The goggles simulate the experience of being high to scare kids … but wait until you read what that experience is like.
Look, we're adamant supporters of weed and all things related to it, but one thing we can't advocate is stoned driving. Yeah, driving high might give some people the inhuman capacity to Tokyo drift around the parking garage like the human host of Paul Walker's Fast and Furious ghost, but for the majority of us, our reaction times are slower and it's not safe. Plus, if we're going to treat weed like beer and booze, we should take as much care not to drive high as we do not to drive drunk.
That being said, how you get that point across to people matters a lot.
That's why the bullshit 'marijuana goggles' Indiana schools have been using to scare and misinform kids about stoned driving are a problem.
Looking like a mutant hybrid between a virtual reality mask, a welding shield and a snow-bro accessory, the goggles are firmly affixed to the craniums of school children, where they supposedly "simulate the experience of what it's like to drive high."
Unbelievably, the way they do this is to knock out the color red from the user's visual spectrum, implying that weed leads to colorblindness. The result is a green-looking world that's supposed to mimic a high person's high vision while they're high driving. High.
Of course, as you'll know, weed does not cause colorblindness. Nor does it cause any sort of condition that would prevent a driver from seeing colors. Yet, the Indiana educators who run the marijuana goggle program feel that forcing kids to wear them, then making them perform a number of ridiculously unrealistic activities, like navigating a tiny car on a stick around a little plastic town full of red flashing lights that are supposed to represent the children they will soon kill because they are driving stoned, is the best way to teach them the perils of high driving.
Given the set-up the goggles create, we're pretty sure most of these kids and any adult would find it much easier to drive stoned IRL than to drive colorblind on a hallucinatory virtual reality landscape.
Nevertheless, people think this kind of misinformation is healthy.
“Anytime you can do an activity — something that’s interactive with them, or something that provides education, that’s great. These actually simulate the loss of some of your cognitive functions,” said Tim Rutherford with Neighbors Against Substance Abuse (NASA).
… Except the goggles don't provide education. They offer a terrifying virtual world that solely exists to haunt children's dreams and steer them away from reality so that when they're actually confronted with the stoned driving later on, they'll have no real idea what to do.
Weirdly enough, Indiana high school kids think the scare tactics the goggles confer are a good idea for younger kids:
“I think it kind of scares them. Especially younger kids. High-schoolers they kind of look past it, but with the younger kids they see what horrible things can happen. I think it impacts them a lot because they can see how real it is,” said Blair Viehweg, a senior at Mount Vernon to Indiana's WISH-TV.
Well, Blair … you're a dumbass. Indiana's not exactly known for being home to smart kids named Blair.
And not only is the goggle program deliberately misleading kids, it's also expensive as fuck. Fatal Vision, the affably-named company that manufactures the bogus goggles, is charging schools an average amount of about $2,200 to misinform their students about what driving high is like. Odd that people can scrape up money to misinform kids, but they can't to actually educate them, no?
What's even worse about this, is that when these kids finally do start to smoke weed, they'll realize that the experience is nowhere near as bad as the weed goggle simulation makes it seem. We're not rocket scientists or anything, but it kind of seems like that would make them more likely to drive high.
When it comes to anti-drug crusades, scare tactics like this modern-day Reefer Madness goggle experiment don't work. It's been proven time and time again that the only effective deterrent to intoxicated driving is compassionate education about what options you have when you're in that situation.
So until schools realize that fear is the worst teacher on the faculty, remember kids: goggles are for snowboarding and maligned rave fashion, not weird anti-weed hallucinations for children. Mkay!
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