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Remember Lawn Chair Larry? The former trucker, Larry Walters, got an honorable mention from the Darwin Awards which “salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally remove themselves from it”.
Larry lived to tell the story of his 1982 experience attaching helium filled weather balloons to his lawn chair after hatching a plan to drink a few beers while floating 30 feet above his girlfriend’s house. But his friends cut the rope he had attached to his jeep, and the lawn chair with Larry in it, shot up to 16,000 feet. Larry wisely decided not to use the bb gun he brought along to shoot the balloons when he was ready to come down. He wound up being rescued when he came up on air controllers’ sites near the LA Airport.
Many arguments for ending marijuana prohibition are familiar, including the potential tax windfall, freedom of personal choice and the financial and societal costs of a policy that's a failure as a practical matter. Now, a new book uses documented scientific and medical evidence to make a less familiar argument: that punishing adults for using marijuana is senseless because, compared with legal and widely accepted alcohol, it's far less harmful.
Steve Fox, director of state campaigns for the Marijuana Policy Project, visited the Trib to discuss "Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?" (Chelsea Green). Following are excerpts from Fox's discussion of the book...