspaper is on the pages when the paper company delivers the papers — or we’d actually have to give someone some credit.
Way to alienate every emergency-service provider in the county, you no-talent clowns!
Mat Wood/via Internet
Why pot is illegal
(Re: “Pot reactions,” letters, April 30.) I read a letter to the editor recently about legalizing pot, in which a proponent said there is no research done on pot because the government has made it illegal. Not true.
I wrote an extensive research report in college on marijuana, and I found out they did do a lot of research on it. They gave it to chimpanzees. The chimps were allowed constant access to it and food and water. They would smoke it, then sit and be high, and eat, and be happy. No addiction. When the same experiment was done with cocaine, the chimps constantly took the coke without eating. Same with heroin and cigarettes. The heroin they would take until they died — coke, close to it. Pot they took occasionally, when they felt like it. They don’t need to do research on pot because they have already proven it is not addictive.
There has never been a car accident that resulted from smoking pot. Newspapers will often say the driver was smoking pot to make it look like the cause, but with further reading you find he was also drinking or doing other drugs.
Marijuana was made illegal because Dupont created a new fiber, Nylon, which they felt was perfect for the shipping industry’s ropes and sails. Unfortunately, that was already being taken care of with hemp rope and sail fabric. So, to get rid of competition, Dupont’s nephew Andrew Mellon was put in charge of a new government agency called the Drug Enforcement Agency. They used propaganda and favors in the Food and Drug Administration to make marijuana illegal, which made hemp illegal — although most people at the time didn’t know that hemp and marijuana were the same thing. So, now the shipping and boating industries use the shorter-lived Nylon ropes and sails, instead of the tried and true long-lasting hemp, and no one can smoke pot anymore legally except medical patients. How rude!
Liz Brix/Boulder
The real reason why the feds want marijuana to be illegal is because pot smokers are more interested in seeking truth than participating in a war.
Arthur Sharp/via Internet
We need habit reform
What with all the debate focusing on health-care accessibility/affordability/efficacy, (the options of privatized plans versus some kind of nationalized equivalent of Medicare and never mind the relatively lousy outcomes of the world’s most expensive care-delivery system), we seem to be majorly overlooking some very germane issues. What I’m talking about is the fact that the most important predictors of one’s health have to do with lifestyle choices (i.e., don’t smoke, overeat, under exercise, leave your seatbelt unbuckled, etc.), as well as with age, attitude, gender and genes.
Accessibility is important, if for no other reason than it ideally promotes and educates us about our personal responsibilities for our own wellbeing. But said accessibility does not in and of itself miraculously assure good health. Furthermore, I think we have unrealistic expectations of what exogenously delivered care can accomplish while we endogenously inflict all sorts of insults on our physical and psychological selves. And we assiduously avert our eyes not only from mortality, but also from the inevitability of aging and declining — events that all the health-care accessibility available cannot offset.
Which is not to say that the idea of universal health care should be dismissed. It’s the financing that’s the sticky wicket here. A federally (i.e., taxpayer) funded system would necessitate some hard choices. For starters, issues of what constitutes “futile care” would surely surface. Frail elderly patients could be sacrificed for the greater fiscal good. (On the other hand, they could be spared burdensome and useless treatments.) So we as a nation need to carefully scrutinize what it is we want to do about assuring ourselves of optimum health — both physically as well as fiscally. And we need to understand that most of what constitutes good health is a matter of personal responsibility. We can’t just turf it off to the government.
June Warwick/Boulder
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