Author: Andrew Sullivan

And the vast majority of those people aren’t Americans:

The drug war has split in two, and there are increasing differences in how it is fought. In August, the Department of Justice advised federal prosecutors that while possessing a small amount of marijuana remains a federal crime, it is not an “enforcement priority.” A majority of U.S. citizens support decriminalizing the possession of marijuana, and Colorado and Washington have passed ballot measures legalizing it. “People see a war as a war on them,” Gil Kerlikowske, the current drug czar, told the Wall Street Journal, in 2009. “We’re not at war with people in this country.” The Obama Administration has managed to briefly lift a ban on the use of federal funds for needle-exchange programs and reduced sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine. Recently, the President commuted the sentences of eight inmates who had been convicted of crack-cocaine offenses, perhaps signalling a new approach; more than three hundred and twenty thousand people remain incarcerated on drug charges.

Overseas, however, the U.S. approach to drugs still looks a lot like war.

The D.E.A., assisted by the U.S. military, acts as an international police force, coördinating with foreign militaries through a network of offshore bases. Of the twenty-five billion dollars that the federal government spent fighting drugs last year, forty per cent went to treatment and prevention programs. The rest went to “supply reduction.” In Mexico, the $1.9 billion Mérida Initiative has relied on an enforcement-driven strategy somewhat similar to Plan Colombia’s. In 2006, President Felipe Calderón decided to deploy the Mexican military to fight drug cartels; since then, more than seventy thousand people have been killed in drug-related violence. …

“The war on drugs has simply not worked,” George P. Shultz, who served as Secretary of State under Reagan, told me. “It hasn’t kept drugs out of this country.” In 2011, Shultz, along with a committee of former heads of state, businessmen, and retired U.S. officials, called for an overhaul of U.S. drug-enforcement policy. The effects of interdiction programs like Anvil, they wrote, “are negated almost instantly,” wasting money that would be better spent on treatment and harm reduction. I asked Shultz why ineffectual policies have persisted. “We haven’t felt the full effects of it ourselves,” he said. “It took us twelve years to learn that Prohibition wasn’t working. There was Al Capone, there was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The violence was here. Now we have outsourced the violence, in effect, to Mexico and Guatemala and Honduras.”

Recent Dish on the violent toll of the drug war here. A reader responds to that post:

Just wanted to offer a counterpoint to the alleged lower number of alcohol related deaths during the “dry years” of Prohibition.  This is a frequent example offered by those still wishing to believe that drug prohibition offers some extra health or safety benefit than a regulated environment would provide.  The problem is there are some difficulties measuring black markets accurately – for obvious reasons – and in the years of Prohibition there are conflicting signals.  Some early drops in reported use were significantly rolled back over the course of the dry years.  Other sources show more consistent rates of drinking and abuse or increase:

The highest death rates from alcoholism occurred during the decade prior to Prohibition as did the highest death rates from cirrhosis of the liver. These statistics should be qualified by the observations of Dr. Charles Morris, Chief Medical Examiner for New York City: “In making out death certificates (which are basic to Census Reports) private or family physicians commonly avoid entry of alcoholism as a cause of death whenever possible. This practice was more prevalent under the National Dry Law than it was in preprohibition time” (Tillitt, 1932: 114-115).

But why stop there if we’re talking about Prohibition’s effect on safety!?  When manufacturing moved to more illicit and clandestine means, delivered by ruthless gangs capitalizing on the invitation to satisfy an insatiable societal demand for alcohol, consumers had more risk and could not as reliably trust the quality of their alcohol.  We’ve all heard the stories of “bad batches” made in backyards (it still happens, if on a much smaller scale) and there are parallels here with the cocaine market, where unreliable purity leads to fatal miscalculations and overdose deaths.

If the years of Prohibition are to be used to guide our current approach to drugs, then let’s not cherry pick a statistic that comforts us in our desired outcome and let’s instead look at the broader landscape: the criminalization of social practise, the destruction of families by agents of the law and murderous gangs (are we not living in a time where this is available for us to see close up every Sunday when Boardwalk Empire is on?).  What benefit can be claimed is illusory and counterbalanced by other statistics showing no benefit at all?  Some of the quotes from the time are instructive.

We should remind ourselves that the contours of this War on Drugs were really set during the Prohibition years.  The legacy lives on – it’s just we tend to have replaced the Victorian moralizing with post-hoc statistical rationalizations of the status quo, offered by those interested in keeping their budget allocations and eagerly agreed to by those steeped in an ideology unable to contemplate an alternative approach.

