Tommyrot
I have to call bullshit on this.
Here’s the deal. Michael Phelps is no hero. He’s an excellent swimmer, that’s all. He gave a record-setting performance at the Beijing Olympics… in swimming. That does not make him a great American, a great scholar, nor even necessarily a great person. As far as I can tell, he’s good at just one thing: swimming. Of course, he’s very, very good at that.
Beyond that, who knows. I won’t get into the rumours about his personality or attitude outside the pool. I’ve never met the man. But it’s pretty clear that aside from his natatorial prowess he’s simply your typical twenty-something male, and as such he likes to party sometimes.
Okay, so given what he potentially has to lose — untold millions in endorsement contracts — it was stupid of him to put himself in a situation where he could be photographed doing something compromising by someone untrustworthy who’d sell him out for a few thousand bucks.
Finally — finally! — we have someone prominent, successful, and (ahem) white, a real Champion of America, who did not apologise for smoking pot. Who did not make vague imprecations about drug problems or rehab. Who, as far as all the quotes imply, only apologised for “behavior which was regrettable and demonstrated bad judgement.” In other words, he’s sorry for allowing that jerk to take his picture.
But here’s where I call bullshit. Amid all the discussion in the press — one dominated by calls, from a wide range of political factions, to reconsider the United States’ failed drug policy with regard to marijuana — comes a new report: “Could smoking pot raise testicular cancer risk?”
Are you fucking kidding me? Are the powers that be — the DEA, Big Pharma, and Big Tobacco — so desperate as that? This study, trotted out yesterday in the journal Cancer, hot on the heels of the Phelps controversy, is tentative, preliminary, and inconclusive. The researches think they see a correlation between chronic pot use and testicular cancer, but the CNN article at least fails to compare the risk factor with that of having an undescended testicle, which is far greater.
In fact, one co-author — way down at the bottom of the CNN article, long after the photo of that lumpy blunt has engrained the thought of a similarly lumpy and blackened nutsack in the reader’s mind — says, “The bottom line is that I would not start warning my marijuana smokers that they are going to get testicular cancer. I don’t think there’s enough here to go forward with that message, at least not yet.”
So even the CNN article calls bullshit on itself! But all it takes is that fucking question mark in the headline to obviate any need for results that back the hypothesis.
In short, we have: a famous athlete, whom some (not I) would call a national hero, who allegedly smokes pot; a sudden surge of people publicly questioning whether that’s such a bad thing; and, as a result, a quickie response that all but says, “if you smoke pot, your nuts will rot.”
