Pot use, pot abuse, and legalization

The New Neo Posted on by

Pot’s illegality hasn’t stopped it from being used with great frequency in recent years by a great deal of the American public. So why not legalize it?

Well, one reason might be that it would result in even higher use:

…[A]longside legalization, such problems [self-described cannabis-use disorder] are becoming more common: The share of adults with one has doubled since the early aughts, as the share of cannabis users who consume [pot] daily or near-daily has jumped nearly 50 percent—all “in the context of increasingly permissive cannabis legislation, attitudes, and lower risk perception,” as the National Institutes of Health put it.

Public-health experts worry about the increasingly potent options available, and the striking number of constant users. “Cannabis is potentially a real public-health problem,” said Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at New York University. “It wasn’t obvious to me 25 years ago, when 9 percent of self-reported cannabis users over the last month reported daily or near-daily use. I always was prepared to say, ‘No, it’s not a very abusable drug. Nine percent of anybody will do something stupid.’ But that number is now [something like] 40 percent.” They argue that state and local governments are setting up legal regimes without sufficient public-health protection, with some even warning that the country is replacing one form of reefer madness with another, careening from treating cannabis as if it were as dangerous as heroin to treating it as if it were as benign as kombucha…

“I do think that not legalization, but the legalization movement, does have a lot on its conscience now,” [Kleiman] said. “The mantra about how this is a harmless, natural, and non-addictive substance—it’s now known by everybody. And it’s a lie.”…

“The reckless way that we are legalizing marijuana so far is mind-boggling from a public-health perspective,” Kevin Sabet, an Obama administration official and a founder of the nonprofit Smart Approaches to Marijuana, told me. “The issue now is that we have lobbyists, special interests, and people whose motivation is to make money that are writing all of these laws and taking control of the conversation.”

As a member of the generation of Americans that grew up in the 60s and was probably the first cohort to experience fairly widespread pot use (although the drug was very very different back then in terms of strength), I’m not the least bit surprised at the drug’s capacity for fostering problematic dependence. It’s been clear for decades that it has a lot of potential in that direction, and that although it’s almost certainly less dangerous than alcohol that does not make it benign.

I’m trying to think whether there is another substance that has been banned in America for a long time and has then become legal, and if so what happened after that. I can’t think of one, however. Liquor is not a good example, because it was traditionally legal and its use commonplace, and then it became illegal for a very short time (Prohibition) before it became legal again.

Alcohol is an enormously problematic substance that was already so heavily used by the public at the time of its banning that Prohibition didn’t have a chance. It was an example of a cat that was already out of the bag and could not be put back in. I believe that marijuana use today has been approaching that level, and that previous criminalization has resulted in differential, spotty, and ultimately ineffective prosecution. There may be no putting that particular cat back in the bag, either. But that’s not to say it isn’t a dangerous cat.

I don’t have an solution, unfortunately. But I definitely see a problem.

Here are some proposals:

One extreme option would be to require markets to be noncommercial: The District of Columbia, for instance, does not allow recreational sales, but does allow home cultivation and the gifting of marijuana products among adults. “If I got to pick a policy, that would probably be it,” Kleiman told me. “That would be a fine place to be if we were starting from prohibition, but we are starting from patchwork legalization…

The government could run marijuana stores, as in Canada. States could require budtenders to have some training or to refrain from making medical claims. They could ask users to set a monthly THC purchase cap and remain under it. They could cap the amount of THC in products, and bar producers from making edibles that are attractive to kids, like candies. A ban or limits on marijuana advertising are also options, as is requiring cannabis dispensaries to post public-health information.

Then, there are THC taxes, designed to hit heavy users the hardest.

At this point, the states represent a natural laboratory for the study of various approaches and their effects, because there’s a great deal of variety there. It seems to be the best we can do right now.

Free-climbers [Part I]

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: It might help to have read this previous post of mine, about free-climbing El Capitan, before reading the present post.]

This article is about Dean Potter, a free-climbing star who died in a base-jumping accident in 2015. It was written before the mishap:

Potter doesn’t want to die, he just wants to come as close to the brink as possible. “I’m addicted to the heightened awareness I get when there’s a death consequence,” he says. “My vision is sharper, and I’m more sensitive to sounds, my sense of balance and the beauty all around me. A lot of my creativity comes from this nearly insane obsession. Something sparkles in my mind, and then nothing else in life matters.”

