Author: Dish Staff

Breaking: Weed Smokers Less Violent

by Dish Staff

Who’da thunk it?

Past research has indicated that couples who abuse substances are at a greater risk for divorce, in part because substance abuse often leads to an increase in domestic violence. However, new research has found that when it comes to marijuana use, the opposite effect occurs: couples who frequently use marijuana are actually at a lower risk of partner violence.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown parses this research:

Obviously this doesn’t mean marijuana makes people less violent per se—maybe the types prone to pot-smoking are just inherently less violent individuals; or perhaps the types prone to partner violence are categorically less drawn to the drug. But it is interesting to contrast these stats with numbers on alcohol, which has frequently been linked to increased incidences of partner violence.

In one recent study, published in the journal Addictive Behaviors in January 2014, researchers found that “on any alcohol use days, heavy alcohol use days (five or more standard drinks), and as the number of drinks increased on a given day, the odds of physical and sexual aggression perpetration” by college-age men in relationships increased.

Christopher Ingraham looks at who paid for the study:

Perhaps most significantly, the Buffalo study was funded partially by a grant from the National Institute for Drug Abuse. Marijuana reformers have strongly criticized NIDA’s institutional biases against marijuana legalization in the past, including restrictions the agency has placed on the availability of marijuana for research purposes. But the fact that NIDA is funding studies like this one suggests that it, like much of the country, is beginning to change its tune.

Is ISIS A Threat To Us? Ctd

by Dish Staff

Daniel Berman considers Obama’s assessment of the threat ISIS poses, and his response to it, pretty much spot-on:

Obama’s remarks express a sense of proportion missing from alarmist claims that ISIS is on the verge of taking over Iraq or establishing an Islamic Caliphate. Contrary to these absurd warnings, ISIS is, as the President noted, engaged in a “regional power struggle” one in which its support is capped by its Sunni sectarian nature, which limits its maximum appeal to the 20% of Iraqis who are Sunni. Furthermore, Obama is correct to note that ISIS is far less of a direct threat to the United States than it is to Iran, Damascus, and Riyadh, and by extension Moscow. All have a much greater strategic interest in preventing a collapse of the Iraqi state, and all will therefore intervene directly to prevent such an eventuality, provided the United States does not do it for them. That said, if the United States is willing to pay the financial and military burden of stopping ISIS, Tehran and Moscow will be overjoyed, though that pleasure will not stop them from attempting to extract a political payment for allowing the US to do their own work for them. Obama appears determined to ensure that the US will not be left alone for the bill for what is in reality a geopolitical public service for the region.

Jack Shafer chastises most of his colleagues in the American press for taking Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s war rhetoric as gospel and accordingly overhyping that threat:

Brookings Institution scholar F. Gregory Gause III assesses the Islamic State without panic in a Aug. 25 piece, nullifying Hagel’s scary “beyond and everything” pronouncement. He describes the Islamic State as the beneficiary of the “new Middle East cold war.” As existing state authorities in the region have lost control of their borders, proved unable to provide services (and protection) to their populations, and failed forge a common political identity, the Islamic State has risen.

But this rise does not necessarily make Islamic State strong and fearful as much as it showcases the relative weaknesses of the Syrian and Iraq governments. For all its ferocity, the Islamic State has acquired no regional or great power ally, Gause continues, no open patrons. It depends almost exclusively on banditry and protection rackets for its survival. The group’s great skill so far has been in uniting almost the entire world against it, making potential allies of nations that can’t stand each other, such as the United States and Iran. This knack for uniting countries that have “parallel, if not identical interests,” Gause predicts, will probably do the Islamic State in. Enemies exist, of course. But boogeymen don’t. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to sell you something.

But John Gray takes the Islamic State’s global ambitions more seriously. And either way, he argues, we created this mess, so it’s up to us to clean it up:

So what is Isis essentially – violent millenarian cult, totalitarian state, terrorist network or criminal cartel? The answer is that it is none of these and all of them. Far from being a reversion to anything in the past, Isis is something new – a modern version of barbarism that has emerged in states that have been shattered by western intervention. But its influence is unlikely to be confined to Syria and Iraq. Isis is already attracting support from the Taliban in Pakistan, and there are reports that a caliphate has been declared by Boko Haram in a town in northeast Nigeria. In time – if only to confirm its superiority over al-Qaida – Isis will surely turn its attentions more directly to the west.

