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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Ice idiots need
the same disrespect
as litterbugsWHEN I was in high school, we had the "sneefahs." And everyone knew sneefahs were idiots. What these idiot sneefahs did was sneef -- excuse me, sniff -- spray paint through strips of rolled-up bath towels.
Actually, they didn't sniff the paint fumes through their noses; they sucked them down through their mouths through the rolled-up towel. But they were called sneefahs anyway because it was too hard to call them "idiots who suck poisonous paint fumes through their mouths."
There was no cool way to ingest spray-paint fumes. You couldn't cut a line of it on a mirror and suck it into your nose with a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill. You couldn't roll it on cool cigarette paper, light it and pass it around to your friends. You couldn't pour it into a highball glass and add a couple of ice cubes and an umbrella.
No, the only way you could ingest spray-paint fumes was to inhale it through a rolled-up rag. And even the coolest guy in the world is going to look like a freakin' idiot with a rag shoved in his mouth.
A sneefah asked me to join him once. He said, "Eh, Charley, you like sneef? Come on, brah, sneef, l'dat."
He was smiling that stupid smile sneefahs had after half their brains had rotted out, and his face with smudged with gold paint that had seeped out of his rag. Mr. Suave and Debonair.
The governor's drug summit last week was a great move, and the hundreds of people taking part came up with some good ideas to fight the current cool drug of choice: "ice," a k a crystal methamphetamine. The ideas, from having immediate treatment available to ice users to landing hard on dealers, were good. But the thing that really needs to be done is to make people, particularly kids in school, realize that smoking ice is as idiotic as sniffing paint.
And they aren't that different. Basically, both simply involve inhaling chemical poisons into the body, with brain damage being the immediate, irreversible effect. Smoking ice seems more sophisticated than sniffing because you don't have to rip up your laundry and get paint all over your face. But it's just as dangerous and twice as stupid.
SO HOW DO YOU get this message out? I say use a publicity campaign modeled after the original "Don't Be a Litterbug" program. Forty years ago, people didn't think tossing rubbish from their cars was a bad thing. I remember chucking soda bottles out of our station wagon on summer vacations with the full support of Mom and Dad.
Then the "Don't Be a Litterbug" thing started, and eventually everyone realized that it was stupid to toss garbage on the roadside. You see someone littering today, and it not only makes you angry, you think the person doing it is a moron.
That's how we have to get people to see ice users: as pathetic, disgusting idiots who no one would want to emulate.
"Don't Be an Ice Bug" probably wouldn't work. I suggest going with "Don't Be an Ice Idiot." Or "Don't Be a Meth Moron."
We need to get to the day when ice idiots are viewed with the same disdain as kids in my day viewed sneefahs. If the gov has some money left from her drug summit, we can start making the bumper stickers right away.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com
