Starry, Starry Plight: Obama and the Space Program

Space enthusiasts are watching and listening carefully to find out how President Barack Obama will support NASA during his administration. Earlier this year he gave the space agency a glowing endorsement:

When I was growing up, NASA inspired the world with achievements we are still proud of. We cannot cede our leadership in space. We need a real vision for space exploration. Let’s also tap NASA’s ingenuity to build the airplanes of tomorrow and to study our own planet so we can combat global climate change. Under my watch, NASA will inspire the world, make America stronger, and help grow the economy.

Before we dive into recent developments, a brief review of NASA under George W. Bush is in order. NASA achieved some laudable feats in the last eight years, notably:

• It greatly expanded the International Space Station (ISS) to add more solar panels, laboratories, and living space (with contributions from other nations, notably Russia and Canada).
• It successfully landed two Mars rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) that have been sending pictures back for 5 years, much longer than originally anticipated.
• It repaired and upgraded the Hubble Space Telescope, which has sent more than half a million images back to Earth.
• It developed the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, which will take astronauts to the Moon and Mars.
• It launched the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has produced sensational images of Mars.

In particular, the string of successful trips to Mars stands in stark contrast to previous missions. Historically most attempts to explore the Red Planet have failed, including one notorious disaster in 1999 caused by a mix-up of measurements made with the metric and English systems.

Yet since the achievements of the Apollo program that landed astronauts on the Moon, there hasn’t been a program that has evoked the same widespread level of interest here and abroad. Indeed in March President Obama made reference to this in an answer to a reporter’s question about the shuttle program

NASA has yielded — or the space shuttle program has yielded some extraordinary scientific discoveries. But I think it’s fair to say that there’s been a sense of drift to our space program over the last several years. We need to restore that sense of excitement and interest that existed around the space program. And shaping a mission for NASA that is appropriate for the 21st century is going to be one of the biggest tasks of my new NASA director.

Sadly as of this writing, The White House’s Technology Page does not include any mention of the space program. Obama has not yet appointed a new NASA administrator, though rumors have been circulating this year about the possible pick of astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson. Anyone who has seen Tyson on PBS’s NOVA scienceNOW cannot deny his charisma and enthusiasm for astronomy and space exploration. Tyson is currently the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and is famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) for advocating the demotion of Pluto from a planet to a “dwarf planet.”

Financial support for NASA remains strong despite the severe worldwide recession. The fiscal year 2010 budget of $18.7 billion is $2.4 billion above the 2008 amount. The first priority listed in their budget summary is climate change monitoring and research. President Obama has repeatedly mentioned addressing global warming as a top issue, as noted in my last article.

NASA scientist James Hansen continues to be a fierce advocate for action to combat global warming. In 2006 he complained that the Bush Administration was trying to silence his dire warnings for political reasons. In December 2008, James Hansen and his wife Anniek Hansen sent an open letter to then President-Elect Obama (and his wife Michelle Obama) urging him to phase out traditional polluting coal plants, support an aggressive carbon tax plan, and encourage R&D of modern nuclear power plants.

Many people are sad to see the end of the successful space shuttle program, currently scheduled for 2010. If and when the shuttle program is canceled, Florida residents may bear the brunt of the employment fallout with 8,000 or more jobs on the line. However a congressman and congresswoman from Florida have introduced legislation to keep the shuttle program alive a bit longer.

The new Orion spacecraft and companion Ares Launch Vehicles are presently in the testing phase. NASA expects to fly the first missions in 2014 or 2015, leaving us with at least a four-year gap in the government’s space transportation system. (Private companies will carry supplies to the ISS, and the Russian Soyuz will be used to rotate crews.)

The James Web Space Telescope (JWST), often described as the successor to Hubble, is currently in development and expected to be deployed in 2013. NASA intends to keep Hubble in operation until at least that time, to avoid any interruption in data collection. JWST is substantially larger than Hubble, though lower in mass. Hubble detects light in the optical and ultraviolet ranges, and can be repaired in space, while JWST will collect data only from infrared light. Nevertheless, JWST will allow scientists to peer substantially further back into the distant past, closer to the origin of the universe.

There have been reports that Obama might combine some space programs from NASA and the Pentagon. The Pentagon’s space budget is significantly higher than NASA’s total budget, and some observers wonder whether the space vehicle gap might be filled in by the military. The merger discussions have been fueled by the fear that China has strong military intentions for its own space program.

