The wrong people

Americans favor legalization of pot, but still:

According to the Rasmussen poll, just 36 percent of respondents say they are opposed to such a measure.

Unfortunately, it's exactly the same people who would never smoke it, who need to, so they can relax and let go of their overwhelming fears of brown people, secularism, and pleasure. Although psilocybin would probably be more mind-expanding for them (and they and we need for them to expand their minds)...



Given the workings of fear and the non-working of our political system, don't expect the time to come soon.

Mercy for me and not for thee

Yesterday, Scott Brown (R-lip service to teabaggers and blue collars alike) owned up to his teenager punk years, and to how welfare subsistence helped his mother raise him.  The juvy judge he had to appear in front of spoke sharply to him and made him write 1500 words!

Today, Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-reformed sinner for the cameras) is caught, having told a similar story (in 1989).  He was caught (at Princeton) with a kilo of marijuana, some LSD, and prescription drugs.  Any idiot can tell he or his roommates were selling, not just getting stoned to make the dining hall food more palatable.  A kilo!  He could have smoked that for a school year.

The judge spoke sternly to him and fined him $350, probably less than the value of the pot, not to mention the acid and the uppers and downers.

Both these men broke the law.  Both received mercy from liberal judges, who nonetheless expressed their disapproval.  Both of them reformed (eventually - a triumph for soft-headed liberalism!).  Both now refuse to show mercy to youths who have similar failings.  Both are Republican hypocrites.

Or is that redundant?

(h/t Atrios)

What's the punishment for heresy?

Pat Robertson (R-another planet) slipped off his usual Calvinist orthodoxy - and his spokesman had to correct him:

Chris Roslan, a CBN spokesman, insisted Thursday that Robertson "did not call for the decriminalization of marijuana. ... Dr. Robertson unequivocally stated that he is against the use of illegal drugs."

But he should not feel so all alone.  Everybody must get stoned.  It's the mandatory minimum!

Not a baby bird

Using a cell phone while driving is clearly risky. I've been put at risk repeatedly by commuters who can't seem to get out of their parking lots without holding a phone to their ears and tuning out every other driver, whom they then threaten to send off to the body shop - or the body farm.

Good, careful studies have shown that merely talking on a cell phone impairs a driver more than being drunk and subjects that driver to greater risk of accident. Talking on the phone is distracting, and distraction is a great enemy of careful driving.

And yet...

Thirty-four thousand people died on the roads last year. (Osama bin Laden, eat your heart out.) Drunk driving was implicated in a third of these deaths - more than 11,000. (h/t Atrios)

Yet, while cell phones have exploded in popularity and common use on the road, there has been no corresponding surge in traffic fatalities. If cell phone use is really as bad as drunk driving, NHTSA should be calling it out as a separate category of distraction, and I'd expect to find another 10,000 dead in the stats. But no.

Now the meta point...

Teabaggers and other wingnuts believe lots of things that the media feeds them. They also disbelieve lots of other things that the media feeds them.

I have no problem in general with skepticism of official sources, which frequently bullshit all of us. I'm not a baby bird, swallowing whatever mom and dad regurgitate into my avid little gullet. No one should be, not teabaggers, no one. I'd just like to separate truth from fiction rationally.

OK, so how to explain the difference between the studied and proven risks of drivers on the phone? Could the problem be a binning defect in our definition of drunk driving? Is it possible that we've reduced the legal standard of drunk driving (0.08% blood alcohol by volume in most states) well beyond the point at which diminishing returns have set in? I thought so until I did a few sample blood alcohol calculations (here). Using my own experiences and perceptions as a guide, there's no doubt that significant impairment begins below the legal standard. (I tested my perceptions, too. One drink per hour for four hours yields almost no blood alcohol at my weight, and that matches my self-assessment of impairment.)

Could there be a huge number of drunks on the road at all times? I don't think that explanation works. The visible rate of cell phone use is significantly higher than the percentage of the population who are problem drinkers. (Yes, both of those stats are proxies for what we'd really try to measure.)

Maybe the problem of alcohol is not the skill impairments at all but, instead, the impairment of judgement. Poor impulse control, found in cell users only at background levels, is rife in drinkers. Interestingly, stoners behind the wheel have impaired skills, too, but they don't pose increased risks because they're blessedly cautious.

Poor impulse control could push drunk drivers beyond the threshold of speed and recklessness that causes more fatal accidents, while cell phone users are so distracted they are at greater risk for non-fatal accidents.

Is this theory true? It's plausible, but I don't know that it's true. In the media, I'd settle for plausible, with the truth to be refined and worked out over time, as it always must be.

Yeah, I'm aware after five decades of life that that's too much to ask for - waaay too much.

Smashed, stoned, and burnt

Montana reactionaries firebomb a couple of marijuana dispensaries. Yeah, Montana has medical marijuana! Who knew?

No one was hurt, like an ELF political arson. When ELF burns down a real estate development to make a political statement, the right-wing goes even more hysterical than usual.

I wonder (only rhetorically) whether they'll piss their pants over this similar piece of political terror.

Of course not. Consistency is not something the wingnuts even recognize could guide their behavior.

Dude!

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

Laws must change someday

Who knew it would take 40 years and still counting since John Mayall's song came out on vinyl? Marijuana itself has been illegal in the United States for twice as long.

