Let’s say you had a child and you told them that eating Oreo cookies would would kill them. Of course, you were being extreme and saying that if you eat too many Oreo cookies you could get morbidly obese and die of heart failure. But what you told them was an exaggeration to help protect them from getting fat off Oreo cookies and dying.
Well, one day at lunch, one of the other kids gives the child an Oreo cookie. The child eats it and doesn’t die! Empowered and no longer afraid of Oreos, he begins to eat them all the time. And not only that, but begins to wonder if Ho-Ho’s and even McDonalds is safe to eat too. He finds all of these things to be not only not dangerous, but actually delicious!
With a diet now consisting mostly of corn syrup and trans-fat, the child develops early onset diabetes. With nothing left to do, and unable to go outside to play, the child now spends all of his time playing video games and eating Oreos.
As the parent of the child, do you suppose that this sequence of events wouldn’t make you feel guilty? After all, telling the child that Oreos would kill him was really just an inverse of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. You lied to the child and then the child didn’t trust you. I know that my conscience would certainly burn.
Even though I think most of us would agree that we wouldn’t want to do something like this to a child, it is what our schools and many anti-drug and tobacco groups do every day.
Tobacco is a harmful substance. There is no question about that. It can cause a myriad of health problems. Growing up in a public school system, I would have expected the lung cancer rate among cigarette smokers to be somewhere in the 75-85% range. But that’s simply not the case. The number is actually more like 15%. That’s high, objectively speaking. But subjectively after consuming a lot of anti-tobacco propaganda, it seems like nothing at all. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t come to mind as I smoked my cigarette this morning.
Marijuana is absolutely no different. Do you remember DARE from back in elementary school? After that program was over, I thought marijuana made you stupid and lazy and worst of all, on your way to harder and harder drugs. But most of that stuff doesn’t hold water anymore. Modern studies have debunked a lot. Marijuana causes no long-term memory loss, no long term amotivational syndrome and most importantly, only about 8% of people who smoke marijuana go on to try harder drugs and even less actually become dependant on them.
Though Hookah is a fairly new development, similar things are being said to children and college age students about it. But, did you know that until 2007, no studies focusing specifically on hookah had been done. Rather, hookah was lumped in with all water-pipes, which are significantly different. The worst part is, the first study dedicated to hookah smoking suggested that hookah smoking doesn’t increase your risk of developing cancer. The study was thrown out because it cast a form of tobacco in a positive light. (you can read the interview with the researcher and find links to the study in this thread.)
Anti-tobacco and anti-drug groups reason that it’s okay to exaggerate if it keeps people from doing it. The problem is, if you lie to a person, it strips them of their freedom. If you walk into a liquor store and put your finger in your coat pocket and point it at the clerk saying, “I have a gun”, provided they believe you, they feel they have no choice.
As long as it doesn’t violate anyone else’s liberties, people need to be free to do what they wish. If you lie to a person about the risks of doing this or that, you take away their freedom to choose for themselves. But what’s even more important, if they discover that you have lied (which most people eventually do), they may find themselves empowered to do the very things you tried to protect them from.
Lying to protect someone—especially from themselves—is still lying. And it’s still wrong.
