Renewed interest in Obama’s ‘youthful indiscretions’?

November 21, 2007

Way back in January, the Washington Post ran a front-page piece documenting Barack Obama’s admitted experimentation with drugs as a teenager. The 1,300-word piece didn’t exactly break new ground, but the article concluded that Obama’s “bad choices, including drug use starting in high school and ending in college … are sure to receive new scrutiny.”

The political world responded with a collective yawn. Obama had not only acknowledged drug use three decades ago, he wrote about it extensively in an autobiography. Unanswered questions pique reporters’ interest; already-answered questions are a lot less interesting. No one on either side of the aisle found any of this compelling, and the issue has barely been a blip on the radar since.

That is, until someone in New Hampshire asked Obama about it yesterday, sparking a new round of media interest.

Barack Obama candidly discussed his youthful drinking and drug use with high school students Tuesday, prompting at least one teen to conclude that such experimentation won’t automatically ruin a young person’s future.

After delivering a policy address on education at Manchester Central High School, Obama chatted with students in a classroom, where a school staffer asked the Illinois senator to talk about his high school memories.

“I made some bad decisions that I’ve actually written about,” he said. “There were times when I, you know, got into drinking, experimented with drugs. There was a whole stretch of time where I didn’t really apply myself a lot.”

Obama explained that he “got really serious” in college, realized he wasted his time in high school, and began to get himself on track. “In fact, I was so serious that my mother told me to lighten up, because I’d become a complete grind — fortunately over time I got a little balanced,” he said.

The audience seemed to appreciate Obama’s honesty and willingness to be candid about his youthful mistakes. But Mitt Romney wasn’t impressed, calling Obama’s remarks a “huge mistake.”

“It’s just not a good idea for people running for president of the United States, who potentially could be the role model for a lot of people, to talk about their personal failings while they were kids, because it opens the doorway to other kids thinking, ‘Well I can do that too,'” Romney said.

Please. Are we really going to make this race about what candidates did as teenagers 35 years ago? What would Romney have Obama do, lie to students and school officials about things he’s already written about?

For that matter, by Romney’s logic, George W. Bush must be the worst president of all time, because no one could possibly be a worse role model — goof off through high school, goof off through college, experiment with drugs, become an alcoholic, get arrested, lie about getting arrested, fail in one venture after another, basically coast through life while relying on a famous last name through his 40s … and then seek high public office. And Romney’s worried that Obama might not be a good role model?

I’m actually at a loss to understand why the media jumped on this story at all yesterday. I suppose reporters occasionally need something new to talk about, but I kind of thought we’d moved past “youthful indiscretions.” Indeed, Obama’s admissions show a certain political maturity on the nation’s part — most Americans simply no longer care what presidential candidates did as teenagers.

The really interesting response, however, came from Rudy Giuliani, who was far more forgiving than Romney.

During a campaign stop in Chicago, Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani was asked if he thought Obama’s comments to the students were appropriate. “I respect his honesty,” Giuliani said.

“One of the things that we need from our people that are running for office is not this pretense of perfection,” said Giuliani, who has faced questions about his own personal life marked by three marriages and estrangement from his two children. He said of the candidates, “we’re all human beings.”

That’s a smart line to take, given Giuliani’s personal scandals. If Obama’s personal activities as a high-school student are on the table, Giuliani might as well drop out now.

That said, isn’t it a little unfair for Giuliani to suggest his mistakes are comparable to Obama’s? After all, Obama experimented with drugs while in high school. Giuliani’s personal scandals include marching in a parade with his mistress at age 56.

Part of dismissing “youthful indiscretions” is the understanding that they happened during someone’s youth.

Obama did the right thing here; demonstrating that it is possible for someone to screw up, acknowledge the screw-up, and then “pull one’s self up by the bootstraps.” Mittens pokes fun at it because it’s something that he won’t be able to deal with come next year. Besides—after the backroom dishonesty we’ve been suffocating under, due to the Great Big Neocon Experiment called Bu$h, a healthy dose of honest candor is well-deserved….

