Medical marijuana in Pennsylvania

It's not as exciting or advanced as in New Hampshire, Rhode Island or Vermont, but at least a medical marijuana bill has been introduced in Pennslyvania. Near as I can tell, it will be a while before legislative opinion settles or coalesces. If MM does get substantial support in PA, especially in rural PA, that could be an indicator of increasing acceptance in what might roughly be called "heartland" areas. If in rural Pennsylvania, why not in most of the Midwest? Illinois is on the way, though success is not guaranteed this time around.,

A bad month for the Empire

The American Empire has had better months. In the war that was supposed to have been won to the point of virtually wrapping up a stable democracy, thanks to Bush's courageous "surge," violence has been rising. April was the most violent month in Iraq since March of 2008. Unfortunately, one response to this increase in violence will be pleas to keep U.S. military forces in Iraq a while longer, "just until things calm down again. The possibility that the very presence of U.S. troops is a contributory factor to the violence will get short shrift.

In Afghanistan, even before President Obama's "surge" is properly underway, things are deteriorating, with increased attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the Pakistani government doing its Wicked Witch of the West routine -- "I'm melting, I'm melting" -- in the face of multiple challenges including its own sclerosis.

The likely result of these two situations is the commitment of even more resources the U.S. doesn't really have -- check out the deficits and projected deficits -- to military, quasi-military or "nation-building" to enterprises likely to involve years of strenuous effort with depleted resources with outcomes that are hardly likely to be favorable. Is this the way empires end -- not with a bang but a whimper of pain from taxpayers?

Cuban attitudes changing

As is usual with politicians, President Obama is following, not leading, on the issue of changing the U.S. relationship with Cuba. He lifted restrictions on travel to Cuba by Cuban-Americans and on remittances to relatives in Cuba, and gave U.S. telecoms to try to market in Cuba. As this Register editorial suggests, however, the group that has been most insistent on maintaining the economic embargo over the years, the Cuban American National Foundation, has shifted its stance. It is now officialy open to wide-ranging discussions on changing U.S. policy, up to and possibly including lifting the embargo. A recent poll of Cuban-Americans, by a firm that has been conducting them for decades, found 67% in favor of lifting all travel restrictions, and 43% declaring the embargo a "failure."

In other words, the voting bloc in Florida that has kept politicians of both parties from saying much about liberalizing relations with Cuba is within a few percentage points of being ready to dump the embargo. Younger Cuban-Americans favor liberalization solidly and that seems to be where the trend is. It is this fact rather than hope of "enlightened leadership" from Washington that makes me think the policies will be changed soon. Like most politicians, Obama has put his finger to the wind, and when he senses the dominant direction will run to the front of the pack saying "follow me; I'm leading now."

100 Days of Hype

I really dislike this artificial delineation of the first 100 days of any president's term -- that phony demarcation that everybody in the news media claims to recognize as artificial and unhelpful, just before hyping the heck out of it. Sure enough, Obama claimed the country is coming out of the recession thanks to his sterling efforts, but refuses to acknowledge he had any part in creating this huge deficit facing the government. The acolytes bow and the critics carp. SOS. Yawn. We'll have a nuch better idea in months. I know he knows nothing about economics, so I doubt his proclamations. If he really wanted a "new era" in Washington he could have simply failed to pay the least bit of attention to this "milestone." But old habits die hard, and foolish customs ossify into "sacred traditions."

Progress on medical marijuana book

I made some decent progress on my proposed marijuana legalization book today. I have named most of the chapters I want to include in the outline and done a brief description on several. Have to fill it out and write a sample chapter to have a package I can start peddling to publishers. I called Ethan Nadelmann at the Drug Policy Alliance today, but he was traveling, so I'll call tomorrow morning. Would like his advice, whether he knows about other similar projects in the works, etc. I'm toying with making the title or subtitle a prediction that marijuana will be legal soon.

New Hampshire voting on medical marijuana

The New Hampshire legislature was scheduled to vote today on medical marijuana as well as several other bills considered controversial or unusual.. Finally found word (should have gone to MPP first!) that it passed the New Hampshire Senate today, and a similar bill passed the Minnesota Senate. In addition, Rhode Island the Senate passed a bill to establis "compassion cnters." A big day for the movement.

Arlen Specter shifts the balance

Many people will say that it's about time Sen. Arlen Specter of PA changed parties and became a Democrat. Certainly conservatives (or self-styled conservatives) who want the Republican Party to be their domain are likely pleased. I'm not so sure. Specter's defection gives the Democrats something close to a filibuster-proof majority depending on the issue, and I would just as soon Obama not have that. And although Specter has always been a liberal by "big-tent" Republican standards, he has also done yeoman work for the Republicans from time to time, as during nthe Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.