While the U.S. must be mindful of threats to our security from other nations, a strong militarization of NASA would be an unfortunate turn of events. NASA was founded during the Eisenhower Administration to conduct non-military space activities. Obviously there is already significant overlap in personnel, and technology flows in both directions. But it would be very sad if NASA becomes distracted or subverted by security issues.

Other controversies still brewing include:

• Arguments about whether robots or humans should be sent to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.
• Whether we should ever bother going back to the Moon.
• Calls for President Obama to fire NASA’s inspector general Robert Cobb — a recent New York Times editorial accused him of being unethical and ineffectual.
• How much we should cooperate with other nations’ space programs.
• An oldie but a goodie–whether NASA should even exist given all the problems we have to solve on Earth.

Despite the criticisms and controversies, the space program is a vital part of our national identity. It has inspired generations of students young and old, capturing their imagination like nothing else. The dream of human flight and exploration will not go away as long as birds take wing and stars and planets twinkle. NASA must survive and thrive during Obama’s time in office, so we may continue to watch over our pale blue dot from space and keep looking at the stars.

(Thanks to Michael Conway for suggesting the title of this article.)

Eat Moose!

To paraphrase Brian Wilson in the Vegetables song, I know that you’ll feel better if you send us in your letter and tell us the names of your…most annoying phone calls—and how to fight back.  Mine are:

1. Pension-donation telemarketer.

Ring, ring.

TELEMARKETER: “Good afternoon, sir! My name is Mortimer Gladhand, from the Pension Donation Overzealous Marketing Corporation.  And how are you today?”

ME: “You know, I’m glad you asked me that.  I have a disgusting boil on my butt and my wife never quits with the nagging.  ‘Go to the doctor!  Put some cream on it! Get off your lazy butt!  That’s how you got the boil in the first place!’ Nag, nag, nag. Wives have a nag gene, you know that? Yeah, I first learned that when my mother-in-law came over and stayed for six years. By the second year the romance had died off in my marriage anyway and then I had two old nagging hens in the house. That’s the story of my life—no respect, I don’t get no respect! My kids are no bargain either. I tell ya–”

TELEMARKETER: “You have a good day, sir.”

2. Mothmen.  If you’ve seen Richard Gere in The Mothman Prophesies, you know that a phone call from a mothman is almost as annoying as a telemarketing call.  You get an ear-splitting screeching noise, like something between a fax tone and a screaming banshee. The unspoken message is “I am a seriously creepy entity and I’m going to eat your spaghetti first and then your children.” But do not be creeped out. Instead, have a recording ready of your wife nagging about your butt-boil and play it right back in the mothman’s ear. That will seriously gross it out and you’ll never hear from it again.

3. A call from Sarah Palin telling me she’s a real governor. She wants to get back at comedians (of which I am a type, loosely speaking), for duping her into thinking they were Nicolas Sarkozy. “Hi!  This is the governor of Alaska!” she says. “The largest state in the Union!”

“Oh, sure you are,” I reply. “You couldn’t govern anything larger than your kitchen. Give me a break.”

“Can too.”

“Can’t.”

“Can too.”

“Can’t. A governor wouldn’t go around shooting up the state’s wildlife from a helicopter.”

“Oh yeah? Well at least I don’t bust the federal budget from a $400 million helicopter.”

“Uh-huh…Well, by the way, I can see Canada from Buffalo but that doesn’t make me an international affairs statesman, you know.”

“Hey—eat moose!”

“Chocolate mousse?”

“Damned liberals, you’re all out to get me.”

“Damned right—you’re really hot, did you know that?”

4. Getting put on hold. “Sir, may I put you on hold a minute? Just one moment, sir.”

And here, I have to give due credit to Homer Simpson. “No, you may not put me on hold!” he retorts in one episode, “I’ll put you on hold!” Then he sings Wichita Lineman in a tinny voice. “I am a lineman for the county, and I drive the main road…Searchin’ in the sun for another overload…I hear you singin’ in the wire, I can hear you through the whine…”

5. Obscene calls from a woman with a sexy voice who says she looks like Julia Stiles, only more nubile. Uhm…I’ll get back to you on that one.

“Buy American” Policies: More Hurtful than Helpful?