  • Guiliani is an example of Americans’ extended adolescence. It is a quality he shares with the current president.

  • What would Romney have Obama do, lie to students. . .?

    Of course. That would be proper role modeling for growing up a modern Republican. Because that great big “R” after the name also stands for Repression.

  • I’m actually at a loss to understand why the media jumped on this story at all yesterday. I suppose reporters occasionally need something new to talk about, but I kind of thought we’d moved past “youthful indiscretions.”

    After the big tease by Novak this weekend, they were so excited they just had to jump on something. Consider it a case of journalistic blue balls;>

    Happy thanksgiving.

  • I think calling drug use “bad choices” is a mistake.

    There certainly are a lot of people who like to pretend to the contrary, but *lots* of people use drugs. The pretenders accept that if you use drugs you automatically turn into a Hells Angel, but the fact is something like 40 or 50 % of American teenagers and adults use drugs on occasion. Now, if it really was such a big problem, they’d all be of the skid row, hitting people with cars while high, weeping in a street gutter and begging God to finally save them while wearing Salvation Army clothes and track-marks down the lengths of their arms, variety of drug users. Instead, there just isn’t that many people like that out there– even though lots of the nations drug users live out in the suburbs, where so many of us live. If the drug users really were all like this, then we have to admit, we’d being seeing a lot of this behavior when we go about our business driving around the suburbs every day- but we don’t. At the jobs and internships I’ve had (many), I’ve known many people who had their acts together, were able to hold down their jobs and interact with other people very well, and hear them discuss their drug use, or set up dates to smoke some pot with friends. Plenty of houses in my neighborhood are places you can walk by and smell pot smoke coming out of every once in a while, and none of them are houses that are sold frequently, or where I’ve ever seen the cops show up, or seen broken windows, or seen bunches of kids hanging out on the porch, or seen wrecked cars, or anything like that. They are the houses of people with regular jobs who probably started smoking pot in high school and still bought it once a month or a few times a year. (Granted, I’ve known of a few houses that were hangouts for gangstery teenagers who smoked a lot of pot and sold a lot of drugs or all kinds, and were mixed up in crime, but that’s beside the point).

    In America, using pot can turn into a problem for the young just like using alcohol can turn into a problem for the young. But just like Europe has less problems with alcohol abuse than America does, I think America’s problems with pot, a basically harmless drug, have more to do with our culture than they do with the drug. People who use pot sometimes but who hold down jobs and don’t cause any harm to other people are productive citizens who should not be hunted down by the rest of us. Marijuana use can enhance a person’s life. A lot of the stuff people were taught in high school about pot- that it will make your sex organs shrink or that it will cause you to grow hair in the wrong places or that it will make you wander out into the street into oncoming traffic- were lies. If pot were really so bad, Amsterdam would be like South Central L.A. or Compton.

    It would be interesting to see what it would be like if a state could experiment with legalized marijuana, because my guess is that if it wasn’t so tightly controlled that you could only get it in one or two bars in the whole state- that is, if people could sell it out of their houses like they do now- it would have a positive effect on the society of the state, and lots of people would move there. Probably just the fact of having legalized pot would reform a lot of people away from being petty criminals because being allowed to smoke pot freely would be the last bit of incentive they need to hold down a job and stay out of trouble so they can stay out of jail.

    Talking so nasty about pot is just classest and wrong.

  • Talk about the extreme fantasy that drug use is a big sin– it’s just part of the racist fantasy in the U.S.

    Anybody who smokes just a little pot once a week on a Sunday, I guarantee you it will cause no problems in their life and probably will make them happier and improve their relationships with people.