It would be easy to take the view that having blundered so disastrously, and so often, the west should withdraw from any further involvement and let events take their course. But having helped bring this monster into the world, the west cannot now turn its back. In ethical terms such a stance would be little short of obscene.

Legalize Opium?

by Dish Staff

800px-Special_Tax_Stamp_Opium_New_Orleans_1932

Gene Callahan suggests giving it a try:

My proposal offers the following advantages over the current situation:

  1. It allows us to test the waters of just how socially damaging full cocaine or heroin legalization might be, without simply plunging in head first. If simply legalizing coca leaves and opium produces droves of drugged-out zombies (which I don’t think it would), we could rule out full cocaine and heroin legalization, and even consider repealing this halfway legalization. If the effects are that bad, we can be sure that they would have been worse if we had legalized the harder forms of these drugs.
  2. A strong libertarian argument for full legalization (I say ”strong,” and not “decisive,” because I think there are significant counter-arguments here), is that many people are able to use these drugs in moderation without destroying their lives. … Well, these moderate, responsible users ought to find a milder, safer, and legal form of the drug they use to be a very welcome thing indeed. They could avoid the risk of arrest, of unregulated and adulterated street products that may contain dangerous additives, of job loss, and would enjoy a much greater ability to control their dosage.
  3. The considerations in point number two indicate what I think would be the greatest potential upside of this idea: its impact upon the economics of the trade in hard drugs. The shift in consumption predicted above would greatly lessen the demand for the more dangerous forms of these drugs.

In other opioid news, Olga Khazan examines a study finding that “the 13 states that had legalized medical marijuana prior to 2010 had a 25 percent lower rate of opioid mortality than those that didn’t”:

This equates to roughly 1,729 fewer painkiller deaths, just in 2010. The results suggest, in other words, that people were choosing pot over Percocet.

There are a few limitations to keep in mind. The rate of opioid deaths increased in all the states, it just increased less in the states that allowed medical marijuana. It’s not as though everyone with a backache bought a water bong and lived stoned and pain-free ever after.

Marijuana is also not a perfect replacement for painkillers, though it does have some analgesic effects.

Sullum focuses on another finding from the study:

Notably, Bachhuber et al. found that state policies aimed at preventing nonmedical use of opioids, such as prescription monitoring programs, were not associated with lower overdose rates. “If the relationship between medical cannabis laws and opioid analgesic overdose mortality is substantiated in further work,” they write, “enactment of laws to allow for use of medical cannabis may be advocated as part of a comprehensive package of policies to reduce the population risk of opioid analgesics.”

(Image of 1932 opium tax stamp via Wikimedia Commons)

“Connoisseurship In Canned Goods”

by Dish Staff

Harold McGee contends that it has a long pedigree:

It was well established by 1924, when James H. Collins compiled The Story of Canned Foods. Collins noted that while the American industry – which started in the 1820s and took off during the Civil War – focused on mechanization and making locally and seasonally abundant seafood and vegetables more widely available, the European industry continued to rely on handwork and produced luxury goods for the well-off, who would age their canned sardines for several years like wine. Today, Rödel and Connetable, both more than 150 years old, are among the sardine makers that mark select cans with the fishing year and note that the contents “are already very good, but like grand cru wines, improve with age” for up to 10 years.

He adds, “I do hope that some restless, frontier-seeking food lovers will look past our present happy surfeit of small-batch pickles and fruit preserves and try their hands at canning age-worthy meats and fish.”

Eat More Salt?

by Dish Staff

salt

Studies showing that one’s preferred vice or guilty-pleasure condiment is actually good for you always have an audience. And so, here’s one for the salt-lovers out there. Sort of. Aaron E. Carroll explains (NYT):

Last year, experts convened by the Institute of Medicine assessed the evidence concerning sodium intake around the world. They agreed that efforts to reduce excessive sodium were warranted. But they cautioned that no such evidence existed to recommend a very low salt diet. They hoped that future research would assess the potential benefits of a diet where sodium intake was 1.5 to 2.3 grams per day.

