Sunday, November 26, 2006

Time - Brain Damage OK, Time Magazine is entitled to their own list of the top 100 influential albums of all time. But can you possibly take a list like that seriously when it doesn't include Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon"? I mean, how can that even be a consideration? It's not a border-line option. I mean, come on -- it was on Billboard's Top 200 list for 741 consecutive weeks (over 14 years). Multiple generations of college students got stoned and found something... amazing... in this album (and the wonderful thing is, each of them found something different). Today, over 30 years after the album came out, I often wear a tie with a simple prism design and people stop me to tell me how much they like it (often with a knowing wink). How many albums on Time's list had that kind of influence? "there is no dark side of the Moon really... matter of fact it's all dark" 10:51:56 AM | drug policy | Related  | permalink | comment []

Context for Kathryn Johnston Radley has an outstanding (and horrifying -- even though I've read about all those cases before, it still hurts) piece putting the Johnston story in perspective, with examples from other bad raids. People like Maye and Johnston are supposed to show remarkable poise and judgment, despite the fact that armed men are breaking into their homes.. When police make mistakes, however, they're nearly always forgiven. Because we're supposed to understand how an officer in such a volatile situation might misjudge an everyday object for a gun, or shoot a completely innocent, unarmed man -- all perfectly understandable, given the volatile, confrontational circumstances surrounding SWAT raids. Such deaths -- while tragic -- are mere collateral damage. We have to keep fighting the war on drugs. And we have to protect our police officers by allowing them to break down doors while people are sleeping. The deaths of a few innocent people are the price we pay for the privilege of having the government tell us what we are and aren't allowed to put into our bodies. It's an abhorrent double standard. Read the whole thing. Now I know that some people around the web are chiding people like us for jumping on the story too quickly -- that we don't know all the facts yet, so how can we possibly claim that a tragedy occurred in the Katrhyn Johnston case? It's possible that she was a 92-year-old drug dealing kingpin (and they just didn't happen to find anything at her place). Maybe she was letting her house be used by drug dealers. Maybe she had created an elaborate hidden identity during the decades she lived in that house. Who knows? I don't. And I don't care. Because it just doesn't matter. When the shooting happened is not when things went wrong. As Atlanta's photodude says: But I do know this. No violent crime had been committed or observed to obtain this warrant. There was no evidence of anyone in the home being held against their will. The circumstances seemed to contain no imminent danger ... whatsoever. And that's the point that Radley has to keep repeating to the dimwitted apologists for our drug war. They just don't seem to get the fact that it is the policy that is completely and insanely out of control. The calamitous policy that says that it is somehow appropriate to use military home invasion techniques for drug charges. To use armed invasion as a sanctioned method to arrest someone for marijuana offenses is as insane as if we had police fire rocket propelled grenades at cars exceeding the speed limit. 8:54:34 AM | drug policy | Related  | permalink | comment []

Robyn Blumner on Friedman and the Drug War A refreshing OpEd in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: Friedman made right call on legalization ... In a Newsweek article Friedman wrote in 1972, he took a step outside his realm of monetary policy and free marketeering and laid out in clear, unequivocal terms what kind of social disaster we were buying with Nixon's drug war. Thirty years later, we know he couldn't have been more right. [...] We have spent $1 trillion on the drug war since 1972 and we arrest 1.7 million people for nonviolent drug offenses every year. When you put a rapist in prison another one doesn't get recruited to take his place, but that is precisely what happens in drug dealing. Take one guy off the streets and that becomes a job opportunity for someone else in the neighborhood. [...] Albert Einstein is credited with saying that insanity is "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." We must really be nuts. [...] Legalization of drugs is Friedman's best economic and moral thesis that has been left untried; and one day, when courage returns to politics and we take this sensible step, experience will bear that out. Beautiful. Update: Another great OpEd this weekend -- this one at the Aspen Daily News by LEAP's Tony Ryan -- End The War On Drugs. 8:04:01 AM | drug policy | Related  | permalink | comment []