I’ve read quite a few interviews with folks who engage in these sorts of high-risk athletic adventure activities, and they nearly all say something akin to that last sentence.

We regulars can’t quite understand it. But I think that, if you feel that way, it makes a certain amount of sense to keep up the activity despite the risks—as Steph Davis, a free-climber and base-jumper who was married to Potter and divorced in 2006, and lost her second husband to a similar base-jumping accident in 2013, says:

She doesn’t like the water, for example. She says she would never surf and chance drowning or getting eaten by a shark, “because the reward I would get from the experience would be so minimal compared to the potential risks”…

“Base jumping’s not safe. Road biking isn’t safe. Driving cars isn’t safe. Living isn’t safe,” says Davis. “So if the perception of the value or benefit of any activity is based on whether it could be made ultimately safe – that’s sort of a losing battle ’cause we’re all going to die.”

We can all see the risk; it’s obvious. But they plan and train so that they reduce the risk, although it still remains high (Davis was base-jumping with her second husband when he crashed into the cliff and died, so she is well aware of it). What we don’t see are the rewards—and for the people who fall in love with these pursuits the rewards must be phenomenal. Some people take it up, feel a certain high (to coin a phrase), but not enough to overcome the perception of risk and they drop it. Others (me, for example), can’t even conceive of feeling a reward doing this activity and perceive the risks as so enormous as to be suicidal. For us, the decision is very very easy.

In that interview Potter gave in 2008, he also had this to say:

Potter’s plan goes like this: He’ll build strength by climbing tough routes and hone his focus by highlining, BASE-jumping and free-soloing projects that require him to enter a trancelike state. “I’ll be balanced mentally and physically, and hopefully it’ll all funnel together into this superheightened power to fly,” he says. “That’s all I think about.”…

Aerodynamically, of course, self-propelled human flight is a nutty proposition. Potter, like many BASE-jumpers, often wears a one-piece, bat-shape, nylon wing suit that allows him to extend his horizontal glide during a jump. Wing-suiting, or “bird-manning,” is the closest approximation humans have to real flight. But it’s not the sort of soaring Potter has in mind. What he’s picturing is an actual human body—his—taking a running start, achieving liftoff and, well, flying. With nothing but his own two arms as wings. Just like in his dream.

Seriously.

“I know it’s insane to think that I could fly,” Potter says. “But to make it possible, you truly have to believe in it – to go to a place that’s not accepted.”

You could call this crazy. But these people must go to a place where they exercise mental and physical powers that seem almost superhuman, so perhaps there’s an inherent tendency to go one step further and think they have actually, literally, defied the laws of gravity.

[Part II coming soon.]

How can “dog” be considered a racial insult?

The New Neo Posted on by

The word “dog” is not (and as far as I know, never has been) a racially-tinged epithet, although the WaPo would have you think it is:

The president of the United States had just lobbed another racially charged insult — this time calling his former top African American adviser a “dog”

Yes, Trump called Omarosa a dog. But why is this “racially charged”? And what on earth does “racially charged” mean, anyway, if it can be expanded to include a word that has no especially racial history at all? “Racially charged” has apparently become an all-purpose term that means “any insult directed at a black person that isn’t delivered by a liberal or a leftist.”

Calling a woman a “dog”—or calling any person a dog—isn’t something I’m going to defend. I think it’s juvenile and classless, but Trump is often those things. One thing it is not, however, is racist. It is a generic insult.

As best I can remember, the practice of not allowing any white person on the right to criticize any black person in any way (and in particular in a rude way) without being accused of racism began with Obama’s candidacy. Remember this one, for example, when McCain and Palin were criticized as racists for saying Obama was a socialist?:

“Socialism” is a code word for black? Bizarre. A less bizarre notion is that “racism” has now become a code word for “all criticism of Obama”—or “criticism of any black person for any reason whatsoever.”

I’ve been around a long time, and “dog” is very much an equal-opportunity pejorative. So maybe this is the WaPo’s racism? Perhaps the WaPo thinks black people are more doglike than other people? Is that not racist of the WaPo, or at least racially charged?