The second New England Journal of Medicine study did just that. In addition to looking at high sodium diets, it also compared the health outcomes of those who had very low sodium diets. What they found was worrisome. When compared with those who consumed 3-6 grams per day, people who consumed less than 3 grams of sodium per day had an even higher risk of death or cardiovascular incidents than those who consumed more than 7 grams per day.

The key to health is (sadly) not pouring tremendous amounts of salt on absolutely everything. Writes Carroll:

It’s a cliché but true: In so many things moderation is our best bet. We have to learn that when one extreme is detrimental, it doesn’t mean the opposite is our safest course. It’s time to acknowledge that we may be going too far with many of our recommendations.

(Photo by Flickr user Lars K)

The Essential Creepiness Of DFW Fandom

by Dish Staff

Mike Miley owns up to it in a fascinating essay about his experiences at the David Foster Wallace Archive at the University of Texas, confessing, “I came to Austin as a stalker, the kind of person who ought to be the recipient of a restraining order, not a research fellowship”:

The fellowship faintly disguises the fact that I am here to invade David Foster Wallace’s privacy, and that I took advantage of the Mellon Foundation to satisfy my personal compulsion to get as close to the inside of Wallace’s literary head as I could possibly get. What I failed to anticipate during all my academic grifting was how much peering into the dark recesses of Wallace’s skull would give me the howling fantods. What I wanted, I learned, was much more than I bargained for.

This realization came fast and hard the moment I opened DFW’s copy of End Zone. I knew the DeLillo books would be juicy because DeLillo was pretty much Wallace’s favorite author, but that was no preparation for the words that greeted me when I carefully opened the book’s brittle paperback cover: “SILENCE = HORROR.”

My breath tripped in my throat. I was hoping for revealing annotations, and Wallace exceeded my expectations with his first gloss. Freaky things like “SILENCE = HORROR” are not the first thing a researcher stumbles across anywhere outside of a TV show. Wallace may have been talking about End Zone, but the context was totally different now; these were words from beyond the grave, written in a dead man’s hand, and even though I’d never met him, here I was holding his treasured book, staring his mind in the face, and his first utterance to me is “SILENCE = HORROR.”

Alan Jacobs marvels, “I don’t think I’ve seen, in my lifetime, a writer who has generated the kind and intensity of veneration that DFW has”:

We might contrast his fans to, say, Tolkien fans, who know a little bit about the author — enough to have an image of a man in a colorful waistcoat smoking a pipe – but who can’t spare much time for him because they are so fully absorbed in his legendarium. But the people I know who love every word of Infinite Jest are also fascinated by Wallace himself: they are constantly aware of him as its author, of its relations to the circumstances of his own life.

Montaigne said of his Essays that “It is a book consubstantial with its author,” and this seems to be true for everything DFW wrote. Absorption in his work seems almost necessarily to involve scrutiny of his life. And given how his life ended, it’s hard not to see this as a worrisome trend. What I wouldn’t give for a detailed and sensitive ethnography of DFW devotees – something like what Tanya Luhrmann did for charismatic evangelicals.

Libya Just Keeps Getting Worse, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Juan Cole finds the US response to yesterday’s revelation that Egypt and the UAE had carried out airstrikes in Libya pretty ironic:

According to the BBC, “the US, France, Germany, Italy and the UK issued a joint statement denouncing “outside interference” in Libya.” Seriously, guys? Except for Germany, these are the NATO countries that intervened in Libya in the first place, in large part at the insistence of an Arab League led by Egypt and the UAE! It is true that the UAE and Egypt don’t have a UN Security Council Resolution, which authorized NATO involvement (I supported the then no fly zone on those grounds). But the newly elected Libyan House of Representatives has openly called for international intervention against Libya’s out-of-control militias and it is entirely possible that the Libyan government asked, behind the scenes for these air strikes. In any case, “outside interference” isn’t the issue!

Claims that the airstrikes caught us unawares are also beyond belief:

“With as many Aegis-class ships as the U.S. Navy has in the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean, there is no possible way the UAE could pull this off without the U.S. knowing it,” said Christopher Harmer, a former Navy officer and an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War.

