Month: June 2014

The potency of  marijuana edibles varies dramatically:

Colorado lawmakers made allowances for serious marijuana users by allowing recreational edibles to contain up to 100 milligrams of the psychoactive component THC, roughly equivalent to smoking three joints filled with a gram each of 15 percent THC cannabis.

At the same time, however, the law seemed to have pot novices in mind when it defined each serving size of edible marijuana to be just 10 milligrams of THC. So if you’re following serving directions on each edible, a 75-milligram-THC Mile High Mint bar weighing 45 grams should be consumed in 6-gram chunks, not all at once. And an 8.5-ounce bottle of one of Dixie’s 75-milligram-THC elixirs (just over half the size of a grande Starbucks coffee) should be divvied up into 7½ servings. Even if you abide by these directions, it’s hard to know exactly how much—or how little—THC you’re getting in each bite or gulp.

In March, a Denver Post investigation found that some edibles had just a fraction of the THC listed on their labels (a package of 100-milligram-THC Dr. J’s Jelly Stones contained 0.2 milligrams of THC), while others were considerably more potent than advertised (a 100-milligram-THC Mile High Mint bar boasted 146 milligrams of THC).

Steven Wishnia’s primer on edibles is also worth a read:

“In a nutshell, eaten cannabis gets metabolized by the liver, so delta-9 THC becomes 11-hydroxy-THC, which passes the blood-brain barrier more rapidly and has more of a psychedelic effect than standard THC,” says Understanding Marijuana author Mitch Earleywine, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Albany. “Smoked or vaporized cannabis bypasses the liver and doesn’t create the same 11-hydroxy-THC.”

Smoking marijuana gets THC into the body much faster and at higher concentrations, but it stays there much longer after eating. With smoking, as much as 50 to 60 percent of the THC in a joint can get into the blood plasma, and peak concentrations come in 5 to 10 minutes. It “very quickly crosses the blood-brain barrier,” explains Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. With orally administered cannabis, only 10 to 20 percent of the cannabinoids reach the blood plasma, and they do so 60 to 120 minutes later, says Dr. Mark A. Ware, an associate professor of family health at McGill University in Montreal.

Recent Dish on edibles here and here.

Fox News is blaming Obama for the massive influx of migrant kids into the US:

Among the policies that allegedly are creating a magnet for illegal immigrants is what’s known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The unilateral policy in 2012 allowed some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children to defer deportation — among other criteria, they must have come to the U.S. before they were 16 years old, be younger than 31 on June 15, 2012, and have been in the country since at least June 15, 2007, and have no criminal history.

The administration extended that program earlier this month, allowing the immigrants to apply for protection from deportation for another two years.

Ian Gordon’s reporting tells a very different story:

Many of the kids are coming to help a family in crushing poverty. Some are trying to join a parent who left years ago, before the recession and increased border enforcement slowed down adult immigration. Still others are leaving because of violence from family members and gangs. According to a report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 58 percent of the 400 youth the agency interviewed “had suffered, been threatened, or feared serious harm” that might merit international protection. “This is becoming less like an immigration issue and much more like a refugee issue,” says Wendy Young, executive director of Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), a DC-based nonprofit that helps unaccompanied immigrant kids find pro bono legal services. “Because this really is a forced migration. This is not kids choosing voluntarily to leave.”

Bob Ortega hears the same thing:

Gang violence in El Salvador and in urban areas of Guatemala has escalated dramatically in recent months since a weak truce among rival gangs has evaporated, said Elizabeth G. Kennedy, a Fulbright scholar reached Monday in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. “Half of them are fleeing for their lives,” she said.

Kids from Mexico are returned across the border, while others are placed in one of eighty temporary shelters, sometimes at military bases, for the duration of their deportation proceedings. Caitlin Dickson parses new allegations by immigrants rights groups that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) agents have been persistently abusing migrant children under their care:

In addition to the descriptions of freezing cold, overcrowded and unsanitary holding cells, one in four children referenced by Wednesday’s complaint said they were subjected to physical abuse—sexual, beatings, and even torture-style stress positions—by CBP officials. More than half of them reported sexual harassment, death threats, and other forms of verbal abuse. More than half said they were denied medical care and about 70 percent of them say they were detained beyond the 72-hour limit—though many report that it was hard to tell what time of day it was or how many days had passed because fluorescent lights were kept on at all hours.

Over 80 percent of the kids interviewed said they were denied adequate food and water. Many say they became sick after eating the frozen or moldy food the CBP officials gave them. One child said that while he was in custody, the drinking water came from a toilet tank. Many of the children reported being shackled while transported to and from CBP facilities, and 30 percent said that, when they were finally released, money and personal belongings that had been confiscated by CBP officials were not returned to them.

