Pubdate: Thu, 15 Jan 2015
Source: Toronto Star (CN ON)
Copyright: 2015 The Toronto Star
Contact:  http://www.thestar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/456
Author: Vinay Menon
Page: E1

WHAT HAS NANCY GRACE BEEN SMOKING?

TV anchor huffs and puffs as she goes hallucinogenic with her anti-pot
crusade

Instead of finding good role models in life to imitate, sometimes I
think it would be easier to just say or do the opposite of whatever
Nancy Grace is saying or doing.

She could do the world an enormous favour by releasing an itemized
list of everything she is against. That way we'd know what to embrace.
We'd know what is true and what is false.

The day she declares gravity to be absolutely real is the day we can
safely jump from bridges and float to work in the sky.

The other day, I opened a kitchen cupboard and noticed a few shells
and nut debris next to a bag of pistachios that had tipped over. My
first thought: there must be a mouse in the house. (My wife, citing a
midnight craving, later claimed responsibility.)

My point: Nancy Grace is the TV host equivalent of an invading
mouse.

She's always trying to sneak into our homes.

While we're busy having reasonable debates, she's hiding in a darkened
corner, gnawing on electrical wires and leaving droppings in the flour.

She is an opportunistic rodent with dead eyes and tiny fangs who
instinctively skitters away from the baseboards of common sense.

With no high-profile murder case to exploit these days, the HLN anchor
has taken up a new cause. Grace is leading a moral crusade against the
possible legalization of marijuana on the grounds - at least, based on
Tuesday's surreal interview with rapper 2 Chainz - that it could lead
to an epidemic in which toddlers are forced to toke up, stoners burn
down their houses and America devolves into a nation of Dorito-eating,
mouth breathing sloths who watch cartoons all day.

Before introducing the pot advocate, Grace mentioned a case in which a
young couple were getting high on the front porch as a fire inside
killed their infant.

"Why do you advocate legalization of pot when you hear stories like
what I'm talking about?" she asked 2 Chainz, whose deadpan serenity
suggested he may have smoked something before the cameras started rolling.

"I don't think that you could put an umbrella on the whole community
off these few incidents that you just named," he said, calmly.

But Grace was having none of it. She's allergic to
calm.

"I'm not defining everybody, OK?" she later shot back. "So don't throw
me in that pot and stew me."

 From here, things got hallucinogenic.

Grace kept barking accusations disguised as questions. She showed a
few grainy video clips in which children were seen smoking drugs. In
one, an Ohio woman gives pot to her 2-year-old.

The rapper responded with a doctorate on the social and financial toll
of the war on drugs. Overcrowded jails, an albatross around the necks
of taxpayers, long-term stigmatization, the impact on housing and
employment, these were his points.

In return, Grace continued huffing on the issue of
puffing.

She put up another clip of a smoking toddler. By now, 2 Chainz looked
vaguely alarmed, like he was on a bus next to someone loudly
predicting the apocalypse.

"It is the same thing we talked about earlier, darlin', with the
legalization of alcohol," he said, calmly. "You will find some footage
like this. But everybody is not doing this.

"Some people actually love their child. Some people know this is
obviously wrong. So this is nothing to really argue about.

"These people are imbeciles. You can't use this case to define a whole
community."

In other words, cherry-picking a few bizarre clips as prime exhibits
in the case against legalization is like showing a few traffic-cam
accidents and then arguing we should outlaw cars.

"Think of the children," Grace told 2 Chainz.

Apparently, she's unaware of the damage she's done over the years by
wrongly condemning innocents (see: Duke University lacrosse case) or
pinning crimes on the wrong people (see: Elizabeth Smart kidnapping
case).

She's been sued (see: "selfie-stalker" case), settled cases out of
court (see: the Melinda Duckett case) and, last year, inspired a
Twitter-based campaign to get her show cancelled after she erroneously
included wrestler Owen Hart in a list of drug-related deaths. He was
actually killed in a freak accident.

As one person tweeted then: "#CancelNancyGrace because she probably
thinks Abraham Lincoln died of steroid abuse."

Probably. And that's why America should legalize marijuana. If Nancy
Grace is against it, it's probably the right thing to do.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Matt