  • I personally don’t want a president whose morals I have to question while in office. You could argue that Obama’s morality today isn’t in question and showing that a person can get back on track is a good message. However, I think Mitt is right to be concerned about role models who are too ready to show their faults. Like the writer, I am way more concerned about this line of reasoning being applied to Rudy than to Obama, but does Obama open that door when he talks about his past? The public doesn’t generally take time to explore nuance. If we look at Obama and say “hey, he’s human” then we risk doing the same thing with Giuliani and others. You may not agree with me but I think there are examplary leaders out there who have not done drugs or had questionable family issues. Is it too much to ask that we stop calling such people robots or too good to be true and say that such moral character may indicate a person’s character overall?

  • I think calling drug use “bad choices” is a mistake. -Swan

    I believe he is calling drug abuse a bad choice, and isn’t getting into the reasons he made those choices. Using drugs as a crutch to escape the condition of one’s life is different than smoking “just a little pot once a week on a Sunday,” for enjoyment.

    If I remember correctly from his book, Obama is also not just talking about marijuana, which it seems your defense of drug use is predicated on.

    You should also tell your ‘friends’ who are toking up on Sunday afternoon, that it is still a crime with mandatory federal sentencing and a criminal enterprise backing it’s distribution that has resulted in the deaths of many innocent and guilty people.

  • Not that I like Giuliani in the least, but I feel I have to stick up for him on principle.

    First, he didn’t suggest anything about his own mistakes, and he certainly didn’t compare them to Obama’s mistakes, at least not in the quote I see.

    Second, I haven’t really seen Giuliani campaigning as any sort of “family values candidate”. Given that, it’s unfair to keep hammering him for his many personal indiscretions. Maybe I’m wrong on this point and I haven’t paid close enough attention.

    Third, his response was exactly the right one.

    Be more careful about whom you mark a hypocrite because I think the real point of this all gets lost – that past personal lives shouldn’t matter, regardless of what party you’re from. No candidate ought to pull the “holier than thou” card on what other candidates did 35 years ago before and have since

    If anything the candidate who deserves scrutiny based on his comments is Romney, not Giuliani. But I fear that, with a Mormon background his personal history is likely to be squeaky clean.

    As opposed to Giuliani, Romney is exactly wrong. The message should never be that your life is necessarily and automatically ruined if you do something wrong. That is a horrible, horrible message to send to people. Something about stones and glass houses comes to mind. The right message is that making mistakes will not necessarily and completely ruin your life.

    The right message is what Giuliani emphasized: we are all human and we all make mistakes, honesty about past mistakes is highly admirable, and pretenses of perfection (like Romney’s) are just plain awful.

    The person we really should be taking to task is Romney. His quote is by far the worst I can recall hearing in this election.

  • Oops, that paragraph in the previous post should say:

    Be more careful about whom you mark a hypocrite because I think the real point of this all gets lost – that past personal lives shouldn’t matter, regardless of what party you’re from. No candidate ought to pull the “holier than thou” card on what other candidates did 35 years ago before and have since apologized for or repented of. It’s great that Obama is no longer a drug addict. And it should be a testament not only to America but to also to Christian tolerance and principle that Obama can get over his addiction and become a US Senator and a serious contender for the Presidency. Seriously, what happened to that once-great Christian principle of forgiveness of sin and that other once-great American principle of the second chance? I can’t help but think that no Republican candidate embodies family values nearly as well as Obama does – that the real family values candidate in this race is Obama.

  • If you think Obama’s story of using drugs and alcohol too much in high school and then becoming serious in college is a bad one (I guarantee, you will be able to find many good lawyers with the same story), read something about Andrew Jackson. He was like a 19th century, presidential version of Axl Rose. Conservatives who don’t really know anything about him may think they like him because he fought a lot of Native Americans or something, but he certainly tore up the town as a young man. Imagine a more rock ‘n’ roll George W. Bush. Or imagine having The Animal from Jim Henson’s Muppets as the President.

