Time to stop the drug war

Johann Hari sums it up at Huffpo: Which country was just named by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff as the most likely after Pakistan to suffer a "rapid and sudden collapse"?

Most of us would guess Iraq. The answer is Mexico. The death toll in Tijuana today is higher than in Baghdad. The story of how this came to happen is the story of this war -- and why it will have to end, soon.

When you criminalize a drug for which there is a large market, it doesn't disappear. The trade is simply transferred from pharmacists and doctors to armed criminal gangs. In order to protect their patch and their supply routes, these gangs tool up -- and kill anyone who gets in their way. You can see this any day on the streets of London or Los Angeles, where teenage gangs stab or shoot each other for control of the 3,000 percent profit margins on offer. Now imagine this process on a countrywide scale, and you have Mexico and Afghanistan today.

How bad have things gotten in Mexico?

In 2007, more than 2,000 people were killed. In 2008, it was more than 5,400 people. The victims range from a pregnant woman washing her car to a four year-old child to a family in the "wrong" house watching television. Today, 70 percent of Mexicans say they are frightened to go out because of the cartels.

Writer Christina Gleason sums up some of the carnage here in the U.S.:

According to the Department of Justice, over half of all sentenced federal prisoners are drug offenders. Over 80% of the increase in the federal prison population was due to drug convictions between 1985 and 1995. In addition, a 2006 report claimed that 17% of State prisoners and 18% of Federal prisoners committed their crimes in order to obtain drug money. According to a 2001 report, the average sentence for all offenses was 56.8 months. The average sentence for drug offenses was 75.6 months, while the average sentence for violent offenses was 63.0 months. Someone is arrested for violating a drug law every 17 seconds. Someone is arrested for violating a cannabis law every 38 seconds.

What's the solution? Hari quotes Terry Nelson a former U.S. drug enforcement officer who has seen the light:

Legalizing and regulating drugs will stop drug market crime and violence by putting major cartels and gangs out of business. It's the one surefire way to bankrupt them, but when will our leaders talk about it?

Why do most people reject this solution? They are afraid that the people who are already getting drugs will continue getting drugs, I suppose. They are failing to consider the extent of the violence and the fact that the drug war is taking valuable money out of the economy to accomplish next to nothing. If you doubt me, go watch a drug court docket. Talk about meaningless rubber stamping. People with drug records as long as your arm simply revolve through the system. In state court, judges struggle to find ways to keep from filling our prisons with nothing but drug offenders. That is the extent of the problem.

Continue ReadingTime to stop the drug war

Richard Dawkins discusses natural selection with Randolf Nesse

Richard Dawkins has recently released a new set of videos packaged under the title "The Genius of Charles Darwin." This series features physician Randolph Nesse, who is the author of Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, a book I've discussed in previous posts. This video is the first of a series of five uncut videos featuring Nesse that Dawkins has made available (see Youtube.com for the next four videos). You can also view the entire series straight through from the site of Richard Dawkins. In this video, you'll hear Dawkins and Nesse discussing "design" (including poor design), randomness (note the example of the jar of only copper coins), Darwinian medicine, the toxic environment we've created for ourselves and path dependence. Nesse would like every medical textbook to have an extra paragraph of explanation regarding each human illness or frailty (e.g., back pain): how was it that natural selection left this condition as it did? In this video, Nesse also explains that the body is not a machine. He comes to this conclusion because the body does not have "blueprints." There is no such thing as a "normal genome." A genome is merely a collection of genes that work. Thus, the genome is not a blueprint and the body is thus not a machine. For more on this metaphor, see here.

Continue ReadingRichard Dawkins discusses natural selection with Randolf Nesse

Stephen Colbert tries to understand how we decide

Stephen Colbert mixes it up with Jonah Lehrer, author of "How We Decide." The disjointed conversation does have its serious moments, with the focus being the emotional self versus the rational self. Sometimes I wonder whether Colbert is tempted to drop his character for ten minutes and just have a good conversation with a thoughtful guest. This might have been one of those times.

Continue ReadingStephen Colbert tries to understand how we decide

Reading On The Rise

According to this report, reading is on the rise in America for the first time in a quarter century. It's difficult for me to express how pleased this makes me. Civilization and its discontents have been in the back of my mind since I became aware of how little reading most people do. To go into a house---a nice house,well-furnished, a place of some affluence---and see no books at all has always given me a chill, especially if there are children in the house. Over the last 30 years, since I've been paying attention to the issue, I've found a bewildering array of excuses among people across all walks of life as to why they never read. I can understand fatigue, certainly---it is easier to just flip on the tube and veg out to canned dramas---but in many of these instances, reading has simply never been important. To someone for whom reading has been the great salvation, this is simply baffling. Reading, I believe, is the best way we have to gain access to the world short of physically immersing ourselves in different places and cultures. Even for those who have the opportunity and resource to travel that extensively, reading provides a necessary background for the many places that will be otherwise inaccessibly alien to our sensibilities.

Continue ReadingReading On The Rise

You too can be part of the Web 2.0 (if you’re willing to invest time and money on technology).

I was born in 1956, when ordinary people had far fewer opportunities to communicate their ideas to mass markets. For most of my adult life, there were only a few choices to get the word out. You could send out mass mailings or you could hit the telephones, dialing number after number. You could hang paper flyers on telephone poles and fences. You could knock on doors and talk to the folks house by house. Or you could stand on a soapbox and shout your ideas. These traditional “techniques” are still available and they are still sometimes quite effective, at least to those with hordes of volunteers at their service. The Internet, however, has opened up many additional possibilities for spreading your ideas far and wide. With that great power, however, comes serious responsibility to spend the time to obtain a working knowledge of the underlying technology. How many bloggers are out there now? At least 100 million. Being a proficient user of a word processor is only the first step. Putting your written work on your own website also requires you to understand at least the basic tools of blogging software. With those two steps, you might already be on a big slippery slope. Many people are perfectly happy blogging on a free site such as LiveJournal MSN's Spaces or Google's Blogger, or one of the many sites with low fees as long as your traffic is modest (e.g., Typepad). Choosing to place your blog with one of these simple on-line sites keeps things really easy. You needn't ever load any software or maintain the "backend" of your blog. In 2006, I suspected that I would want to take advantage of many modern day multi-media tools. That's why I chose to base my blog on WordPress. Going with WordPress allowed me to take advantage of numerous constantly evolving add-ons. I chose it because it kept my site flexible for using multimedia technology that, in return for its flexibility, can require a substantial investment in time. If you’re like me, you will thus develop a love/hate relationship to the flexible do-it-yourself blogging software and the many multi-media tools that allow you to feed your blog in sophisticated ways. You’ll become enthralled with the power these things give you to package your ideas. But you might also become frustrated when you see how much time it takes to learn to make proficient use of these tools. Here's an ironic twist: Since 2006, the free online sites now allow you to easily incorporate many kinds of images, sounds and video on blogs. Therefore, if you aren't exceedingly greedy for technology or traffic, you can now have it all. Yet you'll still need to decide how much multi-media to incorporate into your blog, even if it's free and simple. Therefore, much of this post applies to all of us who have decided to jump into the world of blogging.

Continue ReadingYou too can be part of the Web 2.0 (if you’re willing to invest time and money on technology).