Image via Vulture

There’s an article on Vulture titled “I Used to Spend $1,000 a Week on Pot Because I Thought Smoking Made My Music Better. I Was Wrong.” It’s by Cedric Bixler-Zavala, frontman for The Mars Volta and At the Drive-In, and if it registered on your bullshit-o-meter, then you may be even more on-point than you already realized.

Specifically, Bixler-Zavala bizarrely confesses, “I was a total monster. I was spending $1,000 a week on weed.” He then blames marijuana for preventing him from interacting with people, as if all strands have the same effect. And then he goes in as a scientist, stating “the stuff people are smoking is not necessarily even naturally grown from the ground, anyway; it’s basically been altered to fuck you up and fuck you up royally. I don’t even know how some people are functional after smoking this stuff.”

As for Bixler-Zavala’s newfound weed abstinence: he says, “I don’t want all my art and all my life to be defined by weed. I want to be known as someone who grew up a little.” Did he find Jesus? Nope. What the publication and author leave out, of course, is that it appears Bixler-Zavala is a member of the Church of Scientology, a religion with a reputation for brainwashing and fleecing its followers. Scientology is no friend to marijuana reform; as the religion’s maniacal founder, science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard once wrote, “The single most destructive element present in our current culture … is drugs.”

The lies are endless. A Scientology offshoot, Foundation for a Drug-Free World, claims that cannabis causes birth defects, while pot use is forbidden in Scientology. If Bixler-Zavala really spent a $1,000 a month on weed, then the remaining question is simple: How much is he now spending on Scientology? Vulture should have asked, because his new drug probably costs way more than four grand a month.