Last week’s $787 billion dollar stimulus promised aid to education, infrastructure projects, jobless benefits, and a whole host of other programs designed to stimulate the economy. While the bill was pretty straight forward, there were a few provisions that stood out and inevitably were nixed (i.e.,  the clause specifying that no federal money was to go to former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich). However, one short, but very controversial clause on page 189 did make it to the final bill. There, section 1605 states: “None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for a project for the construction, alteration, maintenance, or repair of a public building or public work unless all of the iron, steel, and manufactured goods used in the project is produced in the United States.”

There are some exceptions (for instance, if the cost of American raw materials will increase the overall cost of the project by 25 percent, the party purchasing the materials can apply for a waiver) but the real significance of this clause is that it sets a very negative and narrow tone on the global economic crisis. Even President Obama stated in an ABC interview that this stipulation was “a potential source of trade wars” and John Bruton, the EU ambassador to the US, cited it as a “dangerous precedent.” Although the provision does state that it “shall be applied in a manner consistent with United States obligations under international agreements” it still forces many companies, such as the struggling Caterpillar, to spend more of their fiscal resources on raw materials instead of preserving jobs or raising wages. Also, given the fact that 37 percent of all manufactured goods sold in America are not made here, this stipulation seems hard-lined and, at some level, woefully misguided.

Moreover, the other underlying and more significant impact of this “Buy American” policy is this: If American companies are forced to purchase domestic raw goods for the public works projects, then what is stopping other countries from enacting the same jingoistic economic policies? This economic crisis is a global one and if every country decides to enforce a “buy me first” approach, this crisis will get far worse before it gets better. Not long after Congress announced its plan, major international news outlets such as Japan Today, Canada’s CBC NEWS, and China’s Xinhua criticized the measure. The International Herald and Tribune also noted that the United State’s protectionist policy could incite a backlash in which other nations stipulate a Don’t-Buy-American policy on foreign goods.

Although I understand Congress’s desire to promote the construction of new roads and bridges, green technology, and car manufacturing while supporting what little domestic manufacturing industry we have left, the reality is that (a) we don’t produce enough of these materials to support the sweeping projects they want to see enacted, and (b) even if we did, we may be shooting ourselves in the foot, so to speak, if we don’t work to stimulate other nations’ struggling economies in the process of stimulating our own. Maybe this approach would be acceptable, or even relevant, if this were just an ordinary American recession. But we are in the midst of a global crisis, and our economy will not get better if everyone else’s is suffering.

I believe a smarter and more fitting approach would have been a “Make American” initiative. Not an ultimatum like the “Buy American” provision, but a tax-break incentive encouragement for either domestic companies to expand their production of vital goods or for foreign ones to locate some of their operations in the United States. In both scenarios, there would be job creation and more spending. Instead of forcing companies to purchase domestic raw materials, encourage them to make products that can be purchased here or abroad. In Louis Uchitelle’s article on this issue for the New York Times last week, he cited the example of mass transit—while the stimulus bill calls for the expansion of mass transit, there are no US companies that manufacture the train cars necessary for that expansion. Now these projects will have to rely on American steel, iron, and manufactured goods while they also negotiate their express need for a specific foreign good they cannot get domestically. Wouldn’t it be nice (and much cheaper for taxpayers) to let cities purchase some raw materials from China or India and let the United States encourage these more specialized industries to move some of their operations here since we will be purchasing such a high volume of these products?

Of course, America will never return to its manufacturing hey day, and I’m not suggesting that domestic production will solve all our economic woes. But by encouraging a responsible, inviting economic policy, we could perhaps not only pave the way for global economic recovery, but also mend some broken foreign policy fences we need to repair from the past administration. Yet, despite the demands of this myopic economic policy, I hope that the Obama administration can find other ways to encourage growth domestically and promote more foreign investment in America’s future without ostracizing our trade partners and fellow economically struggling nations.

Health Care in America: A Way Forward

As previously stated, the purpose of this two part series is to set forth my views on changing health care delivery in America to make it more efficient, more effective, and, most importantly, more compassionate.

In Part 1 of this series, Health Care in America: A Time for Change, I laid out my personal experiences that led me to write this series and outlined the problem. In Part 2 of this series, I will explore ways of making health care better for all citizens of the US, starting with the concept of triage.

