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Former Congressman Patrick Kennedy, a long-time advocate for people with addiction and mental illness, is leading a new group calling for a different approach to marijuana policy. Smart Approaches to Marijuana will advocate for alternatives to incarceration, expanded mental health and addiction treatment and the provision of non-smoked cannabis medicines to sick patients (without waiting [...]
Posts Tagged ‘drug legalization’
December 31st, 2012
Category: Drug Policy
By most measures the majority of the drug problem in both the US and Mexico does not relate to marijuana, so nothing you’re going to do with marijuana is very likely to decisively change the character of the overall drug policy situation So says Professor Jonathan Caulkins in Randolph Nogel’s unusually nuanced article on the [...]
September 4th, 2012
Category: Drug Policy, Health and Medicine
Some people believe the ‘gateway effect’ exists because early drug use primes the human brain for more drug-seeking, others argue that the friends you make using drugs as a youth are a ready source for other drugs later, and still others argue that there are factors, like impulsivity, that causes both early and later drug [...]
April 29th, 2012
Category: Crime Control, Drug Policy
Many times in the history of the United States, rising prevalence of use of a drug has been responded to with increased arrests of people in possession of that drug. As Peter Reuter and Rob MacCoun pointed out some years ago, this makes the rise of marijuana possession arrests in the U.S. particularly puzzling: The [...]
April 11th, 2012
Category: Drug Policy
Zack Beauchamp makes an extremely common analytic error in a post on drug policy. In an effort to refute Water Russell Mead’s argument that we can learn something about drug legalization from the legal opioid pain medication industry, Beauchamp responds by citing data from Portugal. I am not going to get into the substance of [...]
January 10th, 2012
Category: Britain, Drug Policy
The Economist handicaps the coming London mayoral race, noting correctly that Boris Johnson currently leads Ken Livingstone in the polls but by no means has things sewn up. But the newspaper’s house politics skew the coverage badly as the article uses this gem of circumlocution to limn Johnson’s achievements as mayor: Crime has continued to [...]
November 28th, 2011
Category: Drug Policy, Economics
I recently presented a series of DIY calculations for determining the size of the U.S. marijuana market. This post got a lot of play around the web, most notably from Andrew Sullivan, who again did me the kindness of adding his millions of regular readers to my regular readers (both of them). A number of [...]
November 18th, 2011
Category: Drug Policy
Morgan Fox at Cato Institute sees great profit potential from legalizing marijuana because “experts” tell him that the market in this commodity may be worth as much as $120 Billion a year, which is more than wheat and corn combined. An impressive claim indeed, but is it true? You are going to hear many numbers [...]
September 7th, 2011
Category: Drug Policy
Mark informs me that this Thursday he will be “with Glenn Greenwald on bloggingheads tv on drugs”. I have told him this is a bad idea and it would make more sense to take the drugs afterwards, but still, he’s his own man so there it is. Let me contribute something in advance nonetheless. Many [...]