Harmer said that he had no information about U.S. involvement, “but the U.S. government knows who bombed what,” he said. Egypt and the UAE are highly motivated to strike out at Islamist fighters, whose gains in Libya are only the latest reminder that a new wave of religiously aligned political groups and militias threaten secular regimes and monarchies across the region. … Despite denials from the Egyptians and American claims that the United States knew nothing of the airstrikes, there’s no doubt that the UAE’s Air Force, which is newer and more advanced than Egypt’s, could attack Tripoli.

But Keating wonders if this isn’t a sign that the US is no longer running the regional security show in the Middle East:

Despite all the various ways that regional powers have sought to influence each other’s internal politics, the U.S. and Europe (and on a few occasions Israel) have largely had a monopoly on airstrikes and direct military intervention. With crises elsewhere taking up diplomatic attention, U.S. involvement in the worsening situation in Libya has been limited. It shouldn’t be too surprising that others have stepped in to fill the void. The New York Times, which originally reported on the strikes, puts them in the context of a larger proxy battle in the Middle East between Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia—which have sought to roll back the gains made by Islamist groups—and Turkey and Qatar, which have largely supported them. This battle will mostly be fought within the region’s most unstable countries, including Syria, Iraq, and Libya

Michael Brendan Dougherty, meanwhile, blames the chaos in Libya on the failures of the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine advanced by Hillary Clinton:

In the most obvious form of moral hazard, this pernicious “R2P” norm lowers the price of civil war in the developing world, encouraging rebels to make provocative attacks, then lobby for Western air support when the local bad guy punishes them for it. Uncle Sam or NATO deploys resources in a civil war these rebel groups could never win with their own blood and treasure. They often fail to win even when they do get help. The expectation of Western air power has exacerbated and intensified conflicts in Serbia, the Sudan, Libya, and Syria. As an international norm, R2P adds nothing but a noble-sounding gloss on getting more people killed than usual.

A Hobby Lobby Patch For Obamacare, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Reactions to the Obama administration’s latest move to promote contraceptive accessibility keep coming. Jonathan Cohn elaborates on why free birth control is worth fighting over:

Late last week, lots of people were talking about a story by Sarah Kliff, of Vox, on why teen pregnancy has been declining in just the last few years. It’s a great article, well worth your time, but the part that jumped out at me was the much bigger decline in teen births that occurred many decades ago—in the 1960s, when the teen pregnancy rate fell by about 25 percent. What changed? The big factor, as social scientists (and friends of QED) Harold Pollack and Luke Shaefer reminded me over the weekend, was birth control. The Food and Drug Administration first approved the pill in 1960.

It wasn’t just teenagers on whom the introduction of cheap, highly effective medical contraception had profound effects. It was also older women, including married women, who gained the ability to control the timing of pregnancy and child rearing.

James C. Capretta, meanwhile, says the HHS “non-accomodation” isn’t a real solution:

In a moral sense, the supposed “accommodation” is meaningless. If an employer with religious objections to the HHS mandate offers insurance to its workers, that coverage will, by definition, always include the objectionable services and products. There’s no way around it. The objecting employers therefore know, in advance of making the decision to offer coverage, that if they do offer coverage, the insurance plan they sponsor will provide full coverage for these products and services that they find morally objectionable.

The real solution is of course a full exemption, not this convoluted non-accommodation. Employers with religious objections to the HHS mandate should be allowed to offer insurance in conformance with their consciences. It’s that simple. This would likely affect a very small percentage of the American workforce.

And S.M. examines the “complicity” of Obamacare objectors:

By sending HHS a letter requesting an exemption from the birth-control mandate, the objecting groups claim they are prompting a process that will implant murderous IUDs in the uteri of their workers.

This claim is a stretch. An employer does not buy a weapon when his employee takes his paycheck to a gun show. Nor does he buy a morning-after pill if a female employee uses a benefit paid for by the federal government but provided through his insurer to secure a prescription for ella. If requesting an exemption from the birth-control mandate can plausibly be thought to represent complicity in the provision of birth control, then anyone can claim to be complicit in just about any act. But (even religious) pacifist taxpayers cannot sue the government for using their tax dollars to send troops to the Middle East. Nor can Catholics opposing the death penalty deduct the share of their tax bill going toward executions in states with capital punishment. Political society cannot operate this way.