Double time stamps for comments

The New Neo Posted on by

I noticed that yesterday, rather suddenly, the comments began to have double time stamps. This had been a problem in the early days of the new blog (long before the redirect), and I fixed it months ago, but it wasn’t easy to do.

So I can’t say I was the least bit pleased to see the problem recurring. On the other hand, it’s more an annoyance than a serious problem. I’m in Tuscany for about one more week, and I’m not going to fuss with it—or bother my web designer—now. I plan to deal with the whole thing on my return, and I’m pretty sure it will be fixed within a few weeks.

So please just bear with it for a bit.

More Tuscany

The New Neo Posted on by

Recent sightings, and a culinary observation:

Ever since I tasted my first piece of bread here, I wondered: why? Why no salt?

Bread without salt doesn’t taste very good at all. Tuscany is really into food, and good food, so what’s up with the bland, saltless bread? Especially when, in the summer, you lose quite a bit of salt sweating?

So, time to look it up. And the answer is—drum roll, please—nobody knows, but they’ve been doing it that way for centuries. There’s no dearth of theories; follow the link to learn them.

Trump’s China gambit

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m so risk-averse I don’t even like to play the stock market.

My aversion to risk is one of the many, many, many reasons I’m not Donald Trump.

On the other hand, I do own some stocks, and I understand the point of taking risks. I understand that with high risk can come high yield, but if you’re not canny and a little lucky it can come with big losses. And this isn’t true just in the financial world of personal investment. It’s true in general.

When Donald Trump threatened China with tariffs, a lot of pundits and politicians on the left acted as though they didn’t know anything about the idea of taking risks to get positive change. That obviously was what Trump was trying to do, however, and he was wagering that the chance of gain was a lot higher than the chance of failure. One can disagree with Trump’s assessment of his chances of bringing about a good result, but it would seem necessary to at least acknowledge that that was his assessment. But Trump doesn’t often get even that much respect.

Now it seems that a few people on the left are saying—grudgingly and hesitatingly—that maybe, just maybe, Trump’s opening moves will end up working to his advantage. From Robert Kuttner, editor of the left-leaning The American Prospect [emphasis mine]:

Trump started a tariff war with Beijing. China vowed to retaliate in kind. But Beijing was more vulnerable because China has more to lose—it exports far more than it imports and China indeed violates trade norms of fair pricing and fair access.

A number of commentators, me included, faulted Trump for the incoherence of his moves. But Trump’s blunderbuss approach seems to be harming the Chinese economy and catching the leadership off guard.

The incoherence of his moves? What does that even mean? Are they faulting Trump’s rhetoric? Kuttner doesn’t explain, so I’m not sure. But “incoherence” is not usually a problem when you’re making an opening gambit. It’s a move, not a speech.

I use the word “gambit” for a reason. Its definition is:

1. clever action in a game or other situation that is intended to achieve an advantage and usually involves taking a risk

2. a way of beginning a game of chess, in which you intentionally lose a pawn (= game piece) in order to win some other form of advantage later

That’s not esoteric knowledge. Again, you can disagree that an opening gambit such as Trump’s will work in a positive way or as intended. For example, here’s an article about the risk to some of the “pawns”—California farmers (almond growers, for example)—which is considerable and could backfire if this goes on too much longer. But don’t misunderstand the gambit’s essence as an opening move.

The Kuttner message goes on to say [emphasis mine]:

Whether by luck or design, Trump picked a moment when China’s economy was precarious, due to its heavy reliance on debt, the instability of many of its money-losing enterprises, and its inflated stock market.

Oh, so Trump didn’t even take a look at what might be going on in China before he made his move? He just happened to pick that moment, like a blind squirrel finds a nut? That seems pretty preposterous to me. As does this [emphasis mine]:

The Chinese leadership is skilled at scoping out America’s trade policy, cutting separate deals with multinational corporations, buying influence, and besting Washington at trade negotiation. But how do you play chess when the other guy is playing a schoolyard game that he makes up as he goes along?

