Category: The Dish

A reader dissents from part of this post:

Prohibitionists love to trot out the stale old "this isn’t the harmless marijuana you remember from your youth" chestnut. Two points: 1) if the marijuana from their youths was harmless (and I tend to agree it was), then why was it illegal back then? 2) to the extent that marijuana is more potent today than, say, thirty or forty years ago, that means that less of it needs to be ingested to produce the same effect, which, if the method of ingestion is smoking means that less byproduct needs to be inhaled in order to administer the same amount of THC. In plain English, people back in the day smoked until they were stoned, and they still do so today – the only difference is that these days they don’t need to smoke as much…

Of course, some might claim that people today will simply continue to smoke until they reach altogether unacceptable levels of pleasure (since smoking to the point of toxicity is physically impossible), but some basic economics help out on that point: in addition to being more potent, today’s "super potent" marijuana is also much, much more expensive, even adjusted for inflation, than the marijuana of decades past.

The point is, people who attempt to change the debate by claiming that marijuana is somehow "not the same drug" as it used to be are basically just blowing smoke.

Iraq’s parliament prepares to take the summer off. I wonder if anyone will be able to tell the difference. Everyone agrees that the surge is only even viable in Baghdad if critical political steps are being taken in the government and parliament, to complement mildly better security in some parts of the capital. We’ve just been told how serious Maliki is about that. He’s not.

An illuminating exchange of views.

Riverbend blogger makes her call. Sad, sad post. Money quote:

I always hear the Iraqi pro-war crowd interviewed on television from foreign capitals (they can only appear on television from the safety of foreign capitals because I defy anyone to be publicly pro-war in Iraq). They refuse to believe that their religiously inclined, sectarian political parties fueled this whole Sunni/Shia conflict. They refuse to acknowledge that this situation is a direct result of the war and occupation. They go on and on about Iraq’s history and how Sunnis and Shia were always in conflict and I hate that. I hate that a handful of expats who haven’t been to the country in decades pretend to know more about it than people actually living there.

I remember Baghdad before the war- one could live anywhere. We didn’t know what our neighbors were- we didn’t care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now. Our existence depends on hiding it or highlighting it- depending on the group of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night.

On a personal note, we’ve finally decided to leave. I guess I’ve known we would be leaving for a while now.

Vienna, Austria, 8.12 am.

Big whoop. Actually, I find Tenet’s description of the real context of his "slam dunk" remark more incriminating – both of him and the administration. It suggests that the main concern at that time was selling the war with selected intelligence, not ensuring that the intelligence was correct and fairly presented – with all the caveats – to the American people.

I linked recently to John Tierney’s important report on the fight for patients to get adequate pain relief from doctors suffering from "opiophobia." Virginia Postrel, who has had her own experiences with such pain, points to this superb piece on the subject by Jacob Sullum.

A beaut from the WaPo.

I didn’t comment much on the Duke Lacrosse team "rape" fiasco, and in retrospect I’m glad I didn’t. But this data is more salient than a cable news marathon:

If you go to the website reporting the annual National Crime Victimization Survey, as many people do, you can look up the rape statistics in "Table 42: Personal Crimes of Violence 2005: Percent distribution of single offender victimizations, based on race of victims, by type of crime and perceived race of offender."

Under "Rape/Sexual assaults" the survey reports 111,490 rape/assaults in 2005 in which a white was the victim. The "perceived race" of the offender was reported as white in 44.5 percent of cases, black in 33.6 percent of cases, "other" in 19.6 percent of cases.

Where the victim of rape was black, in 36,620 cases, things were rather different. The "perceived race" of the offender was reported as black in 100.0 percent of cases. White offenders? "0.0*" percent.

The asterisk means that the sample included ten or fewer reports. The federal crime statistics show that white-on-black rape was almost non-existent in the United States of America in 2005.

For American GIs?