Shannon Kramer is the seemingly unemployed single mother whose 15-year-old daughter turned her in for getting high. A reporter caught up with the mother of the year who claimed that because her children had behavioral problems (how’d that happen?) she needs to get high to deal with them.

Nothing like knowing your mother thinks you’re so awful she can’t deal with you sober I bet. Kramer’s lucky her daughter just turned her into cops because frankly her kind of mothering usually ends badly, as in dead hooker in the woods badly.

At the end we find out that Shannon Kramer actually was charged with child neglect a couple of years ago when one of her kids wandered out of the house without her noticing. But of course if Pot was legal none of this would have happened, right guys?

h/t Breitbart

When I started seeing this story of a couple using Nazi-like torture on their 11-year-old son as a form of discipline I knew pot was involved. Sure enough, the modern day Dr. Mengele, one Pedro Rivera, was charged with possession of marijuana with intent to sell which doesn’t necessarily mean he was a dealer, just that he had a very large quantity of pot in his house. Judging from the mug shots of him and his girlfriend Megan Brazell, they were using right up to when they were dragged into court.

But the pot is not what got them arrested at first, it was the 40 minute long ice water baths that caused frostbite and hypothermia he gave to his son, you know, to discipline him. That sounds rational, right?

Read this and you will weep:

New Castle County Police said his father, 29-year-old Pedro Rivera, was the culprit who dealt the blows to him.

“This is one of the nastiest cases of child abuse that we have seen in a while,” said Cpl. Trinidad Navarro.

Rivera and his girlfriend, Megan Brazell, 26, were arrested Saturday and charged with child abuse. Police also found more than 20 bags of marijuana in Rivera’s bedroom.

Police received an anonymous tip of child abuse taking place at the Village of Windhover Apartments, located at 104 Sandburg Place in Bear. Navarro said officers responded to the residence at about 5:40 p.m. Brazell answered the door and told police that she was alone with her two infant sons, but upon further inspection of the residence police found Rivera.

“While inside, the officers noticed a man coming out of the back room of the home who said that he had been disciplining his son,” Navarro said.

That abuse included submerging the boy in ice-cold water for 40 minutes, Navarro said. Police found a bathtub full of water when they searched the home.

“When they took him to the hospital they weren’t even getting a reading on the kid,” Navarro said.

Police found the boy inside of a closet on his hands and knees shaking, Navarro said. He didn’t respond when officers asked about injuries on his body. Those injuries included burn marks to his back, buttocks and hands, bruises under both eyes and a hemorrhage in his left eye. Police said the blisters on his hands were signs of frost bite that was healing.

“It’s a pretty troubling investigation,” Navarro said. “Clearly the worst-case scenario of child abuse is when a child dies, but it’s safe to say that officers probably rescued this kid from lifelong injuries.” Navarro also said that the boy asked police not to return him to the custody of his father.

Like I said, this seems less like discipline and more a re-enactment of Nazi Germany’s experiments on Jews and Gypsies. But hey, sober people do these things all the time to their kids, and I’m sure someone will come to the comments and name three.

Many a pot smoker has claimed that I let heavy drinkers and other drug abusers off the hook by singling out marijuana related stories. My response is that because marijuana is the only drug in this country that many people think is completely harmless it is more important to show people the negative effects of chronic or heavy use of pot, because everyone knows drunks get violent and heroin users will eventually blow someone in an alley to get a fix.

That doesn’t mean I approve of heavy drinking or claim that it isn’t harmful. Any child who grew up with a heavy drinking parent or anyone at an A.A. meeting can tell you alcohol abuse not only has serious medical effects on a person, but like any drug insidiously destroys peoples lives. Whether it’s beer, hard liquor, pot or coke people use drugs to lose control and more importantly to live in the illusion of a changed reality so that they need not deal with the issues in their lives that by and large make them behave like addicts.

