Castillo/AP
Dec. 22--Your grandparents were right. Listening to all that rap and rock and "whatever-it-is-it's-certainly-not-music" will lead to nothing but drugs and deviltry.
At least, new survey data published Dec. 22 in the online version of the journal Addiction show ninth-graders who constantly hear songs extolling marijuana use have a high chance of smoking pot themselves. Lead study author Brian Primack and colleagues wrote that teens who hear between 100 and 144 marijuana-related song lyrics each day are 83 percent more likely than their less-exposed classmates to use cannabis.
Primack further explained in a press release that "interestingly, we also found that exposure to marijuana in music was not associated with other high-risk behaviors, such as excessive alcohol consumption. This suggests that there is a real link between the marijuana lyrics and marijuana use."
The 949 freshman polled for the study examining the link between music and nonmedical marijuana use have almost certainly never heard the song above. Nonetheless, watching it might serve as a warning to them what can happen when they take lyrics such as these from the much hipper Lil' Wayne's "I Feel Like Dyin'" as endorsements of how to behave:
I am sittin' on the clouds
I got smoke coming from my seat
I can play basketball with the moon
I got the whole world at my feet
Playin’ touch football on Marijuana Street
Or in a marijuana field
You are so beneath my cleats
Get high, so high that I feel like lying
Down in a cigar
Comments
this is a VERY dumb article.
every heard of "correlation does not indicate causation"?
all the study says is that teens to smoke listen to music about weed/ people who listen to music about weed happen to smoke. NOWHERE DOES IT SAY THAT IF YOU LISTEN TO MUSIC ABOUT WEED YOU WILL BE INFLUENCED TO SMOKE IT!
watch, i'm going to write an article next week about how members of the KKK read the new testament, therefore reading the new testament will influence you to hate jews and black people.
except unlike hating other religions and races, theres nothing wrong with smoking pot.
What lolerz said. The implication of this study is that people who smoke pot seek music about pot to listen to. For a counter-culture social activity such as pot smoking, it is typical to use cultural expressions such as music, games, movies and clothing to identify with the particular clique, and advertise that identity to others. To imply the opposite as this author Ed Lamb does, that the music leads to pot smoking, it just to misunderstand how these scientific studies work, attempting to use it as support for a causal relationship that doesn't exist. It really makes the author and his publisher The Examiner look pretty dumb.
ed lamb, i'd watch what you write about.
ever heard of john english, portland drug policy examiner? he used to write for the examiner, mainly about the evils and perils of marijuana. In one of his final articles, he danced on jack herer's [not yet existent] grave after jack had a stroke. We all sent mr.english running with his tail between his legs. There was a TEAM of people working to discredit the guy, with over a hundred comments to each of his articles DAILY. he hasnt posted anything in months.
dont think the same wont happen to you. There isnt a single negative thing you can say about marijuana that holds any logical weight whatsoever, that we can't disprove a multitude of ways and make you look like a fool. One more article like this and we will make sure that will be the last article of your journalism career.
One hundred comments would be great. Thanks for reading, folks. Although you may want to realize that the embed of the Ian Drury video is a joke.
Funny, they didn't seem to address which came first, the smoking or the music, they just seemed to assume the music LED to pot. I'm betting it's the other way around.
And John English? Good riddance. Nanny-stater control-freak.
When are we going to get intelligent reporting on this subject? Teens smoke pot because it's illegal and easy to obtain (drug dealers don't check ID's).
Are going to ban the word "marijuana" now? Do people want to divorce their spouse and move into a trailer because they listen to country music?
Stop this repugnant reporting that's considered news, and focus on the real issue-- Prohibition and the drug war has failed.
Saw this yesterday..... Was it on this same site??? LAME
The songs get listened to because they are high or like cannabis, not the other way around.
-Dan
Article stinks! Your taste in music is even worse.
EO,
The whole subtext of my article is that songs glorifying drug use tend to be of poor quality.
Where does one get the desire to smoke weed then? One doesn't just wake up and say, "I want to smoke weed." Music and musicians certainly play a role in reinforcing smoking weed for adolescents as well as peer pressure and other role models, the internet, movies, etc. If our mass culture pushes weed, it is difficult for parents and schools to give the opposite message since a lot of kids are in rebellion against them. Music celebrating drug use, graphic sex, sexist and profane language is available to kids as young as 9 or 10 and they are adopting these behaviors and language at younger and younger ages. If it doesn't come from parents, it has to come from somewhere.
The obvious answer is "from their peers", who in turn get it from older siblings, discussions on the internet, or any number of sources. Limiting access to music with references to marijuana will not have any significant impact on the rates of kids smoking pot; and if there is an impact, it will be an increased use as the censorship draws additional attention to the substance (google the "Streisand Effect" for support for this theory). There is nothing to be gained by arguing the case for exposure to music with pot references leading to consumption of pot, as trying to limit exposure by force will not have a helpful impact on reducing consumption of the substance.
