www.roanoke.com

The legend of Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis and the no hitter he pitched on LSD against the San Diego Padres on June 12, 1970 is an enduring one. There's spare corroborating evidence for it, of course -- it is Ellis' story and his alone. Now, we have a hilarious animation that illustrates it, with accompanying audio in which Ellis describes that interesting day.

"Of the 263 no-hitters ever thrown in the Big Leagues, we can only guess how many were aided by steroids, but we can say without question that only one was ever thrown on acid," reads an excerpt from the text on the video's YouTube page.

Btw: It's doubtful that the acid provided any kind of magic groove that helped Ellis pitch flawlessly that day. He struck out six, walked eight (and hit at least two batters). According to Ellis, he could see catcher Jerry May's signals only because May put reflective tape on his fingers.

Enjoy!

You have to feel sorry for those poor truckers, eh? They thought they were merely filching a little candy from a shipment. Instead, it was laced with LSD:

Police got suspicious when a truckload of 138 kilogrammes of chocolate arrived at the Ibiza port last week from the Spanish mainland. The chocolate was unbranded and marked only as "pure chocolate". The two truck drivers said they had hallucinations after they tasted the chocolate. Each of the 5,000 bars of chocolate was found to contain LSD.

Marijuana, ecstasy, heroin, cocaine and some other stuff

"Let me get this straight," one Roanoke Times editor began. "We should talk about legalizing drugs but not about lowering the drinking age? Nobody can call you predictable, Mr. Casey."

And she may as well have added "consistent," too.

She was referring to Thursday's column (it's the next post below this one) , in which I endorsed an open debate about the possibility of legalizing drugs, AND a May 31column in which I warned that lowering the drinking age to 18 would increase alcohol's accessibility to 14- 15- and 16-year-olds.

I can certainly understand the question.

BUT ... I did not call for alcohol to be outlawed. AND ... I don't believe drugs, if they are legalized, should be sold to anyone under 21.

HOWEVER ... it indeed is possible that legalizing drugs could make them more accessible to youngsters.  And that remains a concern I share with Nancy Hans, council coordinator for the Roanoke County Prevention Council, who is quoted in the column below.

And I'm also concerned for some other reasons. As one wise pol lectured me early in my journalism career:

• The 2 legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, irrefutably account for more sickness, hospital admissions and deaths every year than all illegal drugs combined. To that toll you have to add in all the other societal costs of alcoholism: lowered productivity because of missed work, family strife, carnage from drunken driving, senseless violence, and so on.
• With all of those problems from two legal drugs, do you really think that legalizing all OTHER drugs wouldn't magnify the problem of drug abuse, even if you limited their sale to adults? How could it not make the drug problem worse?

It was a point that was hard to debate.

Jim Ford, the other guy in the column below, believes that money taxpayers now spend on drug enforcement and incarceration could be rechanneled to prevention, education and treatment in a way that heads off any increase in drug use, which he certainly doesn't favor. It might even reduce it, and reduce drug-associated violence and property crime.

That's an issue that should be studied. If Ford is right, legalization could be well worth it. If he's wrong, it would not be.

SO, let's debate lowering the drinking age, keeping in mind the real possibility that the carnage could include increased alcoholism in teenage and later years. And if that would be the case, don't lower the drinking age.

AND, let's study drug legalization combined with vastly increased prevention efforts. And if those studies conclude it would only worsen problems of drug abuse in society, let's not legalize drugs.

Should the drinking age be lowered to 18? Should we even have a debate about it?

Citing an alarming amount of binge drinking on college campuses, more than 130 university presidents and chancellors from across the country want such a discussion.

Among them are Hollins University's Nancy Gray, Virginia Tech's Charles Steger and Washington and Lee's Kenneth Ruscio. They admit they don't have the answers -- they're merely raising the question.

I am no academic, but I have some familiarity with the subject, both as a long-ago teen drinker and a 50-year-old parent of teens. I offer these views in the spirit of such a discussion.

Back when I was in high school, the drinking age was 18, which as a practical matter meant that we high schoolers could easily get beer, wine and sometimes liquor, at 15 or 16.

To say we took advantage of that would be an understatement.

Read the rest of the column here.

And post a comment to answer this question: Should the drinking age be lowered to 18? Why?