Abcarian: Is “California sober” a real thing, or just an excuse to keep getting high?
If you go to the web site for the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (CAB) and click the “Polls” link, what do you see? Do you see a chart, like the one at the bottom of this post? Or do you have to click through a slideshow? Well, what you see when you click on “Polls” is not a poll at all. It’s the cover for a very misleading publication that CAB has put out to try to convince the public that California remains a “sober” state.
The cover of the CAB “Polls” campaign, right before they get around to telling you that California is sober.
“Polls” is misleading because it was put together by Mike Adams, an “independent consultant” who was hired by CAB to do what he was hired to do: make CAB look much better than it is.
While CAB can tell you that they’re “working to ensure that California remains a sober state,” they’re really just trying to make its reputation look much more positive than it is. By portraying California as a non-sociopathic environment, they hope to be able to persuade people that they need to be more pro-sociopathic than they already are. I have no problem with people being pro-sociopathic, and I think that CAB knows that. They just don’t want people to see the way they’re trying to pull it off.
California may or may not have the dubious reputation of being the drug capital of the world, but that’s still not the kind of place to be to get high.
When I first saw the CAB-sponsored “Polls” cover, I thought to myself: how many people, in an effort to make our supposedly “saved” image look better, will click on the link and go straight to CAB’s web site, bypassing any useful information about the state of marijuana and alcohol laws? And so then I clicked on the “Polls” link. I was actually prepared for almost the exact opposite outcome. After all, CAB is a state agency after all, and they must have made a mistake.
The result of this experiment was actually not so much a “Polls