TRIAGE – WHERE IS HAWKEYE WHEN YOU NEED HIM

In the old sitcom, MASH, Hawkeye Pierce would perform triage for his MASH unit. His job in triage was to separate the injured into three groups:

1. Those who needed care immediately to deal with a life threatening or a rapidly deteriorating situation.

2. Those who needed care, but who could wait for a time period with little or no effect on the patients’ wellbeing.

3. Those who could not be helped by health care (either they were not sick or they were so badly injured and sick that normal health care procedures could improve the situation).

Hawkeye heroically performed triage for the MASH unit, and by doing so, used the unit’s limited resources for maximum effect. And why was he a hero? Because he made tough decisions about prioritizing the needs of patients based on triage. The system was not perfect, but decisions were made, and the doctors got on with the job of caring for the sick and wounded. And through appropriate triage, care was provided most efficiently given the limited resources at hand.

In the UK, this triage function is essentially how the national health care system works. Resources are indeed limited in the UK within the NHS, and everyone knows it. Indeed, this obvious limitation of resources does cause issues (e.g., waiting lists). However, it also forces the people and the doctors in the system to focus on what is important; it forces the doctors to make the tough decisions necessary to give care to those that are in most need. The classic triage function is returned, not to insurance companies, lawyers, or accountants, but rather to medical professionals. Indeed, this is what doctors are paid to do – not just provide care, but to provide care to the sick with recognition of the limitations of resources. They are not just health care technicians, but they also perform a much more important role – TRIAGE.

Indeed, in the case of my son’s broken arm and my cancer treatment, the triage system worked just as it is supposed to work. In both of these situations, the doctors recognized a problem that needed to be addressed quickly, and even though their resources were limited, we were cared for quickly and efficiently with the resources at hand.

In America, this triage system has been distorted by the market system – a market system which has less to do with medical priorities than it does with economics, litigation, and profit. The market system ensures that the ones with the most money get the best health care in a timely fashion. The ones without money get what they can get. The market system also ensures that those with access to lawyers will receive health care, often unnecessary health care. Large sums of money in America are spent on defensive health care, where diagnostic procedures or tests are performed for the sole purpose of defending against potential lawsuits. Finally, the market system, through the prospective payment system, ensures that many wasteful procedures, tests, and office visits will occur, not necessarily for the benefit of the patient, but for the benefit of the provider who will earn more money by performing more procedures and tests.

The table below is a simple demonstration of the inefficiencies of the US health care system

Country	$ Spent Per Capita on Health Care(USD)	Health Care as % of GDP	CT Units per 1 million persons	MRI Units per 1 million persons	Infant Mortality per 1,000 births	Life Expectancy (years)
USA	6,347	15.2	33.9	26.5	6.9	77.8
Canada	3,460	9.9	12.0	6.2	5.4	80.4
Denmark	3,179	9.5	15.8	10.2	4.4	78.3
France	3,306	11.1	10.0	5.3	3.8	80.2
Netherlands	3,156	9.5	8.2	6.6	4.9	79.4
Spain	2,260	8.3	13.9	8.8	3.8	80.4
UK	2,580	8.2	7.6	5.6	5.1	79.4

Source: OECD Health Data 2005

The first two columns of the table show how the US spends approximately twice as much on health care as comparable Western countries. The third and fourth columns are an indication on how that money is spent. The money is spent on fancy machines and diagnostic tools (CT and MRI); these columns show the US usage of MRIs is 3-6 times higher than other countries in Europe. Although these types of tests are a useful tool in diagnosing certain diseases, there use in the USA is certainly out of proportion when compared to other countries. Indeed, I believe the high use of such technology is not driven by patient need, but rather by profit motivation and the fear of litigation.

Finally, the last two columns show that for all the money spent and the technological advances (such as MRI and CT), the US lags behind other countries when it comes to two objective measurements of health care – infant mortality and life expectancy.

In summary, the market system of US health care forces costs to rise and rise and rise again with no objective benefit to the population. These costs are driven by all the players in the system:

1. Lawyers – who through the threat of litigation lead many doctors to perform unnecessary and non-cost effective treatments.

2. Managers (motivated by profit) – who want to provide more care (as long as it is covered by insurance, Medicare or Medicaid programs) because more care leads to more procedures leads to more revenue, which in turn leads to more profits.

3. Insurance Companies (and HMOs) – who tend to provide more care (more coverage) and increase premiums incrementally across its insurance pool. This is especially true since the costs of increased premiums are often negotiated with employers, and the costs are invisible to the employee (the actual customer). Ultimately, more care means more revenue, which usually leads to more profits for the insurance company or the HMO.