    Also, during the time of the founding of our nation, drinking alcohol every day was a much more common practice in England and the United States. They didn’t have any Coca-Cola or V-8. The Founding Fathers, who some conservative put up on a fictionalized pedestal, often attracted voters to the polling place on election day by making available huge barrels of fermented cider. Voting and public politics in general had a more festive, jolly air in the past than today (imagine how there used to be badnstands at political debates- that type of thing) and not always the holier-than-thou exercise it so much is today.

    doubtful wrote:

    “I believe he is calling drug abuse a bad choice, ”

    I am talking about the WaPo piece CB excerpts at the beginning of his article that claims that drug use in high school and college is a bad choice, not anything Obama said.

    I definitely think using drugs too much (drug abuse) is bad, but that using drugs a little bit probably for most people can make their lives happier. I think the problem is, since drugs are illegal/taboo, the people who end up being most likely to use drugs in our society end up also being the people who are most likely to abuse them, which is why probably more people who are involved in car accidents, drop out of high school, or lose their jobs are drug users than there are drug users in the general population.

    Also I think people shouldn’t smoke pot before they drive, but I have known a lot of pot users for a very long time and I have to say that the idea of pot contributing to car accidents is very exagerrated, even if it is safer to avoid combining toking and driving altogether.

    My main point is that drug abuse does not lead to bad results as often as people claim it does and that drug abuse itself (as opposed to mere drug use, but not use so frequent that it becomes a danger or harms a person’s life) is not as pervasive as people claim it is.

    I would make pot legal for individuals to sell under no regulations, and leave regulating it for later, if problems arise that make the regulation necessary. I would focus on public relations campaigns that discourage people from smoking pot more thatn 1/2/3 times a week, and encourage people to smoke pot with friends (rather than alone) and in a positive environment / context

    Drugs like cocaine, speed, opium, and heroin, if I had to give a quick answer, I would say are just too dangerous and it wouldn’t be a bad trade if they were legal only for medical purposes.

    LSD I think needs to be studied, but my guess is that if it was highly regulated (content and use regulated, and only sold through a couple bars in a state, for examples) and very frequent use discouraged or outlawed, legalization would be a good idea.

  • “You should also tell your ‘friends’ who are toking up on Sunday afternoon, that it is still a crime with mandatory federal sentencing and a criminal enterprise backing it’s distribution that has resulted in the deaths of many innocent and guilty people.” ~Doubtful

    Prude!

    Oh, whatever. If you want to adopt this attitude of moral sanctity over everyone else, then you can go on to heaven by yourself. If it’s full of self-righteous debby downers like yourself, I’d rather not go.

    Oh, and marijuana laws are generally not federally indicted, unless you’re sitting on several pounds that are crossing a state line.

    As far as Obama’s drug use, at least he’s willing to expand his consciousness, a theory that is dead to most White American Males. Yet, we’re (Americans) able to pump our bodies full of things that bring us up, make us sleep, make us horny, make us eat, or make us skinny so long as it has a label from a major medical company and a prime time commercial. What a crock of shit.

  • Right now, I don’t smoke any pot because it’s illegal. If it was legal, I’d probably smoke pot a few times a year. I discourage anyone else from smoking pot or doing other drugs because if you get in trouble for it, it can ruin your life.

    If you want to smoke pot you should go to Amsterdam & get it there & do it there. You should smoke a little bit, just share a joint or two with a few friends, and then go out for a walk, or listen to some music. You shouldn’t sit around smoking bowls all day from a hookah, because smoking too much pot can be a drag just like drinking too much can be a drag. If you drink 2-4 beers, you can probably be happy, but if you get up into the rang of drinking a six-pack or more (and especially if you’re not a physically heavy male or an experienced drinker) it can get to being just an idiotic macho exercise. Also probably smoking pot too often can make it less fun than if you smoked it less.

