Irony Alert: Anti-Marijuana Newspaper Runs Ads for Pot Paraphernalia

Christian Science Monitor has a bit of a reputation for launching rabid attacks against the marijuana legalization movement, so you can imagine my surprise to find them advertising the high-end Volcano Vaporization System™ right next to an anti-legalization editorial.

What fun. Thanks to the targeted marketing geniuses at Google, Christian Science Monitor can collect revenue by promoting sleek vaporizers to the marijuana enthusiasts who stop by to laugh at the pathetic anti-pot propaganda they're constantly publishing.

Now to be fair, it's very possible that they never even had a clue this was happening. If you let them, Google will sell stuff in your sidebar that relates to the subject of the article on the page, and your site gets a cut according to the number of clicks. We do the same thing here at StoptheDrugWar.org, and we've occasionally noticed some really sleazy anti-drug propaganda and other questionable crap popping up in our ad space from time to time. We can reject specific ads, but it's not an easy thing to monitor 24/7, and frankly I think it's hilarious when I write an editorial trashing the idiotic drug policy ideas of some prohibitionist politician, only to have an ad for his presidential campaign pop up on the side of the page. It's like these people are paying me to make fun of them.

So when it comes to Christian Science Monitor running ads for awesome high-tech pot paraphernalia, the point isn't that they're being willfully hypocritical. Rather, it just looks really stupid. It's amusing, and perhaps even significant, that Google's algorithm recognizes pot products as they best thing to sell to the people reading these articles. Here you have these anti-pot fanatics running redundant anti-drug editorials in a desperate attempt to dial back the forward momentum of the legalization movement, and one inch away you see Google asking, "Would anyone like to buy a badass vaporizer?"

It says an awful lot about the economics of marijuana that Christian Science Monitor can't even promote prohibition without inadvertently becoming part of the pot economy.