4. Doctors – who (bless them) want to provide more care because that is what keeps their patients healthy; but we also must remember that sometimes, doctors also have a financial motivation whereby more health care and more procedures will lead to more money in their pocket. In addition, the current system gives no financial incentive for doctors to coordinate care with other providers.

These four players in the system are all motivated to provide more health care and more expensive health care. The system is fixed to continually increase because there is no one in the system who is manning the brakes!

THE WAY FORWARD

The solution to these issues is simple in theory and more complicated in practice. This solution is a return to triage. Provide health care to the ones who need it, when they need it. The solution, however, given the ensconced positions of each of the players, will not be a quick fix. The US health care system has evolved and been shaped by the market, culture, and technology for over 100 years. A miracle cure will not happen overnight; any new law or system will need to be assimilated into the culture and have its own evolutionary process. However, change needs to happen, and that change must address the incentives and motivations of each of the constituent parties (the doctors, the managers, the insurance companies, and the lawyers).

However, the strategy for health care reform is simple: a return to triage – this entails three steps.

1. Define the resources (set the budgets): At a regional (manageable) level (state, county, or city) define the budget and resources which are available to each entity in any given year. Money, operating rooms, MRIs, hospitals, and all of the other resources available and the cost thereof must be defined and budgeted.

2. Define the health care needs of the population being serviced: At a regional level (state, county, or city), an actuarial study will need to define the health care needs of that particular population; any population of 50,000 persons or so can be studied from an actuarial viewpoint, and a very good estimate of health care needs of that population can be developed.

3. Allow medical professionals to make resource decisions: Doctors and medical professionals then need to make medical decisions on how to use these resources to best service the population. This will be a hard job; there is no doubt about it. However, it is the essence of triage and what doctors should be trained to do and, indeed, what they are paid to do. A limited budget means that not everyone can get an MRI; not everyone can have the expensive course of drugs that has a marginal effect. These are difficult decisions which need to be made, but without a budget limitation, the decision will not be made. These medical professionals, who should be appointed to significant staggered terms to avoid political winds, will have the flexibility to spend money on programs that provide more bang for the buck. They, in effect, will perform triage for the American health care system.

Finally, three other political decisions need to be implemented to allow this strategy to work.

First, health care must be universal and include all citizens. There needs to be an acceptance and realization that we as a country will take care of the basic health care needs of our citizenry. Patient finances should not be the determining factor when providing basic health care. This in turn will make it much easier to define the population and the health care needs of that population (because it is everyone, except those who opt out for private health care). This will also eliminate the universal problems of gaps in coverage when one changes jobs, issues relating to pre-existing conditions, and other problems caused by a private insurance system.

Second, all citizens will be allowed to opt out to a private system. If a person wants to spend his or her money for a special medical procedure, medical “gap” insurance or whatever he thinks is appropriate, he can. It is envisaged that only the relatively wealthy will opt for this type of coverage, but anyone who wants to spend his money on more health care can do so. (This would be analogous to a private school system whereby parents can opt out of the public system at their choice for a fee.)

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to greatly reduce the dollars which are spent on lawyers and procedures performed only to placate the lawyers. Through major tort reform, we need to stop paying the lawyers to police the system. We must eliminate large litigation payouts and thereby eliminate most of the defensive medicine that today is necessary simply to provide an appropriate defense for many doctors. Fair reparation should be paid in certain cases where mistakes are made. However, the multimillion dollar payouts, and more importantly from a cost standpoint, all the waste which comes from defensive medicine in response to such lawsuits need to be eliminated.

These of course are only strategy statements. Work, work, and more work must be accomplished before this strategy can become reality. As such, these are no more than first steps meant to start a dialogue. I welcome discussion and debate which can lead to developing an American health care system which can be the best, the most efficient, and the most compassionate in the world.

A Police Officer’s View on Drugs: Part 2

Several months ago, in my first piece as a writer for Demockracy, I talked about my perspective as a Police Officer who is against the War on Drugs. In the months that followed, this article became a very popular piece on this Web site and across the social networks. As such, I’ve had several requests to follow up on this piece and talk more about my career experiences and share my insights on this ill-begotten war on drugs. From these requests, I’ve decided to write a follow-up piece. In this follow-up article, I will explore some of my personal experiences that have led me to many of my current conclusions. I hope you enjoy and please share any comments that you may have.