Arlen Specter visited the Register editorial board some years ago (probably 1999) when he undertook a brief run at the presidency. I found him pleasant and thoughtful and more than willing to discuss his several differences with our philosophy in a sustained and civil manner. I have no particular interest in the future of the Republican Party, not being such a party animal myself. But I think the party is weaker (and probably more clueless) for Specter being gone.

Medical marijuana battle continues in New Hampshire

New Hampshire is currently considering a bill to permit the medicinal use of marijuana for certain conditions, with a physician's recommendation. This piece by a current police officer, explaining why he doesn't want to arrest sick people, ran in the famously conservative Manchester Union-Leader, no less. Attitudes do seem to be changing. It is especially noteworthy to me that a currently serving police officer wrote this. It is not uncommon for retired law enforcement personnel to declare themselves against the unwinnable war on drugs, but currently serving officers seldom do. Don't know whether this is because they face possible reprisals or blockades in their career paths, but they simply hardly ever do. Either Bradley Jarris is especially committed or rather brave, or attitudes are changing on police forces.

The joy of music

If you ever had doubts that music hath charms, or that it has the capacity to keep older people youthful, check out this YouTube.

Pushing back on the drug war exception to the Fourth Amendment

I certainly don't agree with the Supreme Court's decisions all the time, by a long shot, but I have to commend the decision in Arizona v. Gant. It modified a previous decision which had been interpreted to allow the police to search cars whenever they make a traffic stop. Gant reinstated the older rule that a search was warranted (an unwarranted search, that is) only when there was some danger that a suspect might reach for something in the car, like a gun, or when additional evidence for the crime for which he/she was stopped was needed and there was reason to believe it was in the car. In Gant's case, he was already handcuffed in the patrol car and the police already had all the evidence they need on a suspended-license bust.

This Register editorial explains the issues a little more thoroughly. Interesting that our first commenter disagrees and virtually endorses the idea of a police state in which police can search anyone anywhere for whatever reason, or no particular reason. Sad that Americans think that wy, but some of them certainly do.

Back on the blogtrail

Miss me? Having installed our house sitter as well as the security door, we're visiting our son Stephen, who has taken advantage of ths in-the-tank housing market to buy his first house -- at the age of 23 an age when, for me, buying a house was abut 20years away. He just got his Internet service installed, and it was a little spotty yesterday -- and when it was up and working it seemed more important for Jen to use it. Also, our niece Mandie spent a good bit of the day with us, and amused herself in part by playing computer games, after which she and I went out shopping.

I don't think I wasted the day. Having changed my direction for my next book -- I think it will be more timely to do a marijuna-legalization trending toward all-illicit-drugs legalization book than a foreign policy book -- I read Ed Rosenthal and Steve Kubby's "Why Marijuana Should Be Legal," and began the Tim Lynch-edited "After Prohibition." It's not that I'm unfamiliar with the arguments, heaven knows but when I'm starting a new project I find it useful to saturate myself with knowledge and arguments to try to make sure I don't miss any important aspects, then setting out to prioritize them.

My inclination now is to expand on the reporting I did for this Register article, noting the swiftness with which leglization arguments seem to have entered the mainstream. I plan to work on an outline and sample chapter during this, my furlough week, and then start peddling it to publishers while I finish it. Wish me luck -- and feel free to ask me how it's going. A little prod now and then from friends is not a bad idea.

A swinish outbreak

The media tend to hype these things a bit more than they deserve, but apparently there really is something to the Swine Flu outbreak that seems to have originated in Mexico. It's sad. I have loved going to Mexico over the years, and we just had a delegation come in to tell, us apparently accurately, that the drug war killings haven't affected tourists yet (thought they have certainly affected tourism negatively. Now there's another reason to think twice about going to Mexico. At least for a while.

Death in Vienna

One can never know for sure what goes into a decision to commit suicide, and there is still much too little known about the circumstances surrounding Freddie Mac chief financial officer David Kellerman’s suicide in the Washington suburb of Vienna, VA for me even to speculate. It does seem that he was under heavy pressure at work as CFO of a quasi-company-quasi-government-agency that lost $50 billion last year. I’ll just link to this WaPo story and this NYT story that offer a few more details than I’ve seen on various TV reports.

I'm not sure why seeing Kellerman's house on cable news struck me so hard, except that when I lived in the capital area, in Falls, Church, next door to Vienna, I spent a fair amount of time in Vienna, shopping, going to a particular bar, concerts at Wolf Trap, etc. I'm sure I drove through that neighborhood numerous times -- way above my price range then or now, but nice to look at.