After years of abusing any substance a person’s perceptions will be so warped by the fantasy their drug of choice helps them maintain that they may do the most horrible things imaginable. It doesn’t matter if it is drinking or smoking or snorting, prolonged immersion in in the nightmarish inner world all users dwell in produces monsters. The constant escape form reality and responsibility, from the very concept of morality itself can turn the weak minded addicts into wife-beaters, rapists, child molesters, or in this case cannibals:

BRASILIA (Reuters) – Police in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest are investigating three native Indians suspected of murdering and eating a 21-year-old handicapped man in a rare case of cannibalism, local authorities said on Tuesday.

The Indians of the Kulina tribe near the Peruvian border are accused of having killed and eaten the insides of Ocelio Alves de Carvalho, a 21 year-old student in the town of Envira in Amazonas state.

“The body was quartered and then carved up with more than 100 cuts — we think they ate his insides,” Sgt. Osmildo Fereira da Silva of the state police in Envira told Reuters.

The three Indians apparently boasted of eating Carvalho’s heart and liver to relatives in a reservation called Aldeia do Cacau, Fereira said.

Police interrogated a suspect but did not arrest anybody, Fereira said.

The Kulina do not practice cannibalism and police suspect the three Indians were drunk or took drugs.

“Alcoholism is widespread among Indians throughout the region,” said Inspector Pablo Souza, with the Federal Police in the state capital Manaus.

Cannibalism is extreme, but everyone has either witnessed or been in a bar fight. Every adult has seen people drunk and knows how depraved people can be when they drink too much. When I lived in the Bronx I once was awoken by the sound of four drunk men brawling with two petite women outside the neighborhood bar. When Bloomberg passed the smoking ban in bars I saw many drunken revelers exposing themselves to passersby, laughing as their friends passed out in the street and basically doing things most were probably ashamed of when sober. Personally I don’t drink, and aside from a glass of wine with dinner I think it’s a sign of immaturity at best when someone my age still hits the bars and gets drunk. At worst it is the literal pissing away of your life.

And smoking pot is no better.

h/t Crime Scene KC

You know that guy who told you pot smoking was not only safer than using other drugs, but that it doesn’t cause cancer like regular cigarettes? Well he lied to you, and it looks like that lie will cost you big:

Marijuana use may increase the risk of developing testicular cancer, in particular a more aggressive form of the disease, according to a U.S. study published on Monday.

The study of 369 Seattle-area men ages 18 to 44 with testicular cancer and 979 men in the same age bracket without the disease found that current marijuana users were 70 percent more likely to develop it compared to nonusers.

The risk appeared to be highest among men who had reported smoking marijuana for at least 10 years, used it more than once a week or started using it before age 18, the researchers wrote in the journal Cancer.

Stephen Schwartz of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, one of the researchers, said the study was the first to explore marijuana’s possible association with testicular cancer.

“This is the first study to look at this question, and by itself is not definitive. And there’s a lot more research that would have to be done in order to be more confident that marijuana use really is important in a man’s risk of developing testicular cancer,” Schwartz said in a telephone interview.

The study found the increased risk appeared to be in the form called nonseminoma testicular cancer. It accounts for 40 percent of cases and can be more aggressive and more difficult to treat, Schwartz said.

Experts are unsure about the causes of testicular cancer, which often strikes men in their 20s and 30s. The disease is seen more commonly in men who have had an undescended testicle or have a family history of testicular cancer.

The disease usually responds well to treatment and has a five-year survival rate of about 96 percent, according to the American Cancer Society.

About 8,000 men in the United States are diagnosed with testicular cancer per year, and there are about 140,000 U.S. men alive who have survived the disease, the group said.

The researchers said they were not sure what it was about marijuana that may raise the risk. Chronic marijuana use also can have effects on the male reproductive system including decreased sperm quality, they said.

Even the decreased sperm quality should be enough to get most men to put the bong down. No doubt because this is an early study many a pot head will wait to see more studies before proactively protecting their junk. But you know, pot smokers are as reasonable as you and me…