I hope that Gov. Johnson's message will at least get people interested in the discussion, maybe even enough to learn more about the shameful and deceitful history of the War on Drugs. For more information, I recommend the great documentary Grass.

Ken Olson
Northeast 20th Avenue

BUT WHY DO THEY CALL IT DOPE?
I am sure that this letter is only one of many from the millions of enraged stoners in the Portland metro area regarding John Scalzi's article in the May 22 issue of WW: "Pot Culture: Legalize It--and Kill It." However funny the article may have been (and it was), it is clear that this guy had no fucking idea what he was talking about in several instances. Here is one example.

As for pot making someone "verifiably more stupid," he is probably referring to the results of the now thoroughly debunked Heath/Tulane University studies in 1974, which in the end provided science with one inarguable conclusion: that when one straps a rhesus monkey into a chair with a gas mask sealed onto its face so that no smoke escapes, and then fills the mask with an asphyxiating volume of pot smoke (equivalent to over 60 joints) that precludes the admission of oxygen into the mask for five minutes, it will indeed cause brain damage to the unlucky little guy.

This study was (and amazingly enough still is) used to prove, according to an L.A. Times article shortly after the results of the study were released, that "permanent brain damage is one of the inevitable results of the use of marijuana." Interesting conclusion, given the actual methodology of the research. Numerous other studies of dubious scientific quality in the '70s and the Reagan '80s were used to reach similar conclusions.

Pot doesn't make you "verifiably more stupid" in the long term. Dissemination of this kind of misinformation is dangerous, because it undermines the credibility of real warnings against truly dangerous drugs such as heroin, methamphetamines and cocaine.

Lorin Wilkerson
Sellwood

BACCHANALIA BACK ON ALLA YA
Thank you for your article about the FBI's investigation of Reed College's Renn Fayre [Rogue of the Week, WW, April 24, 2002]. You correctly reported that RF can be, for some of its participants, quite a Dionysiac festival. You may be familiar with an ancient Greek tragedy that every Reed freshling is required to read: The Bacchae by Euripides. To refresh your mind, the King of Thebes' grandson, Pentheus, has a mind to persecute the local cult of Dionysus, but he does not realize that Bacchus himself is presiding over the event. Pentheus is lured into personally investigating, but the bacchic revelers (who include his own mother) detect his presence. His mom, thinking him a lion, in her delusion tragically rips her own son's head off and brings it back to her father, the King.

In a funny way, the sending of agents to Reed seems a bit like Pentheus going to spy on the Bacchae in their revelries. Is it out of a desire to persecute, or is it out of repressed fascination? Perhaps the agents will realize what poor, deprived lives they have been living; perhaps they will question why they ever became FBI agents in the first place. Maybe they'll even have a cockroach or two. Hopefully, no tragedy will occur, and if anything, their "heads" (i.e. intellects, understandings, souls) will be served back to their commanding officers in quite different form.

J.S. Gilbert
Reed junior (studying abroad)
Rome, Italy

CALLAHAN'S THE HYPOCRITE
In his April 24 cartoon, John Callahan slams animal-rights/vegetarian activists for being hypocrites if they are pro-choice on matters of abortion. The truth is that abortion is usually an act of desperation, while in our land of plenty, eating meat all the time is a choice people callously and unnecessarily make, as they have other choices of how to fulfill their nutritional needs (and the desires of their tastebuds, whether they realize it or not). Is torturing and killing an animal that has the sentience of a human the same as aborting a fetus that has never known conscious life? To right-wingers, a human life should never be taken (even if the human is in irreversible pain and wants to end his own life) while an animal's life, feelings and well-being are always game for destruction.

Instead of opposing abortion yet hypocritically making fun of animal-rights folks, why don't right-wingers develop a consistent ethic and oppose killing of both fetuses and animals? Or advocate for cultural change in favor of respecting life while disseminating information about alternatives to both types of killing, as Planned Parenthood and PETA do for their respective causes? Perhaps because no matter how many stones they throw at others, it is obvious that hypocrisy is central to the follow-the-old-ways-no-matter-how-inconsistent-they-are mentality of Callahan and other right-wingers.

Tom Soppe
Southwest Alfred Street