Drugs scare stories and the abdication of responcibility, page 1

i was browsing the fortean times weird news section earlier and the following headline caught my attention.

Pot smoking man 'put baby in oven'

(at this point, i should say that the oven was never turned on and the child was fine.)

my interest in this story is that "pot" is named/blamed in the headline yet the first two paragraph's read as follows.

Larry Long, 33, allegedly put the child in the oven after claiming to have hallucinated while smoking marijuana "laced with something", TV station Lex18 reported.

The Kentucky man had been drinking whiskey with the baby's mother before putting the infant in the oven after she had gone to bed.

full story

so it may have been the whiskey, it may have been (yeah right, i wish they did this) a hallucinogenic chemical that had been added to the pot or it may have been that this guy is a bit messed up, as far as i can see, the bottom of the list of reasons why someone might put their baby in an oven has got to be "pot". why is "pot" put front and center in the headline? wouldn't "lackwit jerk puts baby in oven" have been far more accurate? it's the same reason pot is always put front and center, to convince people they're prejudices are well founded, people love to say "i knew it!!".

this type of story annoys me on two levels, the first thing is the continuing yellow mindset the media is so fond of, it just boggles my mind that people keep swallowing the lies.

the second level on which this annoys me is that douche bags like this guy do something monumentally idiotic or irresponcible and then blames the drugs they took. the concept of personal responsibility seems to be as popular as a banker buying a gold plated sucker sign with his bonus.

this story just seems to typify these two strands of idiocy so well that i just had to share.

[edit on 18/3/10 by pieman]