U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps, who won eight gold medals at the Beijing Summer Olympics last year, was at the center of a scandal yesterday when a photo of him using his superhuman lungs to suck a bong load appeared in the British tabloid News of the World. The photo was snapped at a party he attended at the University of South Carolina during a four-month break in his swimming schedule. Phelps didn’t bother with a denial. Instead he admitted that, yup, he was smoking out with some friends. Got higher than a kite in fact, and got rather memorably laid that night too, but not before snorting several fat rails of coke off the waxed montes veneris of two eighteen year-old Croatian exchange students.

Mere hours after Phelps’ admission, the U.S. Olympic Committee voiced concern for America's impressionable children in a statement describing Phelps as a role model who was “well aware of the responsibilities and accountability that come with setting a positive example for others, particularly young people.” In a seemingly coordinated move, conservatives in the U.S. Congress introduced a bill that would require American cities to restaff all police and sheriff’s departments with children. Republican Mitt Romney said, “We have conditioned Americans to feel such anxiety for the well-being of children that we believe crime will virtually vanish for fear that an all-child police force might potentially encounter it.”

At Pulp Intl. we’re just happy we can put anything into our bodies we wish. In fact, the only time people here in the third world really panic over children is when they’re late for their sixteen-hour shifts at the Puma sweatshop. On behalf of all those trapped in less-enlightened countries than ours, we sympathize, because this “set a good example for the children” routine has truly reached levels that verge on the comical. Have a few drinks too many and it’s “please, set a good example for the children.” Drive your car through a hedge and into a swimming pool and it’s “please, set a good example for the children.” Shoot someone in the head with a bottle rocket because you want to see if their hair catches fire and it’s “please, set a good example for the children.” It’s gone way, way too far.