So not only does Kuttner think Trump’s gambit wasn’t any good except by blind luck, but he doesn’t even think Trump is playing chess. The Chinese are playing chess, of course. But somehow they are possibly being bested by Trump, a guy who doesn’t even know which chess pieces move which way, who just stands there playing some “schoolyard game” like perhaps dodgeball (only he doesn’t even know the rules of that). And yet somehow, when Trump releases the ball, it goes careening out of control and happens to hit the chessboard the other side is playing on, providentially knocking a piece off in exactly the right way to lead Trump one step closer to victory

This meme of Trump the stupid clueless lucky bumbler is very popular, but it really makes little sense on the face of it—particularly in the context of the negotiation of a financial deal by Trump. After all, it’s not as though Trump hasn’t announced his intentions of making better deals for the US and written a book on his deal-making tactics and strategy.

[NOTE: When Trump started his threatening of China, I wrote a post, too. At the moment, I think it holds up pretty darn well. Excerpt:

The MSM and many others often treat Trump’s proposals as something he wants to actually do, because they might be something he actually wants to do. But Trump also might be just making the opening move in a negotiation game. ]

Of course Trump is guilty because we say he is

The New Neo Posted on by

Josh Marshall on Trump and Russia:

The greatest conceit in public life today is the notion that we don’t already know President Trump is guilty. Guilty of what? Conspiring, by whatever level of directness, with a foreign power to win the Presidency and then continuing to cater to that foreign power either as payback for the assistance or out of fear of being exposed. In other words, collusion, a national betrayal that may break some statute laws but which far transcends them and isn’t in the past but is rather on-going.

Evidence? Marshall doesn’t need it. Mueller? He must be in on the Trump-exonerating conceit too. Hillary Clinton and Fusion and the Steele dossier? Let’s not pay any attention to that evidence, either.

Then there’s how hard Trump actually has been on Russia in terms of policy. Ignore. And don’t ask yourself why “we” on the left (and that’s who Marshall is addressing; not the right) would be going so easy on Trump and denying what we know is true. Could it be that we don’t hate him quite enough?

One of the most touching of the #Walkaway stories

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve now watched a great many #WalkAway videos at YouTube. If you’re not familiar with #WalkAway, it’s a movement of people attesting to their decision to walk away from the Democratic Party and/or voting consistently liberal.

That doesn’t necessarily make them Republicans or conservatives at this point. One of the hallmarks of these stories is that the tellers all don’t end up in exactly the same place politically—so far, anyway, because the movement is rather young and most of these people had their “walk away” moments relatively recently. But portions of their stories are remarkably similar, and definite patterns emerge.

Obviously I’ve been taking a great interest in this movement. Something of the sort—something I’ve called by the much less catchy name “political change”—has occupied and fascinated me for over 15 years. I’ve also written reams about it on this blog (see categories on right sidebar), beginning in late 2004. So I plan to say a lot more about (and to) the #WalkAway movement, which is composed to a large extent of young people.

Here’s a video that I found particularly moving in the emotional sense. I’ve edited out the first six minutes or so in order to cut to the chase:

Here’s another that’s in the same vein, but far shorter.

This next one is very different, much more cerebral but still very interesting, and in this case entertaining because the speaker is pretty humorous. I’ve cued it up to start towards the middle; the first part mainly involves him saying he was a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016. This guy had a very accelerated change experience, because everything he describes from here on occurred after Trump announced his talks with North Korea’s Kim:

The propaganda from the left says the WalkAway movement is fake and that the people in it are mostly Russian bots. Originally the WalkAway stories were just text (I believe on Facebook), but after that accusation, a lot of people have posted YouTube videos to show they’re not Russian bots.

And of course, the left probably doesn’t really expect anyone going to the website and reading the WalkAway stories to think, “Russian bots, naturally!” or watch the WalkAway videos and say, “Obviously, that’s a Russian bot!” The purpose, as with so much leftist propaganda, is to get liberals to dismiss the movement out of hand and not become curious enough to even go there and read or watch for themselves. If they were to read or watch, it might be the genesis of their own WalkAway process, and that must be prevented. Best way to prevent it is to make them believe it’s not worth the time or trouble to find out, but to just take the left’s word for it.

A lot of these change stories began with a person becoming curious and doing research for him or herself. That’s how my story began, too, so many years ago.

Hungary’s Orban and government censorship of the academy

The New Neo Posted on by

Hungary’s Viktor Orban is continually referred to as “far right.” And perhaps he is. For example, I saw this article describing how Orban has decided to ban gender studies programs in the two universities in Hungary that have offered them in the first place. The headline is quite alarming (and I read similar ones elsewhere): “Viktor Orban moves to ban gender studies courses at university in ‘dangerous precedent’ for Hungary.”