It also reminded me that I can always say that I played in the pit orchestra for performances of a Franz Lehar operetta done by the Civic Light Opera Company of Vienna -- Vienna, Virginia, that is. Since I left there in 1980 to come home to California and the Register, it had to be 1978 or 1979. They recruited wind players from a community band I was playing in, and since I was the only bassoonist who showed an interst, I was in. The operetta was "Land of Smiles," and actually the music was pretty easy.

Quote of the Day

"It is the popular theory, at least in America, that monarchism is a curse fastened upon the common people from above -- that the monarch saddles it upon them without their consent and against their will. The theory is without support in the facts. Kings are created, not by kings, but by the people. The visualize one of the ineradicable needs of all third-rate men . . . and that is the need of something to venerate, to bow down to, to follow and obey." -- H.L. Mencken

Now it's Jane Harman bit by a law she supported

Last week we had various conservatives going bonkers over the fact that Homeland Security put out a report suggesting extreme right wingers and returning veterans might be worth watching for signs of violence. So who was it who cheered from the sidelines as Bush put in all the appurtenances of the surveillance state and kept stressing that creepy term Homeland Security (an admission of empire, of course)? Welcome to the Security State you liked when a guy with an R behind his name was in the White House.

Now Democratic hack congresscritter Jane Harman, who knew about and defended the NSA unwarranted wiretapping program and even called for the prosecution of the NYT when it did a story about the manifestly illegal program. She's not so pleased now. In fact she's hopping mad. One of those warrantless wiretaps apparently caught her doing a little horsetrading with people from AIPAC, whose former lobbyists are slated to go on trial in June for passing secrets to Israel. You get me the chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee, she apparently said in 2006, and I'll see what I can do about getting those charges dropped. She didn't get the chairmanship; apparently she and Nancy Pelosi hate each other. Oh, well.

If I thought it would lead to recission of all the surveillance laws and programs the Bushies put in place I might even indulge in a little Schadenfreude. But I think Obama likes all those conveniently expanded executive powers just fine, thank you.

Cramdown: clinging to a bad idea

Sometimes when politicians get their teeth into a bad idea they just hang onto it no matter how plausible the arguments against it, no matter if it starts to taste bad. An example is the idea of giving bankruptcy judges the power to reduce the principal and/or interest on mortgage contracts. For starters, this would be yet one more contract/agreement that someone from the government can simply abrogate at will -- making it more difficult to make agreements, to make plans, to be able to trust people to do what they say they will do, thus breaking down a little further what is perhaps the most essential element of a society that has any hope of being reasonably free, the ability to trust somebody who is not a direct relative or a member of your clan or tribe.

As this Register editorial explains, it would also quite predictably raise the cost of mortgages by introducing one more element of risk for the lender. Lenders deal with risk by raising the price -- either requiring a larger down payment or charging a higher interest rate or both. This is a terrible idea, but the Obama administration is committed to it, it has passed the House, and though it's running into resistance it is likely to pass the Senate.

To make it worse, it just wouldn't help that many people. But the people who would be hurt the most would be low- to moderate-income people or first-time homebuyers who don't have any equity to draw on when looking at a required down payment in the $40-50,000 range. How it ever came to be a part of our culture that people thinking that giving more power to people in government can be equated with com[passion is one of the great mysteries of our time.

Looking under the TARP

Several banks have already returned the TARP bailout money, more are in the process of preparing to do so, and several larger banks have been denied permission to do so. Denied permission! The sheer dictatorial aspect of this program is breathtaking. Several large banks were bullied into taking the money last fall, ostensibly so it wouldn't be embarrassing when banks that were really in trouble took bailout bucks. That aspect of the program is a complete reversal of the transparency everybody in government says they want from the private sector. The TARP program deliberately set out to hide various banks' true condition from the public and investors. And now the government doesn't want to let banks pay back the money for the sake of saving the reputation of the program itself -- forget that it's supposed to be representing taxpayers' interests. But government always serves its own interest anyway, not the interests of the people it pretends to represent. Understanding that is the first step in acquiring political wisdom.

Here's an angry Register editorial on the subject. Lesson? No private company should ever again ask for or accept a handout from the government. Fat chance!

Torture: a chance to learn

Here is the Register's editorial today on the torture memos. The emphasis here is on calling for a release of all the information surrounding torture, including whatever evidence, if any, exists for torture having been efficacious as a way to acquire information. Dick Cheney's call for the release of such information, I suspect, is a bit of bravado, and his claim that he had asked for such release earlier is already suspect. How sad that he now feels he must spend the rest of his life defending an indefensible decision to put together a torture program -- yes, it was a program orchestrated from the top, not an occasional excess by those in the field. I suspect a full examination would reveal almost nothing that could not have been acquired without torture. But bring it out and bring it on!