LEAP

As I’ve shared in the past, I am a retired Policeman from Vancouver B.C., and I represent LEAP, Law Enforcement Against [drug ] Prohibition. We are a worldwide organization of Police Officers, Corrections Personnel, Judges, and many others who work in different areas of law enforcement, both active and retired. We currently number some 8,500 members. Our advisory board is made up of one US Governor, four sitting US Federal District Court Judges, five former police chiefs, the ex-mayor of Vancouver B.C, Senator Larry Campbell, the Former AG of Colombia, and from the UK, a former Chief Constable and the former head of narcotic task forces for all of England. We do not support drug use and realize that in an ideal world we would be better off without it. What we do believe is that “The War on Drugs” has created most of our problems with drugs and addiction today. Addiction is a disease, not a crime.

More On My Experience

With that said, let me tell you a bit more about myself and why I have come to these conclusions. I joined the Vancouver Police Department in 1973 and served for 28 years. The date of my joining is important, as the year before in 1972 a Canadian Parliamentary Committee known as Le Dain concluded that due to the high costs of enforcement and the relatively benign effects of marijuana, that there should be a gradual withdrawal of criminal sanctions over time resulting eventually in legalization of marijuana. All in-depth studies going back to the British India Hemp act of 1895 have come to the same conclusion about marijuana. However, the Canadian Parliament chose to ignore those recommendations.

As I recall, there was little focus on drugs when I went through the Vancouver Police Training Academy. (I did however learn that reasonable force extended to choking a dealer to prevent his swallowing the evidence and that the ponytails favored by so called hippies made a very effective handle to restrain them.) After completing training, I discovered that drug enforcement was mainly left to the individual officer’s discretion. No high level traffickers were ever investigated. Enforcement was done only at the street level. Those, however, who centered their activities on drug enforcement made substantial overtime amounts from court appearances. This policy, however, has never been the policy of the Federal Police, the R.C.M.P. They, unlike municipal departments, receive considerable federal funding to enforce the drug laws and do so enthusiastically.

One individual I worked with during my early years routinely arrested individuals on the basis of a dirty hash pipe or a spoon with enough residual heroin to analyze. It was not unusual to bring in 4 or 5 individuals from a rundown hotel room on the basis of a small baggie of weed. At that time, the hotel clerks would tell us the rooms where they suspected the occupants of drug use and hand us the keys, while we turned a blind eye to the other illegal activities carried out by the hotel managers and staff. (I suspect these hotel managers were probably the largest traffickers in the buildings and, according to more than one source, charged prostitutes a premium for brief hotel stays.) Drug charges in Vancouver often resulted in some officers doubling their wages from the overtime and court time involved. The drawback was that there was less police presence on the streets to handle the ongoing and routine crime of downtown Vancouver.

In 1995, I started the Vancouver Police Anti-Fencing Unit. Addicts tend to concentrate in the low rent districts as do pawnshops that often supply the addicts with money. The dealers are normally right outside the pawnshop doors to complete the equation. The average addict at that time was spending between $100-$200 daily on his or her addiction. Unfortunately, pawnshops normally only pay 10 cents on the dollar; therefore to support their habits, the addicts have to steal $1,000-$2,000 worth of property. The evidence of stolen property in these pawnshops was so rife as to be almost ludicrous. I remember at one time entering a pawnshop when an addict came in with an armload of stolen property from London Drugs. While negotiating with the owner, he was ripping the London Drugs labels off CDs with his teeth while negotiating the price with the pawnbroker, as he had no spare hands to do the job.

There are unfortunately a small percentage of people who through nurture or genetics, always seem to fall to the bottom and are unable to survive without their self-medications. They have no time for treatment as their days are filled with theft to support their addiction, finding a dealer, and after purchasing their drug of choice, never knowing the quality of their purchase. We cannot help these individuals by locking them away. We must not kid ourselves; in jails, drugs are readily available. Generally, the prison system tolerates drugs as they tends to calm the inmates. The substance that the jail staff often fear is actually alcohol, which leads to riots and destruction. I was told by numerous prison guard colleagues that alcohol is so valued by some of the old alcoholics in jail that they will often attempt to import considerable quantities of drugs, just to trade for alcohol, which is much harder to find inside.

