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Panhandler’s sign in downtown Seattle: Will work for marijuana
Archive for January, 2011
January 20th, 2011
Category: Health and Medicine, Moral philosophy
A medical school colleague laid out a moral dilemma yesterday that illustrates the lack of a simple answer to the question of whether involvement of industry in clinical research is good or bad. We are having a civil war in the medical research community, stimulated in part by Senator Grassley’s investigations, over whether we can [...]
January 19th, 2011
Category: Crime Control, Prisons and penal policy
Newt Gingrich thinks that over-incarceration is wasteful government spending. Not the best reason to let people out of cells, but it has some political zing in the current environment.
January 17th, 2011
Category: Drug Policy
Decriminalization isn’t legalization. The costs and the benefits of prohibition relate overwhelmingly to enforcement against dealers, not users. Therefore, results of a decrim experiment don’t tell us much about the results of legalization.
January 17th, 2011
Category: Drug Policy, Health and Medicine
Methland deserves all the rave reviews it got: It’s one of the best books about drugs I have ever read. That’s why I am happy to say that Nick Reding will be our guest at the Stanford Health Policy Forum this Wednesday at the Li Ka Shing Center from 11:30am-1pm. The event will be held [...]
January 17th, 2011
Category: Affordable Care Act, Policy Analysis
As a follow-up to an earlier post, my Kaiser Health News high-risk pools piece is now up. Yeah the pre-existing condition insurance plans are problematic, embarrassingly under-funded stop-gap measures. Their inherent complexities create many administrative challenges and glitches. Yet this effort is taking more than its share of cheap shots, too. I think a key [...]
January 16th, 2011
Category: Woolgathering
The following fairy tales were reprinted in Espy, Words at Play (1975) and have been reproduced here and there (with introduced errors that I have tried to correct). I think they are sidesplitting, much funnier than Mots d’heures, gousses, rames, though I’m not sure why (you have to read them out loud as though the [...]
January 15th, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
Amy Chua is getting slapped around for her Wall Street Journal article on “Tiger Mom” parenting. Many parents responded to her piece by saying, essentially, “There’s more to life than achievement, there is happiness, freedom, autonomy, and unconditional love!” Well, that’s true, but those critiques concede something that is open to debate: Where is the [...]