    I don’t know whether or not LSD is legal in Amsterdam and I’m not sure I’d recommend using it. I think LSD can be a life-altering experience and you can’t really know how it’s going to be life-altering or what to expect unless you’ve done it. For instance, when I was a youth, I used to have a very strong sense of ambience- a family’s kitchen/dining room feeling like a very happy, homey place every time you visited it, or a particular holiday feeling a certain way, for example. I used LSD as a teenager and my perception of ambience noticably and strongly diminished after I used LSD. I think it’s come back to some extent over the years, but it was a real downer for a long time. LSD is in other ways a really interesting experience, but it is because of negatives like the for-instance I just offered that I wouldn’t encourage LSD use by anyone.

  • For most adults, those “youthful indiscretions” really are something they committed because they’ were young, foolish, and had no idea where they were headed or that they might even regret them as adults. Sounds to me as if Obama handled it quite well.

    Is Mitt Romney saying he committed no youthful indiscretions and led a perfect life? Maybe somebody oughta’ check that out… As an adult, he’s certainly stupid and cruel in his care for animals:

    …in 1983, Romney — according to The Boston Globe — put the family dog in a dog carrier and attached it to his car’s roof.

    And as for Bush, his current day “indiscretions” are far worse for the young to witness than learning about his youthful ones, the lying, authorizing illegal wars, torture, and utterly failing at fulfilling his adult responsibilities. Who’s to say some won’t say, “I want to be JUST like GW Bush when I grow up”, rather than wanting to be like someone who dealt with kid-stuff and became a responsible adult.

  • Also if you ever smoke pot, it might not do anything to you when you smoke it for the first time. That’s pretty common. First time, I would try a joint, maybe share it with some people, and if you still seem to feel the same, try it again the next day, and you will probably have a nice experience. If you are new to it you could probably smoke up in Amsterdam, go sight see and read some books, and then come back to smoke a joint or two in Amsterdam every three days or so when the weather out is nice, and have a nice vacation. If it rains and you want to smoke stay inside the bar and watch it from inside.

    Also, if you smoke and drink, it will probably make you throw up. A lot of people smoke and drink together, but this is because they are experienced at smoking + drinking, so they have a tolerance to it. You get to the point where you’re not that happy unless you’re both smoking + drinking, if you do them a lot. But for most people who haven’t mixed them much before, smoking pot and drinking together makes you much more likely to get sick. And listening to music while you combine them is the worst. Also, some music is more likely make you throw up than other music. I think smoking pot + drinking + listening to the Nirvana Teen Spirit album is the worst. Even if you think a particular type of music is really neat when you’re totally straight, it might really screw you up when you’re combining pot smoke and alcohol. So if you go to Amsterdam to smoke pot for your first time, just don’t combine smoking and drinking at all.

    The best thing to do when you smoke pot is to engage your senses. Go for a nice walk (enjoy the weather or architecture) or listen to some music, which is really a different experience when you smoke pot. Things you usually don’t notice too much will really strike you in a new way when you’re stoned. It’s not so much a thing for sitting around and talking with friends, like alcohol is. Playing video games or watching a video are also pretty good. Reading a book is probably not so good.

  • Prude! -Grinning

    Am I a prude because I believe that following the law is the right thing to do or because I don’t support an enterprise that benefits career criminals and causes the deaths of so many people?

    Oh, whatever. If you want to adopt this attitude of moral sanctity over everyone else, then you can go on to heaven by yourself. If it’s full of self-righteous debby downers like yourself, I’d rather not go. -Grinning

    I’m only advocating following the law and not supporting criminals. How does that translate into an ‘attitude of moral sanctity?’ I took no position in my previous post about decrminalization. As it stands now, can you find anything not true in the portion of my comment you quoted?

    Yet, we’re (Americans) able to pump our bodies full of things that bring us up, make us sleep, make us horny, make us eat, or make us skinny so long as it has a label from a major medical company and a prime time commercial. -Grinning

    For what it’s worth, I don’t support use of those drugs in many cases, either. I think our medical industry has the wrong priorities.

