Run off at Kinko's
Aug. 3, 2000
2:30 pm

HOW IN HELL DID WE GET MIXED UP IN THIS?

Officially, NORML does not have a position on the death penalty issue. Frankly, it's never come up. Well, actually, it did come up once, at four in the morning, but then Dave started doing his Jim Breuer impression from "Half-Baked," and, well, you know how that goes.

NORML is, however, in the business of promoting various commercial uses for hemp, hoping it will gain acceptance as a cash crop, local economies will grow dependent on it, and then the government will let us smoke pot before we're old and blind. A statement currently being circulated by the National Coalition of Power Companies and Utilities, titled "What the NRA and the American Association of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Don't Want You To Know About Firing Squads, Lethal Injections and Electric Chairs," maliciously impugns rope, which can be made from hemp, by dredging up its complicity in ancient acts of state-sponsored hanging, as if that were the only thing rope was good for. In fact, of the nearly 600 executions that have taken place in the United States since 1976, only two were carried out by hanging. Over that same period, however, millions of people have found rope to be handy for such pleasant, leisure-time activities as Tug-of-War and mooring boats.

In light of this defamation, we feel obligated to formally take a position on the death penalty issue: We're against it. Duh. We live in a fucked-up country where it is legal for the government to kill its citizens, but illegal for me to own a Buddha-shaped bong.

As long as we're on the subject, another issue has been sticking in our craw. There is a classic children's game that portrays the rope industry in an unflattering light. We're not suggesting that you stop playing the game with your kids: NORML doesn't ever want to be accused of stepping on anybody's fun. What we're asking is that you teach them an updated version of the game. We call it "Lethal Injection Man."

Now don't worry. The rules haven't changed from hangman. When your child misspells a word, a man still dies. When the game is finished, however, the paper looks like this:

So, from now on, if anyone asks you for NORML's position on the death penalty, just repeat this mnemonic device: "Firing up Ol' Sparky: Cruel and unusual. Sparking up Ol' Fatty: Freaky and fantastic!"