Crandall sits on his perch and admonishes that we should not “blithely dismiss” the cautionary urgings of the Drug Warriors, of whose wisdom we have long been alleged beneficiaries.  He urges that the Drug War cannot “simply” be reformed – as if proponents of regulation are people prone to breezy assertions of magical utopias once we choose to end the Drug War.

Some of this attitude stems from the strawmen Crandall and others construct in these discussions – it seems they are addressing their teenage kids and the crudest formulations for an end to the Drug War.  But a lot of this is due to a failure of imagination and a basic ability to conceive of a different way of doing things.  There should be little excuse for this failure to conceive of what a regulated environment could look like for illegal drugs, including hard ones, when we have access to materials like the wonderfully researched and thought-out “Blueprint” for regulation offered here. Crandall is slumming it – and should try to engage thoughtfully with more cogent, researched and well-articulated proponents of regulation than the hippie in his mind’s eye.

Nancy Hass profiles Fallon Fox, the first openly transgender mixed martial artist:

It’s facile to compare her to Jason Collins of the NBA and soccer star Robbie Rogers, both of whom came out in 2013 as gay. There really is no parallel. Gay athletes? The response at this point has been mild and civilized in most quarters, at least on the record. So brave of you! It’s about time! But when you are a transgender athlete, a lesbian transgender athlete, a lesbian transgender athlete who fights women in a cage, a lesbian transgender athlete who fights women in a cage and fathered a daughter, a lesbian transgender athlete who fights women in a cage and fathered a daughter and served as a man in the Navy, you are not just scaling the barricades but throwing yourself against them full force. …

“MMA is the most dangerous sport there is for a transgender, with all the body contact, I know that,” she says. “But it just turned out that I was good at it, you know? You pursue what you’re good at…. I realize that it’s kind of amazing that I hit girls. You’re brought up not to hit girls, that it’s the worst sin, and that’s what I do. But you know, gender is the last thing I think about when I’m fighting. It’s the one situation where I don’t think of gender at all.”

Fox was forced out of the closet in March, after reporters questioned her gender history. Update from several readers:

I support equal rights for all people in almost all situations. However, fighting sports are one area of society in which I do not approve of the idea of letting a transgendered person fight women.

The fact that Fox did not disclose her transgendered status for her first few fights was highly immoral. Cage fighting is a sport where people can die. I’ve been a fan for a long time, but make no mistake: It’s people trying to kill each other for money. People can talk about bone density and estrogen/testosterone levels and other things, but the bottom line is that someone who lived as a man through puberty, and received military training as a man after that, has leverage and strength that significantly advantage that person over a cis-gender woman in a fight.

I’m happy to call Fallon Fox a woman. She can dress like one, and talk and act like one. She has all the rights of any other person – except inside a cage, trying to take an opponent’s head off. The howls of the left must fall on deaf ears on this issue.

Another:

You might want to take a look at what Joe Rogan has said of this topic.  He provides commentary for the UFC, is a jiujitsu practitioner, and was a Tae Kwon Do national champion.  In his podcast, he had a lengthy conversation with Buck Angel – a FTM adult film star – about the physical advantages he believes a transgendered woman would have because she was born (more) male – regardless of the effects of hormone therapy after puberty. Rogan’s beef was Fallon Fox’s lack of disclosure to her competitors about her gender reassignment because he believes she possesses an unfair physical advantage.

And another:

I watched the trailer, and Fallon’s situation is an interesting one. Does the science really say that she has no physical advantage over her opponents? This article referenced that it is at least not settled. I think Fallon should be competing in male MMA fighting, as inherit differences between males/females that remain after hormone therapy do exist (referenced in the linked article). I would be interested to hear why Fallon thinks men and women should compete separately. And interestingly, the better Fallon does, the more she proves her detractors’ point.

Previous Dish on transgender breakthroughs here.

Edwin Heathcote provides a progress report on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. He finds that the “most prominent building has proved the most disappointing”:

What was once dubbed “Freedom Tower”, but is now known more prosaically as 1WTC, was intended to be the centrepiece of Daniel Libeskind’s master plan. The architect – Polish-born, but born-again New Yorker – spoke sentimentally of the impact of the Statue of Liberty as he arrived by boat in the city as a teenager. His tower was meant as an homage to the torch-bearing form, twisting and torquing to a spire (a symbolic 1,776ft tall) and emulating the beacon held aloft. … The site’s developer, Larry Silverstein (who had bought the World Trade Center only a couple of months before 9/11), judged Libeskind too inexperienced and instead brought in his favourite designer, David Childs of corporate giants SOM.

