Zany Washington Post Marijuana Story Contains Dangerous Levels Of Wordplay

Oh, Washington Post writer Emily Heil, we were going to make excuses for you, assuming you were some poor underpaid intern forced to churn out blog postlets for the Post’s “In The Loop” blog, which is different from all the other blogs the Post has, somehow, there’s probably a logic to it, but then we went to your author page and saw that you have been a journalist for ten years so we feel a need to take you to task for your latest post, about reefer marijuana users. It has so many puns and pot jokes packed into five paragraphs that it makes our head hurt — more than even smoking marijuana, which is an illegal crime, by the way.

So the young nerds who toil in D.C.’s various policy shops and government agencies enjoy playing softball against one another, for fun. (There was a brief kickball fad among these same people, but Wonkette hasn’t done any posts about that in like two years, so we’re going to choose to believe that that’s over?) And sometimes people who believe diametrically opposed things compete on the softball diamond, which is good for camaraderie and/or irony. So it was when the White House team, representing people who refuse to acknowledge that legalizing pot might be an even vaguely realistic goal, faced off against the Students for Sensible Drug Policy (i.e., crazed drug fiends). This is obviously worthy of extensive journalistic coverage, but was it really worth the following list of terrible marijuana jokes? Was it worth it, Emily Heil?

• “cloud hanging over the Mall last week”
• “getting absolutely smoked”
• “hello, Michael Phelps!”
• “The One Hitters” (admittedly, this is the druggies’ team name, but still)
• “the precious weed”

OK, that last one’s not so much a joke as “someone’s idea of what someone who’s high would say, about drugs.” But whatever, this is still journalism’s shame.

The article also notes that a team from the Office of National Drug Control Policy refused to play against the drug hippies last year. The head of this agency is colloquially known as the Drug Czar, a name derived from the title of an actual Russian dictator, and the team is called the “Czardinals,” which is unforgivable. Not “put tens of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders in jail for years” unforgivable, but pretty bad nonetheless. [WP]