Explain this to me: In the past few weeks about 155 tonsof marijuana has been stopped from coming in from Mexico. Numbers of that magnitude tend to numb. I have no idea what 155 tons means. So I did some figuring. 155 tons is about 1,500 big men (or 3,000 very petite women). It’s about 1.3 times what the space…
It didn’t surprise me that Prop 19 lost. I’m still amazed that it did so well and was taken so seriously. A lot of progress has been made over the past 10 years. I suppose only history will tell if we’ll look back on this as the high point (there was really no pun intended when I first wrote that)…
The key is to un-learn the academic habit of treating every proposition and argument offered as needing to be taken seriously and requiring a refutation, if false. Note to self: Making sh*t up is a valuable research technique. Must use it more often. So says Mark Kleiman. [thanks to Jay]
…of the war in the drugs, mostly in Mexico. While you lose you appetite looking at these, remember the US party line that violence in Mexico is a sign the drug gangs are on the run. War is peace! (I’ve never seen those evidence cones get to number 71… and we had some pretty big shootings in Baltimore.) [thanks to…
Charles Blow of the New York Times write about drugs (and yes, that is his real name), specifically about the racial disparity in marijuana arrests. Some people just don’t seem to care, but it seems to be a fundamental issue about fairness in justice. Whites and blacks smoke weed at nearly similar rates (actually whites smoke more), and yet blacks…
That’s a lot of weed. And yet somehow I don’t feel any safer. Remember when bringing in weed from Mexico was all fun and laughs? Those were the days.
So says Radley Balko: “If lawmakers are serious about saving lives, they should focus on impairment, not alcohol.” I’m not certain where I stand on this, but it does make some sense. Plus, I always appreciate counter-intuitive thinking.
How to write about Mexico’s drug war? There are only a limited number of ways that readers can be reminded of the desperate acts of human sacrifice that go on every day in this country, or of the by now calamitous statistics: the nearly 28,000 people who have been killed in drug-related battles or assassinations since President Felipe Calderón took…
“The longshoremen were paid $50,000 to $100,000 for unloading a single duffel bag of cocaine.” I’m glad nobody has offered me that kind of money for that kind of work, because I don’t know what I would do. Meanwhile the tunnel from Mexico business is booming, which is an unfortunate but inevitable result (along with migrants dying in the desert)…