The result is dreadful.

Libeskind’s notion of an expressionistic, spiky tower may have been impractical but it at least embodied an idea. At the end of last year the new tower scraped through the vetting process of the Council on Tall Buildings to become recognised as the tallest building in the western hemisphere (a record formerly held by Chicago’s Willis Tower). It reached the record through its spurious “spire”, the last remnant of Libeskind’s vision, once a reference to Liberty’s torch but now merely an appendage atop a dumb chamfered block. With its clunky concrete base (a precaution required by the NYPD against future attack) and a form which refuses to relate to anything around it, the tower is a poor successor to the 1931 Empire State Building (which had become the city’s tallest building again after 9/11), a skyscraper whose spire seems a natural culmination of its stepped form, a style imposed by the city’s strict setback regulations.

Update from a reader:

Nah, it’s a worthy successor to the Twin Towers. They were hideous, lamely designed, and yeah, utterly “refuse(d) to relate to anything around them.”  Their whole point, as far as I could see, was to sit there at the tip of Manhattan saying HERE WE ARE, WE ARE BIGGER THAN ANYBODY ELSE NYAH NYAH NYAH.  Nonetheless, 30 years after they were built, people had gotten used to them and had developed their own associations and memories around them.  People will do that about any really striking landmark, however badly designed (except maybe for the absolute worst of Brutalist architecture).  And of course, once they had fallen, they acquired the sheen of martyrdom.

But notice that Heathcote has nothing kind to say about the Twin Towers as he slams 1WTC’s compromise design.  He contrasts it with the Empire State Building, but not with its own predecessor. Give it thirty years (assuming no catastrophes) and people will speak affectionately of the “Freedom Tower” too, because it will figure, somehow, in their personal stories; it will show up in movies and in souvenirs from New York, and so on.  And, it’s actually a bit less hideous than the Twin Towers.

(Photo of One World Trade Center in August 2013 by Jules Antonio)

Barro, tongue-in-cheek, asks Brooks:

[W]hy go after marijuana for its second-order effects? Why not just ban stupidity, laziness, obesity, unambitious taste, or whatever social ills are of concern to national opinion columnists? As Brooks asks, “Laws profoundly mold culture, so what sort of community do we want our laws to nurture?” If the answer is “one where people are thin,” the obvious answer is to ban fatness.

Fat is an ideal menace to be targeted with a criminal law. To some extent, it’s a subjective matter who is lazy or stupid, but it’s pretty easy to figure out who’s guilty of being fat. A law against fat would scare people into losing weight. Even independent of actual legal penalties, it would set a strong norm, showing that society is opposed to fatness and wants people to stay at healthy weights. It would lead to improved cardiovascular health, higher labor productivity (fewer sick days!), and longer life expectancy.

Of course, we’d have to actually jail some people for their fatness. (Otherwise the policy wouldn’t work!) Those who are jailed might find, upon release, that their records of criminal fatness make it harder for them to find work in their desired fields, such as national opinion columnist.

Previous Dish on Brooks and other talking heads in favor of Prohibition here.

Alex Altman checks in on the state of the state post-legalization:

It seems inevitable that some problems will materialize. Supporters of Colorado’s marijuana industry fret about heavy taxes and high prices, the potential of dwindling supply, overregulation, and the specter of intervention from the federal government. A car accident involving a stoned driver, use by minors or pot tourists carrying their product across state lines could all tarnish the rollout. Then there is the biggest concern: a lack of access to banking services that has forced legal pot businesses to operate mostly in cash, both a legal and safety hazard. “We’re not going to get it 100% right the first time,” [implementation task force member Sam Kamin] cautions.

But a few days into Colorado’s big experiment, there are few, if any, major failures to point to.

Bruce Barcott peers into the future:

Marijuana today is a craft-scale industry. It may not stay that way very long. Bigger players are waiting in the wings.

 In the past year, Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML, the nation’s biggest marijuana-­advocacy group, has met half a dozen times with representatives of the beer, wine and liquor industries. They’ve talked about the coming legalization of marijuana and what it will mean for the sector of what St. Pierre calls “problematic adult commerce.” The NORML leader didn’t ask for those meetings. The booze people came to him.