Destroying evidence clinches the case for torture

I must admit that if you read the "torture memos" released last Thursday without much prior knowledge they have a certain plausibility -- except for the fact that Bybee and Bradbury, in their memos of advice to the CIA take all the assurances of the CIA that in using face-slaps, head-grabbing, wall-pushing, sleep deprivation and so on they are taking tender care to make sure there is no lasting damage and that the detainees are always under medical supervision. There's no evidence of anything resembling independent investigation into whether the assurances were accurate, or whether the detainees actually did suffer lasting damage, especially mental damage. Links to the four memos are here, here, here, and here.

The only thing that seems to bother the DOJ lawyers is waterboarding, and they even come to the conclusion that that isn't torture either. But then there's the astounding offhanded acknowledgment that waterboarding was used 266 times on just two detainees -- 183 on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed alone. That certainly put the lie to the story the Bushies were trying to peddle for years that KSM wilted after what was inferred to be a single waterboarding and started spilling his guts eagerly. It also makes it questionable that it was all that effective. If they had to use it 183 times, it must not have been all that productive of actionable intelligence. Or was that sheer sadism?

The key thing to know, however, as Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, is that the CIA, after lying to the 9/11 Commission about their existence, destroyed the tapes of KSM's interrogation. If it really were effective, those tapes would have been invaluable for training purposes, and something the CIA was proud of. They had to be deeply ashamed and/or aware that they would be clear evidence of the use of torture.

Then there's the evidence of what the techniques did to detainees. The evidence is that KSM was reduced to a quivering mass of protoplasm. Jose Padilla, the US citizen kept in solitary in a Navy brig and not even waterboarded, was deemed unfit to contribute to his defense. The statutory definition of torture includes lasting mental or psychological harm. The interrogation certainly did that to more than one detainee -- and several died during interrogation as well.

A shameful episode in our history. Phil Zelikow of the 9/11 Commission has some thoughts on how we got there -- mainly by focusing on possible lawfulness rather than morality, and suggestions for going forward, not all of which I would endorse.

Male depression and medical marijuana

Actually, it would probably be effective, but there's a more subtle connection. In the current New Republic Sherwin Nuland reviews a new book, Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness, by Mark Micale, which chronicles just how long it took for doctors and psychiatrists to recognize that men as well as women can have depression and other severe mental or emotional disorders. Serious depression was long called hysteria, after the Greek word for womb, hystera. Properly buttoned-up (buttoned-down?) men couldn't have it. When men seemed mentally unstable other explanations were found. In most cultures of the past, proper men could not have that flighty women's disease.

The story that emerges is that cultural conditioning, except for a few exceptional thinkers, determines what most people are willing to consider as possible explanations for observed phenemona. As Nuland puts it, Micale documents "from approximately the end of the Georgian period until relatively recently, a story in which male physicians have returned to their earlier habit of bringing forth theories of female emotionality and mental frailty based on the close -- and obviously biased -- observation of women, while failing to acknowledge, or perhaps even to observe, that men of all social classes could be shown to suffer from the same ailments. Not from lack of evidence or cases to study did this situation exist, but for a complex of reasons personal and general, ranging from the anxieties of the individual male observers all the way to the growth and perpetuation of a reliable economic and civil order in nineteenth century society -- the political and cultural imperative of a patriarchal structure in which the image of stability and dependability of the rational, clear-thinking male was assured."

In other words, because of cultural/social assumptions, professional physicians couldn't see what was right in front of them, or maybe inside them.

What does this have to do with medical marijuana? Consider the only sentence then-drug-czar Barry McCaffrey ever quoted from the 1999 Institute of Medicine report on medicine and marijuana he commissioned after California passed prop. 215 in 1996: "For those reasons [cannabinoids in marijuana smoke, uncertain delivery of predictable quantities of numerous compounds] there is little future in smoked marijuana as a medically approved medication." Gen. McCaffrey ignored the fact that the report went on to say that until alternative delivery systems were developed patients should be allowed to smoke.

I contend that while there's a modicum of science in such statements, it's mostly cultural conditioning. As I discuss at some length in my book, "Waiting to Inhale," the paradigm of modern medicine includes pills (or shots) that deliver precise doses of single molecules. Within that paradigm smoking an herb seems -- well, so primitive, so shaman or medicine-man-like, so everything we scientists in white coats have moved beyond. There's value in the quest of such precision. But the test of a medicine shouldn't be whether it can be prescribed in precise doses but whether it works. The objection to smoking is far more cultural than scientific or rational.

That's my 420 contribution.