Karen McVeigh adds:

Reports of such abuses have been documented for at least a decade, the groups said, but no reforms have been implemented and agents are rarely held to account. For instance, the AIC found recently that 97% of the 809 abuse complaints – 60% of which involved abuse of migrant children – filed against Border Patrol agents between January 2009 and January 2012 resulted in the classification “no action taken”.

The head of the CBP’s internal affairs unit was removed from his post on Monday. The Obama administration is working on a program offering legal aid to the migrant children.

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel refines his earlier “theory of jerks”:

I submit that the unifying core, the essence of jerkitude in the moral sense, is this: the jerk culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or idiots to be dealt with rather than as moral and epistemic peers. This failure has both an intellectual dimension and an emotional dimension, and it has these two dimensions on both sides of the relationship. The jerk himself is both intellectually and emotionally defective, and what he defectively fails to appreciate is both the intellectual and emotional perspectives of the people around him. He can’t appreciate how he might be wrong and others right about some matter of fact; and what other people want or value doesn’t register as of interest to him, except derivatively upon his own interests. The bumpkin ignorance captured in the earlier use of ‘jerk’ has changed into a type of moral ignorance.

One of the jerk’s defining features is hypocrisy:

He might rage against the smallest typo in a student’s or secretary’s document, while producing a torrent of errors himself; it just wouldn’t occur to him to apply the same standards to himself. He might insist on promptness, while always running late. He might freely reprimand other people, expecting them to take it with good grace, while any complaints directed against him earn his eternal enmity. Such failures of parity typify the jerk’s moral short-sightedness, flowing naturally from his disregard of others’ perspectives. These hypocrisies are immediately obvious if one genuinely imagines oneself in a subordinate’s shoes for anything other than selfish and self-rationalising ends, but this is exactly what the jerk habitually fails to do.

Reviewing a new memoir by Rob Lowe, Heather Havrilesky finds that the actor has pulled off the near-impossible – a celebrity book with some humility:

[H]e makes up for … egocentric passages with lovable Diary of an Emo Kid interludes in which our hero is overcome by his surging emotions. On a flight to visit his son during his freshman year at college, for example, Lowe is forced to wear sunglasses and hide behind his newspaper to mask his copious tears. “I am amazed that so much water can come out of the eyes of someone who dehydrates himself with so much caffeine,” he writes, wryly deprecating his sentimental foolishness while also indulging a telltale celebrity Angeleno focus on maximal body maintenance.

Throughout Love Life, Lowe seems attracted to his most demeaning stories:

Jewel wipes her mouth with the back of her hand after she’s forced to kiss him while shooting the short-lived drama The Lyon’s Den. He dresses up as Bigfoot to scare his kids while camping, and ends up getting kicked in the balls. He visits Warren Beatty’s house with his girlfriend; Beatty lightly informs him that he’s been sleeping with her.

Mostly, though, Lowe’s books are a great example of the power of confounding expectations. You wouldn’t think a face off the pages of Tiger Beat magazine would revel in his own humiliation as much as Lowe does. When, in Stories I Only Tell My Friends, a young Lowe goes to a screening of The Outsiders and discovers that his central role in the film has been reduced to an afterthought, it’s impossible not to feel sad for this needy teenager, who desperately hopes for some proof that his big dream hasn’t been a waste of time. Instead, he is humbled, truly.

 

A new survey indicates that out-of-work Americans are twice as likely to suffer from depression as their employed peers. And the long-term unemployed appear to be the worst off:

Gallup also finds that the long-term unemployed spend less time with their family and friends, potentially contributing to those higher rates of depression. The survey notes that we cannot identify causality: “These results don’t necessarily imply unemployment itself causes these differences. It may be that unhappy or less positive job seekers are less likely to be able to get jobs in the first place.” That’s true, but these findings are also consistent previous academic evidence.

Rebecca Rosen mulls over the findings:

[Gallup’s Steve] Crabtree cites a 2011 study by the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University which found that long-term unemployed people were much more likely to report that they had spent two hours or less being social the previous day.

“Again,” Crabtree writes, “these results don’t necessarily imply unemployment itself causes these differences. It may be that unhappy or less positive job seekers are less likely to be able to get jobs in the first place—if, for example, employers are looking for more upbeat workers. It is also possible that those who spend less time with family and friends are therefore less able to draw on their social networks for employment leads.”