As a policeman, I attended many untimely drug related deaths in the downtown eastside area of Vancouver where I spent much of my career. Overdoses of various drugs were very common. No one paid much heed, and most were not too traumatic to me, as relatives were usually far away, often in Northern BC or other Provinces, and it was up to the local RCMP detachments to notify them. That area in Vancouver is the poorest area in Canada according to tax returns and acts as a magnet to those who have run away from home due to abuse, sexual and domestic. Few of them had any local support in Vancouver. These individuals rapidly became involved in the drug culture of the area and many died there. It was impossible to determine if the drug deaths were a result of long-term abuse, mixing too many drug cocktails or the strength of the drug being greater than expected, either by deliberation, such as we hear of with a hot cap, or by accident.

It was only when I attended deaths out of the usual pattern that the reality of the horror really set in. A one time partner of mine lost his 16 year old daughter to a drug overdose. Unfortunately, her dealer did not monitor her slide into abuse. He did not offer her counseling or monitor the purity and strength of the drugs he sold. He was probably an addict himself, dealing to support his habit. The outrage is that he and thousands more are still out there still selling their products, everywhere to our children.

Solutions?

Raw opium increases in price by several decimal places from the poppy fields, to the addicts in North America. Coke is not quite as profitable and the other drugs even less so, but anyone can rapidly rise to enjoy the lifestyle of say a successful surgeon or lawyer with no educational requirements, experience, skills, and very little work required. The only way we can break this cycle, ensure a uniform product, help those who request it, and monitor those who need help is to legalize the product, heavily regulate it, and supply it to those in need.

Why don’t we go out and arrest all drug dealers? We could arrest them all and you know what will happen? There will be fights, stabbings, shootings and deaths, AND tomorrow new dealers will be there to carry on business as usual. When you arrest a drug dealer, the only thing you create is a job opportunity. As an example, there was recently an investigation of an individual planning to blow up a city block in Surrey, BC, in order to rid it of all the drug dealers there. Some may believe that his point of view could be justified. The only problem was that he himself was a dealer and hoped to take over all the business with the others gone.

Ask yourself if heroin or cocaine were legal, would you use them? I wouldn’t. No one who is rational and has aspirations for a meaningful life is going to. In fact, 99% of all people tell us that they wouldn’t. The first drug laws were enacted because 1-3% of the population was believed to be addicted to drugs. By addicted I mean unable to hold meaningful work and behave in a socially responsible way. Today, after countless millions have been arrested and billions of dollars spent, the percentage of addicts is still estimated at between 1 to 3 % of the population.

Let’s take the money from the criminals, reduce property crimes, reduce prostitution, reduce disease, and give our social agencies the funds to really have an impact on society. Above all, let’s give that 1-3% a chance of a real life.

Epoch’s End

I should start by stating that I am a novice in the fields of economics and finance. My career was as a law enforcement officer. I do, however, believe that I have a firm grasp of world history, human nature, and a sense of how much the human spirit can endure until endless mass frustration leads to a chain of events that explodes into actions which can result in regime change and major shifts in worldwide belief systems.

After the First World War, communism and socialism emerged to duke it out with Hitler’s fascism and other conservative regimes for the balance of power in Europe. After the Second World War, unfettered missionary capitalism emerged in the US, bolstered by evangelic Christianity. Liberalism and socialism tended to dominate in old Europe where the relative place of religion diminished, and today is virtually non-existent in many such secular states. Into this mix, multinational corporations emerged, with no allegiance to anyone except their shareholders. Their power enabled them to shape government policies, and their financial weight enabled them to implicitly blackmail governments into giving them sweetheart deals, which were often to no ones benefit except theirs and the richly rewarded politicians who supported them. From this standpoint, I do suspect that the shock waves radiating around the world from the stock market meltdown were not entirely created by a few bad apples running amok in Wall Street, but were rather a symptom of the basic dishonesty that seems ensconced in most stock markets around the world.

Events of the past decade and the past year in particular have convinced me that we are at Epoch’s End and that the current worldwide geopolitical and economic system is so broken that it can never be completely fixed. What will emerge I cannot venture to guess, but it will likely take many years to reach this yet unknown new global equilibrium. In this new equilibrium, the standard of living that many in the western world have taken for granted in recent generations may not be seen again.

