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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Cokeheads and their carbon footprints |
| 2008-10-29 |
| Kevin Libin, National Post (Canada) . . . from what I can tell (correct me if I'm wrong), not a single one of Steven Page's comrades in the enviro-movement has yet raised a peep about the Barenaked Ladies front man's apparent betrayal of the green cause. Page reportedly got a walk today from a New York judge, after being charged this summer for cocaine possession: no jail time, but if he gets treatment and stays "clean" for six months, the judge suggested the charges could be dropped. If Page cared about the environment, as he purports to, he'd abstain permanently. . . . when the (admittedly likeable) singer was busted in July, his ardent supporters, in the same breath as praising his eco-activism, let Page off the hook for snorting up the equivalent of several square metres of Colombian forest. . . . According to the Trade and Environment Database at the American University in Washington, D.C., the cocaine industry is responsible for enormous amounts of pollution, deforestation and wildlife destruction. . . . Click through for the specifics. Page would hardly be the first eco-righteous celebrity to urge the end of the minivan-age while ignoring the destruction an eight-ball of coke can do (see: Perry Farrell, Christian Slater and 1,000 other Hollywood party-people who haven't been caught yet). Maybe, like Al Gore and his space-shuttle-sized carbon footprint, stars get a pass on principles for belonging to the privileged nomenklatura. Or maybe they just haven't thought that deeply about the environment, preferring to stick with simplistic, trendy approaches like carbon offset wristbands. Or maybe it's a vital part of a lifestyle that they won't sacrifice even for the sake of dear Mother Earth. Kind of an addiction. You know, like how we average schmos can't seem to kick the habit of fossil fuel transport, hot showers and incandescent lightbulbs. I saw the Barenaked Ladies in a bar in Columbus back before anyone heard of them. I liked "If I Had $1,000,000" and I bought the record. I stopped buying their records when I learned they were Chomskyite 9/11 "truthers." Now we find out they're also cokeheads. Guess that explains the Chomsky business. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #3 Plus, there’s all those nasty chemicals -- often the sort banned in Western industrial countries -- used in processing coca leaves into paste; according to the U.S. State Department “16 million litres of sulfuric acid, 16 million liters of ethyl ether, 8 million liters of acetone, and from 40-770 million liters of kerosene” are dumped into the soil every year by cocaine processors in the Andean region and end up in the water. Organic it ain't. |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2008-10-29 12:04 |
| #2 Loved their first album. Second one and almost everything sense was terrible. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2008-10-29 11:44 |
| #1 Ironically enough, on their Everything To Everyone CD, there's a song called "War on Drugs"... |
| Posted by: IG-88 2008-10-29 09:52 |
