According to Fox 4 out of Dallas:

The secret pot farm was practically right under their noses. In fact, if you could walk in a straight line from the riverbank through the marshy underbrush and tangled wilderness, you’d walk just 200 yards before you hit the DEA’s office building.

These guys can’t even keep their own backyards clean!

Keeping up a marijuana field containing more than 300 plants is no small task and would require a lot of maintenance yet the DEA officials have no idea who was taking care of the plants.

So why is this in the news already? It seems like it would have been smarter to keep the plants under surveillance in order to figure who was maintaining them.

While I am absolutely not advocating the war on drugs — in fact, I would rather see the DEA agents sitting around doing nothing — you would think that this would be a good opportunity for a decent sized drug bust. But then again, I always knew these guys were fairly incompetent. Keep up the good work fellas!!!

A recent study conducted by MAPS.org shows that there are more ER visits per year for cheerleading accidents than there are for Ecstasy use. To quote the study:

I focused on Emergency Room (ER) visit data, the most common indicator of cost to public health. For example, according to the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), in 1994–nine years after MDMA was criminalized, but the first for which data is available from SAMHSA– there were 253 ER visits as a result of Ecstasy use in the US. Meanwhile, according to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (USCPSC), in 1994 there were 15,792 ER visits as a result of participation in organized cheerleading. By that measure, in 1994 cheerleading was 62 times more of a threat to our nation’s public health than Ecstasy use. Keep in mind that most users don’t know whether their Ecstasy is pure MDMA, so these statistics reflect the risks of using unregulated black-market Ecstasy, which often contains other substances and sometimes does not even contain MDMA.

To look at those numbers another way, in 2001, one out of every 152 organized cheerleading participants sought ER treatment, while only one of out of every 585 past-year Ecstasy users sought ER treatment.

There is also a graph comparing the two for each year from 1995 to 2004:

So I guess we all know what this means. It is time to start a prohibition on cheerleading. After all, the reason certain drugs are illegal is because the are ‘unsafe’ and this study clearly shows that cheerleading is far more dangerous to public health than MDMA. It seems that if the government is at all worried about the safety of its citizens then they should outlaw cheerleading. While they’re at it (since governments never seem to know when to stop), they might as well outlaw smoking and trans fat since these are also dangerous to public health.

Of course these are ludicrous claims. The government does not have the right to regulate what people can do with their bodies. They should not be allowed regulate cheerleading and they should not be allowed to regulate drug use. I just hope this study puts drug use into perspetive for those who think the government should have the right to regulate it. Just think about how you would feel if the government banned trans fats or cheerleading and you can see why the ‘war on drugs’ is the debacle that it is. People will get their fix (whether it be trans fat, cheerleading, or drugs) even if they have to go behind Big Brothers back to get it.