Legalizing pot is a long way from the most important issue we face, but you might think that, after giving up on our 50-year-old, failed Cuba policy, we might rethink our failed marijuana prohibition.

King Tut-tut

Joe Conason and I are back on the same side after a brief and mild estrangement.

The reason the media love tut-tutting stories about pot-smoking celebrities (not to mention blow job stories and drunk driving stories and Amy Winehouse breakdown stories and commando miniskirt stories and missing blond white girl stories and ...), the reason they love these stories is that they provide circus for the king to distract viewers from the real power they king's men hold over us.

Of course I'm not calling Obama king. He's only the President, not even part of the permanent ruling class that acts as if it were king.

Someone somewhere might be having fun

Michael Phelps inhaled. So what! Why do we think it's our place to censure victimless fun? Why didn't Prohibition wring that particular kind of tut-tutting out of our political system?

Marijuana is a goofiness-enhancing drug, not a performance-enhancing drug. Ask anyone who's ever been stoned, and you may get a grin from the memory, but no one will tell you how razor-sharp their concentration and coordination became. Well, no one who's sane...

It has long puzzled me why the Abrahamic religions are so devoted to stamping out most sexual pleasure. Sure, they'll tell you it's god's will, but I'm looking for a historical and sociological explanation, not one that requires me to accept the faith of the "explainer". If there was ever a time when people were screwing so hard that they starved, I haven't heard about it, and you'd think they at least would have left enough offspring to tell their story in oral culture (heh).

It's not as though Judaism, Christianity, and Islam etched in stone their scriptural opposition to sexual expression at the same time, in the style of "Life of Brian". Maybe it's the ascetic tradition - those guys each went eremetic out into the Sinai, the Dead Sea, or Arabia, going commando under their itchy robes, and they could have mistaken the suppression of libido from grime, dehydration, and isolation as necessary for the inspiration they believed they had achieved.

More likely, it's all just an overreaction against the cult of sexuality in ancient Egyptian polytheism. Those guys built monuments to their own phalluses and celebrated masturbation among other practices. Then the current abstemiousness would be the price of Exodus. Call it Pharaoh's revenge! But even Wikipedia is missing this, so maybe it's just science channel titillation, not real history.

Gateway drug

First you inhale air to get high on the oxygen. Sure it's good, but it's only there at a 20% concentration, so eventually you need something else.

Next you inhale tobacco smoke from a cigarette. That hypes you up and smooths you out at the same time - what could be finer? But still, it's only nicotine, and it may be wicked addictive, but it's only a mild stimulant, not really a blissful high even when you've graduated to two packs a day. Especially not when you've graduated to two *cough*, *hack* packs a day.

So you need to inhale something else, and now in Massachusetts you can smoke marijuana and even get caught at it without ruining your life. This means that the hardcore stoners, who couldn't evade the draft - and it's not even operating - can stay hardcore stoners.

Of course, now our toddlers will all make bongs out of their Mr. Potato Heads, and the world will end, not in fire or ice, but in a giggle-filled haze of smoke. Oh, and jelly donuts.

Damn that addictive gateway drug oxygen. All responsible Americans must work to ban all respiration from the moment of birth. It's the only way to keep our babies from feeding their munchies at mama's breast.

Or am I just suffering from the 'noids?

Not enough to worry about

Jimson weed? OK, it contains poisonous alkaloids that might give you a trip, albeit a bad one. If a public health warning was in order, a picture would have helped. But I used to have belladonna growing in my back yard, too. Never tried that either.

If you know where to look, you can find plenty of marijuana growing wild. My garden includes salvia. Smoke either for a buzz. The anti-pleasure crowd is trying to ban the latter.

Could we instead concern ourselves with the important problems that we have in great profusion and let people make their own decisions about harmless highs?

(Note: Nope, I'm not talking about opiates.)

Click image for full picture and more information at Cornell.

Thought you said 'dogs'

War on drugs, war on dogs, what's the difference?

Either way, you don't expect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to still apply, do you?

If this sort of thing can happen to the township mayor, you better believe it could happen to you. Over marijuana, not even an opiate.

Mayor Calvo came downstairs into a new time in America, in which no one is presumed innocent and guilt is only an assumption away.

My guess: If you looked into the operating history of the Prince George's County Police, you'd find aggressive use of civil forfeiture laws to fund special projects out of alleged drug money.

Something else that I had to go find myself: The PGCP is under a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice for excessive force and civil rights violations, ironically related to its K-9 unit.

IOKIYAR

Flying around with a former drug dealer is the best thing to happen to Fred Thompson lately. At least it keeps his moribund campaign in the news and gives him a chance to spin some homespun platitudes. This guy has obviously turned his life around - he's a Republican!

Fred could use a stimulant, though, and this guy sold marijuana. Funny he never did any time for it even after a probation violation.

Nowadays, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people serving mandatory minimum sentences in prison for similar crimes, thanks to Republicans and Democrats trying to out-tough each other. I notice no one asked Fred if he would pardon them. To spin it a Republican way: It would save the country a hell of a lot of money.

Not a libertarian

Even though I think marijuana should be legalized, stories like this keep me from drawing the same conclusion about opiates. Here's the money quote:

"You've got three choices," [Dotson] said. "You either die, go to prison or get saved. Mostly, people around here are dying."