Surely there are people out there who are accurately described by one of those possibilities. But it’s all too easy to imagine a scenario in which all of these act together in a vicious cycle that mires a person in unemployment. That same Rutgers study found much higher rates of reporting “feeling ashamed or embarrassed” or “strain in family relations” for those for whom a loss of a job had had devastating financial consequences. As one reader wrote to The Atlantic in 2011, “I look at my peers who are getting married and having children and generally living life and it’s depressing.  They’ve got jobs, health insurance, relationships, homes; I don’t even have a real bed to sleep on.” Would hanging out with friends and family be very appealing under such circumstances? Not to me, at least. From there, it’s a pretty direct line to isolation, depression, the toll those will have on a job search, to more isolation, more depression, and on and on and on.

A reader goes out on a limb:

Never have I been more grateful for your anonymous reader-contributor policy …

George Will is wrong in many of the ways people are saying, but he does have a point that no one wants to really face: the power to silence other potential participants in a discussion is a privilege and a powerful one. In our post-Civil Rights era culture, grievance is the optimal position to be in while in argument. Victimhood is desirable when it allows you to win the narrative.

I am not saying this privilege is worth being raped for and that people are intentionally getting raped to win their arguments about gender, but given how often people are silenced by the victimhood of their verbal sparring partner (maybe I see it more because I live in liberal California?), I see why Will had this thought.

I’ll go further:

the story he excerpts, at least in excerpt form, doesn’t sound like rape. The guy is being an asshole for not respecting his recent ex’s wishes but she ultimately cooperated. It’s shitty, yes. It should be discouraged, yes. But “rape”? The point Marcotte and many bloggers make is that it doesn’thave to be “forcible” to be rape; even the absence of consent is rape. Well, okay yes but don’t be surprised when people stop taking “rape” as seriously when it is no longer defined as physically forcing yourself on someone.  I think that’s also one of Will’s two or three somewhat valid points amidst his mountain of old-school BS: the self-proclaimed fighters-of-rape-culture want us to conflate these more ambiguous “absence of consent” situations with the more conventional understanding of rape as a forcing of oneself on another. I think that’s probably a legitimate goal but I don’t think Will is out of line for calling folks on it.

The fact that there are men who are falsely accused of rape doesn’t “cancel out” that women are raped but when one considers the intense fear many men have of being falsely accused of rape, one starts to understand the origins of Will’s thinking as more than just enforcing patriarchy.

I have more on this in the form of anecdote, but I think I’ll wait to see where the discussion goes before I share it.

Another voices a very different view:

Hook-up culture IS rape culture.

There is no place on Earth more progressive than Swarthmore. Every far-left piety is accepted without question, much less criticism. (You’d think that students would be challenged with contrary views to help them burnish their intellectual armor so that when they left Swarthmore they’d be equipped to grapple with people who disagree with them, but you’d be mistaken). “White Male Privilege” means that white guys are automatically wrong, “Rape Culture” is Serious You Guys, and sex is only consensual if the woman has no regrets about it. If under these conditions, women are still getting raped – and not by the College Republicans or Future Patriarchs of America, but by members in good standing of the Privileged-Oppressed Alliance – then the fundamental underpinnings of the college model are completed fuçked, and need to be scrapped.

You want to see “Rape Culture”? Take hundreds of 17 to 22 year-olds, remove them from their parents, give them unrestricted and unsupervised access to alcohol and each other’s bodies, tell them that they’re mature enough to handle adult choices, and teach them that there’s no virtue in sexual restraint. Sprinkle some talk about condoms and consent, and send them back to their coed dorms. THAT is “Rape Culture.” Women are going to get raped, because many eighteen-year-old men aren’t mature enough to understand what “no” means or manage their urges, and many 18-year-old women aren’t mature enough to spot red flags. For all practical purposes, Hookup Culture IS Rape Culture.

You want to get serious about preventing rape? Single-sex dorms, no visitors after ten, doors ajar when there are visitors, room checks by RAs, consumption of alcohol banned, sexual contact beyond first base punished by warning, then formal reprimand, then suspension, then explusion. Yeah, college will be less fun. But you’ll learn more, and there’s no chance that progressive, sensitive, feminist men will ever rape you in your dorm room.

Things may change at Swarthmore. I hope rape victims get better support, because it does sound like the administration’s first instinct has been to wish the problem away when confronted with a rape allegation. (That goes for allegations that are fatuous on their faces; it’s not up to some dean to decide). Regardless, my advice to a relative or friend attending Swarthmore would be to walk down the hill to the police station, and not to trust a system designed to adjudicate academic offenses to competently handle criminal offenses.

But they’re not going to adopt my idea. In loco parentis isn’t coming back, because Swarthmore would never dream of telling eighteen-year-olds who were smart enough to be admitted that they don’t know everything (this being a campus where the prevailing belief is that someone who holds the same position on same-sex marriage that Barack Obama did until May of 2012 is too bigoted to be allowed to speak), or that they’re not yet mature enough to manage decisions about what goes into or comes out of their pelvises.