Gilmore on Ecstacy
More than ten percent of the pills sent in [to DanceSafe] for testing in the last few months contained no MDMA, and instead contained various other substances known to cause symptoms similar to those of publicly reported "Ecstacy deaths". Government efforts to drive the purveyers of MDMA further underground, and incarcerate capable suppliers for long periods of time by making the penalties harsher, will only increase this adulteration. This increased adulteration can only increase teen and young adult deaths and ill effects.
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Only in a forum where the penalty for revealing one's knowledge is very low, will that knowledge become available to the Sentencing Commission for determining the appropriate penalties for the "crime" of providing MDMA to one's self or to one's fellow citizens. Drug policy would benefit from having a South African-style "Truth and Reconciliation" commission -- where people could come to reveal that they had used drugs, teach the rest of society what they learned from doing so, and be absolved of prosecution for what they did. Unfortunately the Commission's emergency public comment process is not structured to provide such an opportunity.
DanceSafe - Current Lab Results - results of testing a large number of purported ecstacy pills for drug content. Includes pictures and dimensions. Recommends measuring pills with an inexpensive set of calipers. Likely helps MDMA users recognize good and bad pills. This is the site to which Mr. Gilmore was referring in the first paragraph I quoted above. [gilmore]
John Gilmore's home page contains more good drug policy commentary. Look for "Drug Policy Reform". I liked the last paragraph quoted below so much that I added it to my {@faq} page. [gilmore]
Besides the practical issues, there are fundamental rights involved. The right to speak freely is irrelevant if the citizenry does not have the right to think freely. Our government's control of drugs is really intended to control our citizens' mental states. The substances themselves are not important unless they affect human minds (and some, such as nitrous oxide, are freely sold for non-mind-altering uses, but controlled when people wish to influence their own mental states).
These drugs appear to be prohibited by the government because they permit users to see that the world is not composed of a single point of view, a single concrete reality shared by all. The way each of us interacts with the world is a function of our internal brain chemistry, which is unique to each of us, and can be altered by our own choice or by imposed choices. The government seeks to impose its answer to the choice of whether or not to view reality in certain ways. These altered ways have clearly been useful in religion, art, music, medicine, and recreation for millennia. These government attempts to control the minds of its citizens are a direct violation of the basic Constitutional freedoms that the government is designed to secure for ourselves and our posterity.
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I believe that mind-altering drugs should be usable and sellable under the same rules and the same taxes that apply to substances like flour, sugar and coffee. If the label says it's pure Humboldt County marijuana of 18% THC content, then it had better really contain that, or the seller is in legal trouble. Otherwise, no restrictions, no special taxes, no more black markets. If someone consumes a drug in a way that damages people around them (or seriously threatens to), they should be held responsible -- whether the drug is coffee, alcohol, or cocaine.
Damaged Justice at Music for Misanthropes - Streaming Delenda Est - A wonderful rant on why we must end copy-protected streaming software. Not being a student of Latin or history, I didn't understand the title. I initially thought that "delenda est" was Spanish. I eventually found it in the second to last paragraph of this page. "delenda est" = "must be destroyed". Then I looked back at dj's article, and he tells it in his second to last paragraph. Duh. [MfM]
michael at Slashdot - Reading the Fine Print on the Cybercrime Treaty: Slashdot found the Mike Goodwin article on Cryptome that I linked to yesterday. Lots of comments.
There's a new article in The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:
- "Are you shirking your duty to help keep America free?" - Vin
tells us how we would all be defending ourselves against the host of
unconstitutional laws were it not for treasonous judges who won't
allow such a defense. The militia is us, all of us, armed to the
teeth. It is our duty as citizens to serve on juries and to judge the
law as well as the alleged law-breaker. It is our duty as citizens to
be armed with military-class weapons. If you can get to Reno on April
6 through 8, Vin tells of a gun show where you can arm yourself
without going through any background checks unless you choose a
federally licensed gun dealer. And why would you want to do that?
Given the number of unconstitutional enactments blithely put into force in this country in recent decades, the most common defense in any federal courtroom should be:
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5) Therefore, since the statute, regulation, ordinance, edict, or "interpretation of code" under which the defendant now stands accused, represents an attempt by the federal legislature and/or bureaucracy to meddle in an area where it has no constitutional authorization (trafficking in constitutionally protected firearms, trafficking in medicinal plant extracts, declining to "volunteer" to pay unconstitutional direct federal taxes or to participate in a federal retirement pension or "payroll withholdings" scheme; "money laundering" to facilitate such commerce, etc. etc. etc.)
6) These charges should be dismissed; and the defendant declared innocent.
Dave Winer at Scripting News - Saturday, March 24, 2001 - Dave comments on how SOAP implementations don't interoperate. Coulda told ya, Dave. The spec left me wondering what SOAP is. No wonder different people interpreted it in different ways. XML-RPC is an entirely different matter. Read the spec, write the code, it works with everybody else. Simple. [script]
Cathleen Moore at InfoWorld - Scopeware aims to unite corporate information - I linked to Scopeware a little while back. This article provides a little more info. [tomalak]
"The network file folder system as we know it is dead on the floor," he said. "We've wanted to be able to organize information without inventing directories and file names. We've wanted the question 'Where did I put that information?' to always have the same answer. [Using Scopeware] you don't have to worry about how you named something, what directory it is on, or what file it is in."
"Corporate users don't want to be limited by categories of data storage that were invented when computers were radically different than they are today. We don't want people to throw out the file system, but this offers an alternative reservoir of information," Gelernter added.
Applesurf has links to lots of MacOSX stories. It was released yesterday. I don't have a machine that will run it, since Apple, in their great wisdom, decided not to support anything older than the G3 processor. That Titanium PowerBook sure looks nice... Once they finish the DVD software, that is.
Dave Winer at xmlrpc.com - My Experiment with "Messaging" - XML-RPC over SMTP. Hmm... [script]
Kelly Truelove at OpenP2P - Gnutella and the Transient Web - Gnutella is a year old. Comments on the Mandragore virus, BearShare, LimeWire. I especially like the following Slashdot comment on this article. [/.]
If you have to become a police state to enforce your law, the law is wrong.
