Scott Burns moves his lips

Scott knows I love it when the Drug Czar’s office gets trashed, so he sent me this gem from the Missoula Independent.

Everyone has heard the joke about how you can tell when operatives from the Bush administration are lying — their lips are moving. …

Moving his lips, [deputy drug czar Scott] Burns got right to the point with his first lie: “I’m not here to tell anyone how to vote,” he said, looking straight into the TV cameras — and then proceeded to tell Montanans that voting for medical marijuana would be a terrible thing. …

Burns said we now “look to experts to tell us what is safe” and claimed: “None of them say smoking this weed is medicine.” Unfortunately, the drug czar must be too busy flying around the country on taxpayer money doing the federal government’s political dirty work to take the time to read the conclusions of medical authorities from all over the world who have found just the opposite — that marijuana is indeed efficacious in treating a number of ailments. …

Rather than get bogged down in messy medical details that disprove his propaganda, Burns simply went on to assure reporters that in every state that had approved the use of medical marijuana, drug use among young people had increased. But an on-going annual study in California found marijuana use by ninth-graders has dropped 45 percent since 1996, when the state legalized medical marijuana.

Instead of interfering in Montana’s elections, the drug czar should have used his federally funded plane ticket to visit Canada. If his preposterous claims were correct, the streets of our northern neighbor should be clogged with stoner youths, barely able to ambulate because of their access to potent B.C. bud. But as many Montanans know from firsthand experience, Canada’s legalization of medical marijuana has produced no such drastic effects. …

Come Nov. 2, Montanans should tell the drug czar to take his lies back to the White House, vote for I-148 and bring legal relief to our most seriously ill citizens.

Oh yeah. Montanans are an independent bunch.