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Dr. Lester Grinspoon at the Boston Globe via Marijuana News - Why won't government let us use marijuana as medicine? Why indeed? [mjn]
The answer, of course, is the fear that as people gain more experience with cannabis as a medicine they will discover that its toxicity has been greatly exaggerated, its usefulness undervalued, and that it can be used for purposes the government disapproves of. Having made these discoveries, they will be less supportive of the prohibition and its enormous costs, among which is the annual arrest of 700,000 people in the United States alone....
It is unlikely that marijuana will ever be developed as an officially recognized medicine via the FDA approval process, which is ultimately a risk/benefit analysis. Thousands of years of widespread use have demonstrated its medical value; the extensive multi-million dollar government-supported effort (through the National Institute of Drug Abuse) of the last three decades to establish a sufficient level of toxicity to support prohibition has instead provided a record of safety that is more compelling than that of most approved medicines.
The modern FDA protocol is not necessary to establish a risk-benefit estimate for a drug with such a history. To impose this protocol on cannabis would be like making the same demand of aspirin, which was accepted as a medicine more than 60 years before the advent of the double-blind controlled study.
David Sheff at Playboy Magazine via Cannabis News - Playboy Interview: Gary Johnson: Drugs, open borders, guns, abortion, campaign financing, exercise, lots of exercise. Long, but worth the read. [cn]
JOHNSON: Half of all crime is drug-related. Half. Half of what we spend on law enforcement, half of what we spend on the courts and half of what we spend on prisons is drug-related. That's billions of dollars that could be spent on education, on other crimes, on other issues. If we legalized drugs, we would destroy the environment that allows and even encourages all those crimes. We know that prohibition drives a black market and all sorts of related crimes. Prohibition sets the stage for criminals, from the small dealers on the street to the drug kingpins. If police didn't have to deal with drug-related crimes, they could fight other crimes and increase our quality of life. Same with courts and prisons. We could educate people about the danger of drugs in a more effective way. Anyway, I would argue that some kids do drugs because they're illegal, purely out of rebellion. I know that it's partly why I did them. We were told you couldn't do it, so hey.... I am not alone in this. You see a sign: WET PAINT. Is it really wet? DON'T OPEN THIS DOOR. I usually don't, but I want to. Part of the reason kids get so excited about smoking, drinking and drugs is because they are prohibited from doing them....
JOHNSON: My vision of the border with Mexico is that a truck from the United States going into Mexico and a truck coming from Mexico into the United States will pass each other at the border going 60 miles an hour. Yes, we should have open borders. It will help enormously with the drug issue, too, by the way. One of the huge raps on Mexico is that it is a drug supplier, that it's the drug corridor. But there wouldn't be drugs coming in illegally from Mexico if there weren't the demand in the United States. We have a militarized border with Mexico, and it's a shame. It doesn't work very well, either. Mexican mules get paid a king's ransom to carry marijuana or cocaine across the border, but they are just mules. If they get caught, they're the ones who get locked up, not the drug lords. One out of eight gets caught. Whoever's paying them south of the border knows that equation and understands the risk.
...
JOHNSON: Bottom line: I think Republicans are about giving people freedom and holding them accountable for it. If there's a criticism about me that I love, it's that I'm a Libertarian. If people call me a Republican Libertarian, great. I separate myself from the party when it wants to legislate morality. You can't legislate morality. You lead by example, but you can't tell people how to live, which, ironically, is a Republican assumption. A law against smoking marijuana just does not work. There are other ways to try to get people not to smoke.
Carol Harrington of The Canadian Press via Cannabis News - Judge Suspends Pot Cultivation Law: good news from our neighbor to the north. [cn]
The court gave Parliament one year to rewrite the drug legislation so that sick patients can get medicinal cannabis. Otherwise, there will no longer be any law prohibiting marijuana possession in Ontario, the judges said.