What Prime Minister does such a thing, except one who is bent on stifling civil liberties and on a path to tyranny? Even the teaching of the often-useless and always-leftist topic of gender studies should be the school’s decision, not the government’s.

But a little bell went off in my head, sounding a note of doubt. Is this really what Orban had proposed? Or was it something milder than a ban?

So I turned to the body of the article. It did seem as though they were indeed talking about a ban [emphasis mine]:

A proposal by the Hungarian government to ban gender studies at universities in the country has been criticised as a “dangerous precedent” for state interference.

Hungary’s ministry for human capacities said the proposed ban, which would come into effect at the start of the 2019 academic year, had been introduced because employers showed no interest in graduates from the subject.

But critics say the ban is part of a campaign by Prime Minister Viktor Orban to attack NGOs or institutions that oppose his Fidesz party’s socially conservative narrative.

Andrea Peto, a gender studies professor at the Central European University, one of the two universities that could be affected, said the proposed ban violated the Hungarian constitution, which protects the freedom of scientific research and learning.

And the reason for the ban sure sounds odd, doesn’t it? If employers aren’t interested, why not stand back and let the market take care of it?

I read the entire article and it was quite consistent in describing the proposed action as a “ban.” But that little bell of doubt kept going off in my mind, and so I kept looking. And then I found this, which told a slightly different story [emphasis mine]:

Hungary’s government will stop financing gender studies university courses, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff said on Tuesday, marking one of the first concrete steps in a cultural shift signaled last month…

Gender studies courses are taught at the state-run university ELTE and Central European University, which are among the top universities in Hungary.

Gulyas said those already enrolled could finish their studies but Budapest would stop financing the courses from the next academic year.

Ah. So we learn two things from this article. The first is that it’s not a ban, it’s a defunding. The second is that one of the two universities in Hungary that even offer gender studies in the first place is run by the state. So why should the state pay for something it considers counterproductive and worthless?

I’m actually not the least bit in favor of governments banning areas of coursework. But withdrawing funds is a different thing, although if the state university is the only school that teaches a certain course, then withdrawing funds has the effect of eliminating it. However, if someone or some group wants to start a private college and offer it, providing their own funding, they are still free to do so.

Or so it would seem. After reading about six articles on this and trying to decipher what might actually be happening,I gave up because the truth was remarkably elusive.

It does indeed appear, however, as though a sort of reverse cultural revolution might be taking place in Hungary, a campaign by Orban’s party to restore the older ways and stamp out some of the leftist/progressive cultural agenda:

The most recent cultural target of the pro-Orban press is a Budapest exhibition of the work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, which was denounced in an article headlined: “This is the way communism is promoted using state money.” Kahlo was a member of the Mexican Communist Party and had an affair with Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

In June, the Hungarian state opera scrapped several performances of the ballet musical Billy Elliot after the same right-wing newspaper called it “gay propaganda”.

Szilvester Okovacs, the opera’s general director, insisted that commercial rather than political pressures were behind the decision. This week, he announced that the theme for the opera’s 2019-2020 season would be “Christianity”.

Orban wants the Granscian march to go in the other direction for a change. And (as I wrote recently), Europe has a much weaker tradition of “liberal capitalism—the Enlightenment, Locke and the rest” than the US does. So it would be no surprise if Orban had instituted a ban, and started more heavy-handed direction of the country’s cultural life, although it’s not at all clear that those moves are occurring right now.

Why are so many intellectuals collectivists?

The New Neo Posted on by

Milton Friedman’s answer to the question, circa 1972:

I think it’s in their own self-interest, in a double way. First, in a collectivist society, intellectuals have more power than they do in a free enterprise system. In the 1930s, the New Deal created an enormous number of jobs that didn’t exist before for intellectuals. I had one myself, so I am speaking from personal experience. There has been a “drang nach Washington” since the New Deal which intellectuals everywhere recognize as having improved their personal status. Second, it is much easier to sell simple-minded, collectivist ideas than it is to sell sophisticated, free enterprise ideas.

Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book on the same basic topic approximately forty years later. I have only read a small portion of it, but I recommend just about everything Sowell ever wrote.