The Blog of Curtis Chambers

I saw this video today and had to write about it.  It’s a perfect example of what’s wrong with the mainstream media in today’s society.  Before I go into my rant, I’ll post the video here so you can watch it as well.

Now I’ve never done this drug or any other hallucinogenics so I can’t really claim to have personal knowledge about them, but this story is completely over-dramatized.  Here’s a few reasons to question this story:

1. The medical examiner found no traces of salvinorin in his system.
2. He was on an acne medication that has been linked to depression.
3. His parents were divorced, which has been shown to lead to higher depression rates.
4. He was an alcohol user, a demographic that has nearly twice the suicide rate of non-alcohol users.

I’m not saying this wasn’t a tragic event or that his mother was at fault.  This post is mostly a criticism of the hysteria that mainstream media produces by distorting and/or omitting the facts.  They wanted to produce a sensationalist piece that got under people’s skin, so they only showed the things that would “shock and awe.”  The irony of it is that the local Delaware news presented all the facts and what happened, while the mainstream media outlets (CNN, ABC, NBC and USA Today) took the story and reported it as a “salvia suicide”, even though there are no documented cases of fatalities from salvia use.

In reality, the mother believes that it was a wide variety of things that caused her son’s death, which is probably the truth.  CNN also took this quote from his journal:

“Salvia allows us to give up our senses and wander in the interdimensional time and space….  Also, and this is probably hard for most to accept, our existence in general is pointless.  Final point: Us earthly humans are nothing.”

Deducing that salvia killed him from that quote is purely a red herring.  Anyone with any sort of intelligence has probably thought the same thought at one point in their life, even without drugs.  You’d probably come to the same conclusion from reading a Stephen Hawking book, but no one ever blames that for killing people.

In the end, it seems that the news is becoming more and more of an entertainment source than a source of information. The well-informed are turning to other sources to get their information.