    If using drugs has led you to make trollish, insulting comments with no basis in fact or logic, I would suggest you cut back.

  • Anney wrote:

    For most adults, those “youthful indiscretions” really are something they committed because they’ were young, foolish, and had no idea where they were headed or that they might even regret them as adults.

    If you hang out with people from the lower social classes, I think you’ll meet a lot of middle-aged people who smoke pot, though. A lot of cops even recognize that it’s not a real crime, like rape or murder, and a lot of cops and firefighters even smoke pot or don’t enforce the pot laws.

    One more thing about smoking pot:

    My first few experiences smoking pot were all pretty nice, I think, but when I got a little older, it got to the point that all the people I usually hung out with had pretty good (that is, pretty powerful) pot all the time, and even the people I didn’t usually hang out with, but just hung out with through happenstance, seemed to get good pot most of the time! I think mostly whenever my friends smoked pot, I smoked with them, and I barely ever turned down some pot. It got to the point where it would basically knock me out every time I smoked pot. What I should have done was realized and accepted that everybody’s body is different, everybody’s got a different rate of metabolism and different body chemistry and different amount of hormones being released into their bloodstream, and I should have just smoked pot less (instead of, often, three or four or more times a week)– and smoked less when I did smoke. I’m sure there are some people who can gobble down pot like it was Chips Ahoy cookies and mostly do fine with it, but I wouldn’t have done that well unless I was smoking once a week or less, especially with that powerful pot; or, I should have just had a few puffs and then walked away from it every time we smoked. Instead, it was too much like a peer pressure thing.

    If people could walk away from it and be smart with their individual thresholds (and be able to just use it around the holidays, like eggnog, if that was what they wanted), then pot wouldn’t be a problem at all and it could make our society happier.

  • We americans are so gullible when it comes to politics!!!

    Does anybody here think that a presidential candidate decided to talk about his drug use on a whim? Of course not. He knew what the response would be. It would be all the sympathy you are reading about on this blog. It would be comparisons to “didn’t inhale”. It would be the right confronting the issue and making him look like the truly honest candidate.

    This was deliberate…and it was done deliberately in front of high school students. What was he thinking?!? Was he just trying to relate to high school students by saying he was just like them by doing drugs? No way. He knew he would get headlines and sympathy.

    Quite brilliant actually.

  • Swan

    Most mature adults give up those youthful indiscretions when they have children if not before, particularly those that are illegal or harmful unless they don’t CARE if their children are at risk for arrest or harm to themselves or others. Most parents do care for their children’s safety and well-being in the world and are willing to give up some “iffy” things they might think are all right for themselves.

  • Elbeau,

    Nice try, but he wrote about his childhood years and ‘youthful indiscretions’ before becoming a Presidential Candidate. Dreams from My Father was originally published in 1995 before Obama entered politics when he was serving as the president of the Harvard Law Review.

    When he ran for Senate against Alan Keyes in Illinois, it was floated as an attack against him then.

    And this time, like usual, he didn’t bring it up, he was asked about. Only one Candidate, so far, has been caught planting questions and it wasn’t Obama.

  • Some points here are way off base, IMHO:

    You may not agree with me but I think there are examplary leaders out there who have not done drugs or had questionable family issues. Is it too much to ask that we stop calling such people robots or too good to be true and say that such moral character may indicate a person’s character overall?

    Who says the “moral character” of someone who was repressed all their life, or who’s managed to hide their indiscretions, is superior to someone who’s had a normal life filled with curiosity and experimentation? That is patently baloney. If I had the choice of which type I’d want to be president, I’ll take the curious experimenter over the repressed character any day of the week.

    Rian writes: It’s great that Obama is no longer a drug addict. And it should be a testament not only to America but to also to Christian tolerance and principle that Obama can get over his addiction and become a US Senator and a serious contender for the Presidency.

