NEW YORK, New York — Opponents of the legalization of marijuana held a rally yesterday at Times Square to protest a secret meeting between marijuana supporters.
Midway through the demonstration, the protest came to an abrupt halt when it was leaked that the string of studies released from various scholarly outlets that showed the damaging effects of marijuana use were actually results from a study on television-watching habits.
The initial studies reported four main claims:
1) Heavy marijuana consumption in youth caused brain underdevelopment, impairing necessary connections between the adult brain and nerve fibers.
2) Marijuana use in teens led to a decline in adult intelligence later in life.
3) Marijuana use in small children led to poor educational attainment, in terms of lower grades in school.
4) Marijuana was addictive.
But in actuality, children who watch more than 1 hour of television each dayâor more than 5 hours each weekâare, on average, dumber children, less intelligent adults, and have more underdeveloped adult brains compared to children who watch less than 1 hour of television each day and less than 5 hours of television each week.
Television is also addictive. (Duh. There’s no other reason to explain why a show like Survivor has survived for 28 seasons… and more to follow.)
In some instances, marijuana even had more positive effects compared to sitting hours in front of a bright screen reflecting flashing lights.
Other studies not associated with the earlier misrepresentations found that marijuana use helped clarity of thought, while television-watching impeded thoughts from entering the brain.
People who smoked marijuana, when high, appeared to be more inventive with their expressions, while people who watched excessive amounts of television found it difficult to form complete thoughts and in fact only paraphrased or regurgitated verbatim the speech of the characters they observed.
Marijuana use in subjects was often associated with higher amounts of creativity, activating the parts of the brain that spurred free thought, while television-watching stifled those impulses of the independent mind.
A research assistant discovered the switch when writing a second book for his tenure-track professor.
Comcast, Viacom, Time Warner, and Fox announced they would fund a multi-billion dollar study to negate this new evidence that television-watching is harmful.
Oddly, none of the executives at these companies realized that people who watch excessive amounts of television do not also read scholarly journals.