It’s easy to assume that Big Tobacco and Big Alcohol are licking their chops at the emerging marijuana industry, waiting for their chance to scoop up a massive share of the market. In truth, it’s not that simple. Tobacco, St. Pierre tells me, has production and distribution channels that could easily absorb cannabis. “But they don’t have the Dionysian background,” he says. “The alcohol guys, they’re in the pleasure business. They know how that works.”

Beer companies are the most likely first movers. Beer sales have been slipping in recent decades, as more Americans move up to wine or cocktails. Their customer seeks an inexpensive, low-level buzz. Here’s one way to think about it: At the end of the week, the beer consumer has 20 bucks in his pocket. He can spend that all on beer, or maybe he buys a six-pack and a gram of pot. “I think they’ll be happy to sell you both,” says St. Pierre.

Alcohol companies also have excellent working relationships with state lawmakers and regulators. That’s no small thing. Legalization rides on the growing belief that marijuana should be treated like alcohol, not like heroin or cocaine. For the feds to go along with these pilot projects, they need assurance that state officials can turn pot into a product as tightly regulated as beer or wine.

Alexis Madrigal attributes the success of the streaming giant to its ability to hyper-tailor content to viewer interests, using 76,897 genre descriptors:

Using large teams of people specially trained to watch movies, Netflix deconstructed Hollywood. They paid people to watch films and tag them with all kinds of metadata. This process is so sophisticated and precise that taggers receive a 36-page training document that teaches them how to rate movies on their sexually suggestive content, goriness, romance levels, and even narrative elements like plot conclusiveness. They capture dozens of different movie attributes. They even rate the moral status of characters. When these tags are combined with millions of users viewing habits, they become Netflix’s competitive advantage. The company’s main goal as a business is to gain and retain subscribers. And the genres that it displays to people are a key part of that strategy. “Members connect with these [genre] rows so well that we measure an increase in member retention by placing the most tailored rows higher on the page instead of lower,” the company revealed in a 2012 blog post. The better Netflix shows that it knows you, the likelier you are to stick around.

And now, they have a terrific advantage in their efforts to produce their own content: Netflix has created a database of American cinematic predilections. The data can’t tell them how to make a TV show, but it can tell them what they should be making. When they create a show like House of Cards, they aren’t guessing at what people want.

Salmon puts this strategy in a less favorable light. He observes that Netflix “can’t afford the content that its subscribers most want to watch”:

As a result, Netflix can’t, any longer, aspire to be the service which allows you to watch the movies you want to watch. That’s how it started off, and that’s what it still is, on its legacy DVDs-by-mail service. But if you don’t get DVDs by mail, Netflix has made a key tactical decision to kill your queue — the list of movies that you want to watch. … So Netflix has been forced to attempt a distant second-best: scouring its own limited library for the films it thinks you’ll like, rather than simply looking for the specific movies which it knows (because you told it) that you definitely want to watch. This, from a consumer perspective, is not an improvement.

Last month, Netflix commissioned a survey that found “of 1,500 US adults who stream TV shows at least once a week, 61% binge watch regularly”:

Respondents were not provided with a definition of binge watching, but 73% defined it as watching two to six single episodes of a TV show in one sitting. That may come as a surprise to some self-proclaimed binge watchers, as watching two episodes in one go actually seems so normal that it’s hardly worth noting. … 73% of those surveyed said they enjoy binge watching and don’t feel guilty about it – big shocker there. And 79% said binge watching makes shows more enjoyable, while 37% said they prefer to “save” new shows or seasons to stream them at a later date instead of watching them when they’re new.

On that note, David Koepsell contends that rapidly consuming a TV series creates a shared cultural canon:

While in the past, I might have felt trapped by having missed the first three seasons [of Game of Thrones], unlikely to try to lock into the next and begin mid-story, I could quickly come up to speed with something that is clearly now an important part of our culture. The New Canon is both unhindered by geography and unrestrained by time. Binging is a legitimate and sometimes necessary way for us to join the broader culture, engage with fans around the world, and perform a new form of communion.

Michelle Smith also sees advantages to binging:

A significant number of people still consume series such as True Blood by viewing or streaming weekly in order to avoid spoilers and keep current with social media conversations. Yet many other TV viewers now prefer to gorge on an entire season via streaming, downloading, or DVD. This method of consumption removes the suspenseful wait between episodes, and enables the viewer to more clearly follow, and remember, plot developments.

Previous Dish on Netflix and streaming video here, here, and here.