    Rian, I would venture to guess that you yourself have never tried any drugs. The idea that Obama was an addict just because he messed around with drugs is evidence of rank ignorance about drugs. I’m not faulting you for never having done them, Rian, but be damn careful about tossing around allegations of addiction, which is an entirely different story.

    Swan, I got a kick out of your advice about getting high. Quite subjective, mind you, but amusing.

  • Anney, I would like to know where you are getting your ideas from– doesn’t sound accurate to me– but anyway, as footnotes to your last post, I’d just like to add that not all middle-aged people have kids, and that those that do can keep the pot out of their kids’ way quite easily by smoking only once in a while, like when the kids are away at camp, when the parents leave the kids with relatives to take an ‘alone’ vacation for their anniversary or whatever, or when the kids are at school or at a sleep-over.

    Also, as I think my previous posts should make clear, even if a person smoked pot around their kids once in a while before pot was legalized, I don’t think smoking pot around them would corrupt them or anything. I think you just have to not smoke when you’re pregnant or around a pregnant woman, and you have to make sure your kids aren’t getting a lot of second-hand smoke that could hurt their health. I think it would be pretty easy to explain to them how the prohibition is part of a screwed-up racist drug war and if you educate your kids properly, seeing you smoke pot isn’t going to turn them into hoodlums or anything.

    President Lindsay, I think all the advice I gave about smoking pot is pretty basic stuff that most pot smokers would agree with. If they don’t, it’s probably because they don’t know enough people and haven’t heard the particular recommendation yet, so they’ve been doing something that’s been making them really uncomfortable over and over again and just ignoring it or accepting it as part of smoking pot.

    Like for one thing, some people might enjoy talking to people when they smoke pot a lot, but if you read what I wrote, I’m not saying talking to people has to be unpleasant when you smoke pot or anything like that. I’m just saying that the best effects of smoking pot are from experiencing your physical senses and not from what it does for your social interaction. Another thing I’d add is that not all video games are going to be great for you. A Super Mario Brothers game, one of the original Mortal Kombat games (before the series gets all 3-D), or one of the original Nintendo games might be the best- a game that’s mindless fun. But Tekken, Virtua Fighter, or RPG games might be bad for some people (Tekken and Virtua FIghter because the 3-D stuff might be too complicated for your brain to take, the RPGs because they’re complicated in their own way). And I’m not saying reading books while stoned would necessarily bother a person or anything, but you might not remember what you read at all after you stopped being stoned, and there might be things to do that would be a better use of your “stoned” time.

  • I could see how Virtua Fighter could be fun the first time you were stoned, or maybe if you were just a little stoned. Maybe even just watching the game on its “demo” mode would be pretty fascinating, instead of trying to actually play it. But I think for a lot of people, definitely if you were really stoned, trying to play Virtua Fighter would just be too complicated and would just be too harrowing, not really fun.

    Different drugs are different for all these effects I’ve talked about, though. I’ve had really interesting experiences playing chess while on LSD (never tried it on pot, but from what I’ve said about other games, you can guess I’d probably conclude it wouldn’t work too well on pot- too much like reading- if you want to play board games or something, just do it to laugh at how dumb it makes you and your friends feel, and give it up quick to move on to doing something else), but again, it’s nothing that should tempt you to actually try LSD in spite of the bad possibilities I alluded to and provided an example of.

  • Sen. Obama did these things when he was a kid/teen, realized they were stupid once he “grew up” and became serious about his life, and moved on. Swan seems to have this agenda to push that is taking the entire conversation off-topic, which was an otherwise interesting analysis on how honesty affects politicians today, and whether comments from Romney and/or Giuliani are warranted (or even hypocritical) in the context of a presidential race. It’s sad to see any article with a mention of drugs devolve into an argument about marijuana (one type of drug) and it’s effects. One of the many flaws of drug users is their obsessive insistence to talk about them, even when the topic is completely different.

    • Comments are closed.