Year: 2013

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As more and more evidence emerges that medical cannabis can transform some debilitating diseases in children – preventing seizures, for example – Dr. Sanjay Gupta does more than an about face, he acknowledges his past error:

I apologize because I didn’t look hard enough, until now. I didn’t look far enough. I didn’t review papers from smaller labs in other countries doing some remarkable research, and I was too dismissive of the loud chorus of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved on cannabis. Instead, I lumped them with the high-visibility malingerers, just looking to get high. I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof. Surely, they must have quality reasoning as to why marijuana is in the category of the most dangerous drugs that have “no accepted medicinal use and a high potential for abuse.”

They didn’t have the science to support that claim, and I now know that when it comes to marijuana neither of those things are true.

What’s staggering to me is that anyone who has access to the Internet could believe for one second that what the federal government says about marijuana is true. It’s a self-evident, massive lie, incapable of being defended, and asserted by some kind of fiat. Just watch this pathetic spectacle. It’s like something out of the late Soviet Union, in which an apparatchik is forced to lie to conform to an obviously untrue ideology. This is not science:

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That the Obama administration has done nothing to reclassify the drug to conform to minimal medical standards of accuracy can only be called extreme cowardice. At some point, in my view, this president needs to say about marijuana what he said about marriage equality: that he’s for legalization, taxation and regulation. But Gupta is a helpful stepping stone – a mainstream celebrity acknowledging that the US government is engaged in misleading and lying repeatedly to the American people. Gupta spells out the empirical reality:

It doesn’t have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works. Take the case of Charlotte Figi, who I met in Colorado. She started having seizures soon after birth. By age 3, she was having 300 a week, despite being on seven different medications. Medical marijuana has calmed her brain, limiting her seizures to 2 or 3 per month.

I have seen more patients like Charlotte first hand, spent time with them and come to the realization that it is irresponsible not to provide the best care we can as a medical community, care that could involve marijuana. We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that.

Alex Moore thinks Gupta’s support could prove significant:

The fact is, no matter what category they represent, celebrities tend to cauterize our opinions. It’s not their fault—it’s just how work as a society. Mario Batali, Jamie Oliver and Top Chef come to define how we think of good cooking, and the opinions of celebrity doctors like Sanjay come to represent the “medical mainstream.”

Slate announced yesterday that it will start referring to the Washington Redskins as “Washington’s NFL team.” David Plotz explains his magazine’s rationale:

Americans think differently about race and the language of race than we did 80 years ago. We now live in a world, for instance, in which it’s absolutely unacceptable for an NFL player to utter a racial slur. Changing the way we talk is not political correctness run amok. It reflects an admirable willingness to acknowledge others who once were barely visible to the dominant culture, and to recognize that something that may seem innocent to you may be painful to others. In public discourse, we no longer talk about groups based on their physical traits: No one would ever refer to Asians as yellow-skinned. This is why the majority of teams with Indian nicknames have dropped them over the past 40 years.

He says the term’s “relatively innocent history” doesn’t excuse its current usage:

As Smithsonian linguist Ives Goddard has shown, European settlers in the 18th century seem to have adopted the term from Native Americans, who used “red skin” to describe themselves, and it was generally a descriptor, not an insult. Over time, it became a more ambiguous, and less benign term, sometimes used as a slur. When Washington owner George Preston Marshall – who was admittedly a racist, refusing to integrate his team until 1962 – chose the name in the 1930s, he was almost certainly trying to invoke Indian bravery and toughness, not to impugn Indians.

But time passes, the world changes, and all of a sudden a well-intentioned symbol is an embarrassment.

Update from a reader:

Color me unimpressed. If Slate started nurturing Native American journalists or ran a new, substantive article on Native American issues once a week (whether by a Native American or non-Native American journalist), I’d be impressed. Please publish something along those lines, if you have it in you. It’d be nice if they got a little embarrassed by their cheap, easy sanctimony.

For more on the long-standing controversy, check out the comprehensive Dish thread, Do Mascots Need Modernizing?

Keith Humphreys points out that “most state prison inmates today are incarcerated for a violent offense”:

[E]ven assuming the best of all policy worlds in which reducing incarceration continues to be a priority, the U.S. is probably too violent of a society to ever shrink its prison population to a Western Europe level. The proportion of the U.S. population that is serving time for violent crimes is larger than the proportion of the Western European population that is serving time for all offenses combined.