SO YOU PROPOSE WE DO WHAT?! stop people from writing songs about marijuana? or do you really expect to succeed in stopping your kids from ever being exposed to that music (in the age of the internet and child-friendly pg-rated snoop dogg)? even if you do succeed, what do you think the effect will be? you think everything will be honkey-dorey because your kiddies never got to see all the bad parts of the world before they left your nest? What do you think is going to happen when they go to college? In my experience, those individuals who are sheltered through highschool are the ones who end up partying the hardest in college (either that or they go to bringham young).
go ahead. shelter your kids. prevent them from being exposed to the big bad world of drugs. by sheltering them you're just forestalling the inevitable. they need to make the concious decision to be drug-free on their own accord.
go watch "the devil's playground".
Wow, even Harry Anslinger blamed pot for the music, not vice-versa.
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US,
and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers.
Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage.
This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations
with Negroes, entertainers and any others." --Harry J Anslinger
seriously, not this same old rehash of propaganda agaiiiiiiinnnn... ugh
this is a horribly written article. and of all the lyrics you could have chosen, you picked "i feel like dying" and didn't even choose the best marijuana referenced lyrics from it. be ashamed
lolerz2,
Again, I note, "The whole subtext of my article is that songs glorifying drug use tend to be of poor quality."
you obviously have bad taste in music. furthermore, what exactly qualifies you as an expert in auditory aesthetics? (impossible, considering it's entirely subjective)
i would think quite a few people would disagree with you about the quality of stoner music.
lets do a quick list of musicians who liked to get high, and wrote/played numerous songs about marijuana:
Pink floyd
black sabbath
bob dylan
the beatles
tom petty
louis armstrong
miles davis
charlie parker
david bowie
bob marley
carlos santana
and many more....
most of the above listed artists are either already, or will likely make it into the cannon of timeless, intergenerational, "classic" music - up there with mozart and Beethoven.
so much for your "smoking pot makes you write bad music" argument in the subtext.
oh yeah....jimi hendrix too.
you can say what you want about those other artists. you have to be crazy to not like hendrix.
the beatles were pretty bad when they started off.
then they met bob dylan, who introduced them to marijuana, the product of which was sgt pepper, revolver, the white album, and the rest of their good stuff.
Cripes ... The word "tend" in my comment indicates that not every pot-related lyric is poor. Also, I wrote not a word about how marijuana should be regulated or whether musicians benefit or suffer from their use of marijuana. I may, however, need to reconsider how marijuana use affects reading comprehension.
You may not have directly stated anything specifically about the pros/cons of marijuana or how it should be regulated, but you still wrote about a study which is grounded and motivated by prohibitionism. The fact remains that this study that was the subject of your article was funded in part by NIDA and the ONDCP, and is heavily biased and unscientific towards with the aim of arousing negative opinions towards marijuana and it's subculture among the news-reading general public.
I dont care if you agree or disagree with prohibitionism. You reiterated (in your article) what amounts to pure propaganda, weather you realize it or not. I would think that you would have learned in 3rd grade (especially considering youre a "journalist") that you shouldnt spread rumors, especially ones that arnt true. I dont care what you think, i care about what you said, and what you said is damaging to the reputation of the marijuana subculture as a whole. you can be a critic, just not a propagandist.
Ed, allow me to put something in perspective for you, lest you think that all this vitriol is based on stoner fantasy and the ravings of potheads.
For an incredible amount of americans, Marijuana represents non-dangerous, life-changing medicine. And when you present a study like this, so obviously biased and factually incorrect, and then put a sensationalist headline that gets the studies correlations BACKWARDS, you're spreading ammunition to our enemies and we simply won't stand for it.
And I imagine most of us picked up on your "subtext" (if you can refer to something so unsubtle as such) that lyrics about marijuana are of poor quality; we simply found it trite, childish, and overused. These jokes have been run dry, and the great irony is the only people who DIDN'T understand your article were probably the rednecks.
I noticed something interesting.
scroll back and look at all the other articles ed has written. most dont have comments, a few have 1 or 2. this article has 25 (including this one). This is the only article about marijuana that he has written.
Goes to show....
perhaps it's time for a change of focus, ed? You should be the next john english. you'll get tons of comments then. considering were all walking around in a paranoid daze all the time, we stoners do pay lots of attention when someone threatens us. makes our blood boil as much as a black man's would if here were called a slave.... ya know.
Pay attention. subtext.
.......with his tail tucked between his legs.....
Would someone please explain the meaning of the past three comments? Especially the post about being paranoid? I think the commenter was trying to say he or she was not paranoid. But the person came across as, "ya know," paranoid.
the moral of the story is that if one is unable to understand clever underhanded subtexts, one should not attempt to create a clever underhanded subtext.
smoke some pot ed, maybe you'l get a clue.
ever heard of "tongue in cheek"?
or the colloquial saying "ran away with his tail tucked between his legs"?
it's pretty simple....if you're IQ is above 100.
i think what the dude is trying to say, is that in the parlance of our times, picking on potheads, be they recreational or medical users, is pretty darn politically incorrect...... and just plain stupid.
It's been nearly two weeks since ed published this article, and we havnt seen any new ones. i think we hurt his feelings ROFLMAO
I haven't posted any new columns because I took planned time off from this gig to focus on others -- and enjoy the holidays. Again, thanks for reading.
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