Joel Miller at Spintech Magazine via Cannabis News - Books: Dealing With Dope: Joel reviews two books he likes on drugs: Our Right to Drugs by Thomas Szasz and Undoing Drugs: Beyond Legalization by Daniel K. Benjamin and Roger LeRoy Miller. User comments include a bunch of Szasz links and an excerpt. Right on, Dr. Szasz! [cn]
Szasz basically calls for consistancy -- very consistant consistancy -- concerning drug laws. Not only should the government eschew bans on heroin, cocaine, etc., and let people use their property as they see fit, it should also, he argues, eschew pharmaceutical regulations like federal oversight of narcotics prescriptions. If a doctor wants to prescribe an opium deriviative to a patient, more power to him. Feds should sit in the waiting room, not the dispensery, looking over the shoulder of the medical establishment.By distilling the argument down to one of property rights, Szasz makes the case for a free market in drugs -- not "legalization," which usually brings continuing statist controls into the picture in the form of taxes and regulations, but a pure-and-simple butt-out on the part of the government, where free individuals would be at liberty to partake of drugs for whatever purposes they desired sans an onlooking nanny state.
Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - A Republic, Not a Democracy: Dr. Paul reminds us of why the president is NOT chosen by a simple democratic vote. He has introduced H.Con.Res.443 in the House to affirm this position.
Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That it is the sense of the Congress that the United States is not a democracy--but a republic--and that the present constitutionally prescribed means by which the President and Vice President are selected State by State is essential to preserving the diversity of the citizenry of the United States and to maintaining the United States as a Federal republic composed of independent and sovereign States.
J.J. Johnson at Sierra Times - A Nation Divided: A Response to Jesse Jackson: Mr. Johnson lays into Mr. Jackson. [sierra]
Rather than fearing you will "take to the streets", we're banking on it. Yes, go protest in front of the federal buildings. Close them down for all we care. If you want to burn down your own neighborhoods, we'll give you the matches. It you want to burn down the cities, we only ask that you give us time to buy marshmallows. Since your fellow actors will be leaving the country soon, we'll need something to entertain ourselves. Watching those Blue areas erupt in a "civil right's explosion" beats watching Oprah and Rosie any day.
Darrel Mulloy at Sierra Times - Stealth libertarianism is the answer: Mr. Mulloy has a good idea, if you still believe in elected representatives. [sierra]
I think it is time for a stealth libertarian campaign. I think it is time to start calling ourselves Republicans in strong Republican areas, and Democrats in strong Democrat areas. I think the libertarian ideology appeals to both sides in more than one way, and could get libertarians elected in either camp. It does no good to preach your parties ideals if there is no way to get your candidate elected. There may come a time in the future when the public is either too tired of the same old same old, or a revolution changes the way things are done now, but at my age, I don't think I will live long enough to see that tree bear fruit.
Gary North at LewRockwell.com - Pearl Harbor Historiography: A Lesson in Academic Housecleaning: FDR's Pearl Harbor treachery was first revealed in George Morgenstern's 1947 book. 53 years later, the history community is only beginning to accept this reality. [lew]
Things are beginning to change for the better. The Web has begun to chip away at every academic guild's monopoly. What is taught in college classrooms no longer has the same authority that it possessed in 1960. But until the subsidizing of higher education by the state ends, and until the state-licensed accreditation oligopoly ends or is overcome by new, "price-competitive technologies," it will remain an uphill battle for Pearl Harbor revisionists in academia.
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, November 26, 2000 - Security & Human Factors: Advises us to let users pick their own passwords. It improves security. Wish I could convince my ISP of this. I've managed to memorize the mumbo-jumbo they assigned to me, but would much rather have a more sensible password of my own choosing. [cafe]
A big lie of computer security is that security improves as password complexity increases. In reality, users simply write down difficult passwords, leaving the system vulnerable. Security is better increased by designing for how people actually behave.
Jon Orwant at the O'Reilly Network - What's on Freenet? Not much, apparently (he categorized the 1075 items he could find), and it's hard to get to, but shows promise. [cafe]
Overall porn: 15.6%
Overall sex, drugs, and rock and roll: 53.8%
