Mitcham, Mark H. “Recreational Track Meet.” Marijuana Policy Political Cartoons. N.p.,19 Aug. 2014. Web. 30 July 2015.
Mark Mitcham was born in the 1960 and currently a resident in Denver, Colorado. He is a recovering alcoholic, and a self-identified stoner who had a technical career in electrical controls. He started drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco in grade school. Later in his life he began to smoke pot at the age of 16. Finally in January of 1991, he quit drinking after joining a group call Alcoholics Anonymous. Following the quit to drinking, a year later Mitcham quit smoking tobacco. Currently he is a personal medical marijuana user, who finds the substance to be quiet beneficial. Therefore his username on the website is the soberstoner.
In Mark Mitcham’s political cartoon, “Recreational Track Meet,” Mitcham portrays the controversy of different narcotics. Throughout the cartoon, Mitcham compare three well known narcotics like cannabis (marijuana), tobacco, and alcohol to show what the individual does to a person. He add little well known side effect, such as high, out of breath, and drunk and lost. The consumer safety line represent a finish line how user of the substance has not resulted in death while the other two substance runners are represented with terrible side effect and number of death within the lanes.
For the joint, Mitcham shows a little more favoritism toward the substance marijuana by drawing it as a winner of the race in the “Recreational Track Meet” cartoon. He shows how cannabis is more beneficial than any of the other substances because it has a low annual death while the other substance has a crap load of annual deaths of 443,000 and 25,000. Near the finish line of consumer safety, Mitcham place some statistics of annual deaths for the different substances to show how harmful each one is to the current user and ex-user.
As a cannabis user he might be bias, but instead he uses so many different factual information to show his background knowledge about the topic he is trying to get through to his audience. Mitcham gave a caption to the political cartoon on the original website to state what he is shock about as he researched on cannabis, tobacco, and alcohol. Within his research, Mitcham managed to conclude that tobacco has killed more American than any other legal drugs or non-legal drugs.
The reason for this cartoon creation was because he felt a passionate connection to the substance during his struggle of becoming a sober person. Therefore this cartoon is a contribution back to society.
The cartoon depicted above displayed enough to catch my attention. Without even reading the article I could grasp what was being communicated. I find it captivating that the speaker is a former user of both alcohol and tobacco. It’s more intriguing that he currently smokes marijuana. I would have enjoyed reading about personal experiences that he has had with alcohol and tobacco to support the message of the cartoon and text.
This is a very good cartoon to visually juxtapose marijuana to other drugs. As said in the essay, we can conclude that the author is bias, but just by looking at the cartoon we can conclude the reasons he believes marijuana is safer to use. I think his background information is very interesting, the fact that he was an alcoholic and moved on from tobacco and alcohol to smoking medical marijuana.
Its funny, i don’t usually get what political cartoons say at first glance but with this one. It was fairly simple, but the message was very clear. I personally know the effects that tobacco and alcohol do to people, so seeing this picture made me remember those guys in my life. However, even though i still wouldn’t use marijuana, i still can understand a bit more of how marijuana is seen to be safer than tobacco and alcohol.
I LOVE THE CARTOON YOU USED! It’s so effective at getting to your point! I feel that tobacco is a MAJOR issue and actually am kind of thinking that tobacco should be illegalized as well and marijuana should have been in place of that, but i’m still not fully convinced. Either way, I feel that drugs and alcohol in general alter your body negatively overtime and they should all be illegalized. I think tobacco and alcohol isn’t because the medical industry is profiting off of people’s ignorance and low health due to the high usage of these things. Medicinal use of marijuana is rising too, so that outta show you even more how doctors and pharmacists profit off of these things.