Many a pot smoker has claimed that I let heavy drinkers and other drug abusers off the hook by singling out marijuana related stories. My response is that because marijuana is the only drug in this country that many people think is completely harmless it is more important to show people the negative effects of chronic or heavy use of pot, because everyone knows drunks get violent and heroin users will eventually blow someone in an alley to get a fix.

That doesn’t mean I approve of heavy drinking or claim that it isn’t harmful. Any child who grew up with a heavy drinking parent or anyone at an A.A. meeting can tell you alcohol abuse not only has serious medical effects on a person, but like any drug insidiously destroys peoples lives. Whether it’s beer, hard liquor, pot or coke people use drugs to lose control and more importantly to live in the illusion of a changed reality so that they need not deal with the issues in their lives that by and large make them behave like addicts.

After years of abusing any substance a person’s perceptions will be so warped by the fantasy their drug of choice helps them maintain that they may do the most horrible things imaginable. It doesn’t matter if it is drinking or smoking or snorting, prolonged immersion in in the nightmarish inner world all users dwell in produces monsters. The constant escape form reality and responsibility, from the very concept of morality itself can turn the weak minded addicts into wife-beaters, rapists, child molesters, or in this case cannibals:

BRASILIA (Reuters) – Police in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest are investigating three native Indians suspected of murdering and eating a 21-year-old handicapped man in a rare case of cannibalism, local authorities said on Tuesday.

The Indians of the Kulina tribe near the Peruvian border are accused of having killed and eaten the insides of Ocelio Alves de Carvalho, a 21 year-old student in the town of Envira in Amazonas state.

“The body was quartered and then carved up with more than 100 cuts — we think they ate his insides,” Sgt. Osmildo Fereira da Silva of the state police in Envira told Reuters.

The three Indians apparently boasted of eating Carvalho’s heart and liver to relatives in a reservation called Aldeia do Cacau, Fereira said.

Police interrogated a suspect but did not arrest anybody, Fereira said.

The Kulina do not practice cannibalism and police suspect the three Indians were drunk or took drugs.

“Alcoholism is widespread among Indians throughout the region,” said Inspector Pablo Souza, with the Federal Police in the state capital Manaus.

Cannibalism is extreme, but everyone has either witnessed or been in a bar fight. Every adult has seen people drunk and knows how depraved people can be when they drink too much. When I lived in the Bronx I once was awoken by the sound of four drunk men brawling with two petite women outside the neighborhood bar. When Bloomberg passed the smoking ban in bars I saw many drunken revelers exposing themselves to passersby, laughing as their friends passed out in the street and basically doing things most were probably ashamed of when sober. Personally I don’t drink, and aside from a glass of wine with dinner I think it’s a sign of immaturity at best when someone my age still hits the bars and gets drunk. At worst it is the literal pissing away of your life.

And smoking pot is no better.

h/t Crime Scene KC