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