Fearmonger Of The Week: Barbara Boyer
It was the lede that made a thousand heads scratchy, and in a week full of consterningly (is that a word?) dumb news stories, it easily took the cake:
A potent type of marijuana known as AK47 - so strong that some users have been treated in emergency rooms for overdoses - has hit the Philadelphia area.
The stinklines of inanity were stronger than the weed itself. First off, AK47 has been embedded in the stoner culture for years now, making the Inky’s Barbara Boyer’s lede about a City Line drug bust smack a bit of Furlongery. But that wasn’t the half of it: Emergency rooms? Overdosing? On weed? Are you fucking serious? Blogs far and wide took note, and laughed heartily. But at the core of all this was something more disturbing: While you can pretty much count on television news to indulge in fearmongering and misinformation, it still stings when your local paper of record does. In this case, the Inquirer, who really oughta know better at this point than to regurgitate apocryphal, damn-nigh impossible weed stories just because someone utters them at a press conference. Or maybe not. We wanted to give Babs the benefit of the doubt, really we did, so we emailed her and asked: Is this for real?
We never heard back. So we can only infer, Ms. Boyer, that this is your story and you’re sticking to it. Good luck with that, m’lady, and enjoy your reign. For without your mongering, we’d all be at least one smile/awful pang light.
November 30th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
I overdosed on weed once, real talk. I couldn’t move my limbs and I broke out in this strange rubbing-alcohol like sweat. I couldn’t move for an hour. Fortunately I had just put on a Candi Staton record and between moments of totally freaking out I enjoyed that enormously. But I have been unable to listen to it since…
November 30th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
the closest i ever came to overdosing on weed was where the 101 drops into the 110 in l.a. this kid who we called jason verve (because he was so retardedly obsessed richard ashcroft and because they were seriously 12 jasons in our group of people out there) had pure THC. the kid had become our, like, only-when-ya-have-to go-to-guy because he seriously wouldn’t shut the fuck up about richard ashcroft and how he once worked for whichever label the verve were on the UK. i was on my way to the studio and stopped by to get weed and he was like “hey, i got some pure THC”, and i was like “do ya now?” so we smoked before i split and right where the 101 merges with the 110, i swear, it was like someone dosed me with the ‘roin. i was like, “dude, i’m melting into the steering wheel, but wait! i’m driving straight like i just banged a totem pole!” to be sure, you can’t fucking o.d. on weed. the most you can get is close to feeling like you might if you accidentally tooted some h bomb in the cokey proxy. and my that i mean like a fingernail line. where like, some heroin dude thinks its funny to watch coked up kids throw up and get mopey.
December 1st, 2007 at 7:38 pm
Damned if Valania didn’t try to transform that link into gratuitous uniques and page views.