Arrests, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly for non-violent offenses. Balko reviews that latest numbers:

Millman dreams big:

If The Washington Post treated its own newsroom as a premium product to be bundled with a larger package of services that mostly re-purpose third-party-generated content – and long-form investigative journalism in particular is a perfect example of a premium product that is very hard to sell on its own, but which considerably enhances the value of a more comprehensive bundled product – then its scope could be much, much larger than it could ever be on its own. Larger, and more truly national, in fact, than The New York Times is (and the Times has already gone some way in the “parallel internet” direction, but relying on its own prodigious capacity to generate content). …

My own personal hope is that Bezos becomes the first internet media mogul to actually downstream revenue to third-party content providers. I’m sure it wouldn’t be much, but even establishing the principal would be huge. And the opportunity to capture a huge portion of the high-value journalistic internet is enormous. Who wouldn’t rather optimize their blog to integrate with the Washington Post‘s engine than try to sell enough banner ads to keep the lights on? And once that process has begun, the “parallel internet” starts working better than the real thing.

Ken Doctor’s vision is similar:

Netflix Inc. (NFLX) has rounded up movies and TV shows. Apple Inc. (APP)’s iTunes has rationalized the buying of and listening to music. You know the buzzwords of the consumer digital revolution made meaningful: recommendation engines, aggregation and curation, socially mediated discovery, save lists, wish lists and flexible alerts.

All of that would create a boffo news product. The Associated Press offers a 1.0 version of it, in AP Mobile, and Google News and Yahoo News, among others, have long aggregated. Google caused near apoplexy when it pulled the life-support line from Google Reader. Feedly seems to be the replacement flavor of the moment.

Seriously, though, there’s nothing like a Netflix or iTunes experience for heavy news consumers — a place to read, buy, share and be easily informed without heavy lifting.

Yesterday the advocacy group All Out delivered a 320,000-signature petition to the International Olympic Committee urging it to condemn Russia’s crackdown on gay people. Stephen Fry released a letter calling for a boycott of the 2014 Sochi Olympics, saying that Putin “is making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jews” and comparing the event to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin:

Putin is eerily repeating this insane crime, only this time against LGBT Russians. Beatings, murders and humiliations are ignored by the police. Any defence or sane discussion of homosexuality is against the law. Any statement, for example, that Tchaikovsky was gay and that his art and life reflects this sexuality and are an inspiration to other gay artists would be punishable by imprisonment. It is simply not enough to say that gay Olympians may or may not be safe in their village. The IOC absolutely must take a firm stance on behalf of the shared humanity it is supposed to represent against the barbaric, fascist law that Putin has pushed through the Duma.

LZ Granderson thinks the comparison to the Berlin Games is apt:

In talking about the 1936 Olympics, I do not equate what is happening in Russia to what happened to Jewish people during World War II. I just want to remind you that the Holocaust did not happen overnight. It was subtle. Surgical. In silence. These new anti-gay laws are disturbingly similar to the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws Hitler passed before the 1936 Olympics. And with the Pew Institute finding 84 percent of Russians believe society should reject gay people, perhaps some saying they object to gays for fear of arrest, the world should question how far Russia intends to go.

Meanwhile, runner Nick Symmonds became the first US. Olympian to publicly criticize Russia’s “gay propaganda” law this week. However, in stark contrast to Fry, Symmonds said he wouldn’t raise the issue in Russia:

I will say now what I said before the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China, when people asked me how I felt competing in a foreign country with questionable human rights standards: The playing field is not a place for politics.

In a world rife with never-ending political battles, let the playing field be where we set aside our differences and compete for national pride and the love of sport.  If I am placed in a race with a Russian athlete, I will shake his hand, thank him for his country’s generous hospitality, and then, after kicking his ass in the race, silently dedicate the win to my gay and lesbian friends back home. Upon my return, I will then continue to fight for their rights in my beloved democratic union.

Meanwhile, ESPN’s Jim Caple thinks a boycott would be counterproductive:

Skipping these upcoming Olympics would only alienate and anger the very people in Russia the boycott supporters are trying to influence. It’s somewhat like Dan Savage’s misguided call to boycott Stolichnaya vodka, which is produced in Latvia, not Russia. The people such a boycott will hurt are not the Russians with anti-gay views but the innocent workers in what was once an oppressed Soviet republic. … If Russian President Vladimir Putin opposes gay rights, let LGBT athletes from every nation go and beat his athletes in competition.

Along similar lines, last week Frida Ghitis urged athletes to show up and “turn the Winter Games into the gayest games in history”:

Let the Russian police, if they want, arrest every athlete, every coach from Europe, North American, Australia and other forward-looking countries – that includes you, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. The teams should march during the opening ceremonies brandishing rainbow flags, holding hands, proclaiming that every one of them supports equal rights for gay and lesbians — in Russia and everywhere else. Make it an “I am Spartacus” moment for the world. Let Putin arrest them all.

(Photo: Unknown anti-gay activist hits Russia’s gay and LGBT rights activist Nikolai Alexeyev during an unauthorized gay rights activists rally in central Moscow on May 25, 2013. By Andrey Svitailo/AFP/Getty Images)