Certainly many have been expecting Epoch’s End, through global warming, plagues or famines, but its tipping point appears to have occurred not through those venues, but through economic breakdown. As life has proceeded happily upward for us in the developed world since the Second World War, we have long forgotten that this uninterrupted growth was unprecedented in recent world history. World history suggests that the past fifty or sixty years are more likely to be seen as an outlier rather than as a permanent new paradigm. In the past, plagues have wiped out the working forces, old industries closed down and new ones developed, and populations followed the jobs. Crop failures caused those who wanted to survive to move on to new areas or even to new continents. Growth has been followed by stagnation. Fifty or sixty years may seem like a long time in the scope of a human lifetime. However, it is all but a footnote in world history.

Over the last 50 or 60 years we have come to expect that things will always improve–we will have better cars, holidays, and medical care, and our incomes will continue to provide more of these things. Many companies have based their development on a policy of increasing their revenues as much as 10% a year. Most of these companies have psychologists study shoppers brain waves to use exactly the right words in their sales promotions and to find the best place to put certain items in the store to trigger the buying impulse. We have all happily shopped and shopped for more and more things we don’t need. Products we really need require no advertising. How many television commercials do you see for bread and milk? If the whole world were to enjoy the standard of living that we currently enjoy in North America, we would need three worlds just to keep up. Perhaps most selfish of all, most people now expect to live longer without giving any thought to the potential consequences of this like increasing the world’s population, all the problems of pollution, global warming, polluted water ways, etc. With the world’s population approaching 8 billion plus people, it is close to cardiac arrest. We can’t expect to live forever and have growth forever; death and cyclical stagnation of populations and civilizations are a part of the natural balance of our planet.

As you probably expected, I am nothing of an expert in the ways of the multinational corporation. However, what I do know is that there are many Chinese workers, working at monotonous, dangerous jobs for $5 a day or less, with unpaid overtime expected. They produce cheap quality goods for us that we really don’t need. Who then is the net gainer? At least in the short run, it is a few wealthy shareholders. In order for this situation to flourish, our wage levels must remain 20 times higher, for the same or less effort, than a Chinese worker. The whole approach is broke.

As I write, more and more western governments are announcing huge spending plans to stimulate the economy, using vast amounts of borrowed money. That money is all coming from the sale of our bonds to China. If it works, perhaps we can put off Epoch’s End for a few years, as we attempt to pay the huge debts. Certainly our wages will take a huge hit, and lifestyles will need to readjust. But what if it doesn’t work, what if our spending doesn’t pick up enough to reopen the factories in China? What if China were to ever demand repayment of those bonds to assist their own citizens? We will be bankrupt, there will be no wages for any civil servants, no military wages, no police wages, and no pensions or benefits of any kind will be paid.

Further, as a people, many of us have become lethargic and ignorant. How is it possible to consider people for the highest offices in the land without demanding that they have the knowledge, stability, and honesty to do the job? When you visit your doctor you know that his or her certificate represents years of study, tested time and again by exams and practicum. Yet we are prepared to accept persons for the highest offices because they look good, string a fine line of BS and are just like you and me. Well I have news for you, I don’t want a person like me running a country.

In Canada from where I write, we had a recent Federal Election. The Liberal leader Stephan Dion was put down continually because he didn’t speak perfectly in his second language of English. He didn’t look good in front of the cameras, and he was often filmed from the wrong angles. The saddest thing was that nobody seemed to have the slightest interest in hearing the substance of what he actually was saying. We could save enormous amounts of money and time if we simply gave the job to the best actor and provided a good speech writer. Perhaps getting precisely that for many years has resulted in all our difficulties today. Franklin D. Roosevelt would probably never have been elected today, wheelchair bound as he was. Winston Churchill, similarly, was drunk too often to be electable today. At that time we paid attention to what was said, not the carefully buffed images we see presented today.

In the last U.S. election, most were too polite to state publicly that the election of Sarah Palin as vice president could potentially place every citizen of the US one 72-year old heart beat away from danger. Yes, thankfully Ms. Palin did not become vice president. However, for one of the two major parties of the world’s leading nuclear superpower to even nominate her for vice president should be scary enough. In the case of Mr. Obama and Mr. Dion, being an intellectual was seen as a negative by many. We call this civilization? Thankfully, after eight years of George W. Bush, the America people took a chance on an intellectual. New Canadian Liberal leader and respected Harvard intellectual, Michael Ignatieff, may get a chance in the next few years as well.

If we are indeed at Epoch’s End, we will have all caused this through greed, but most of all because we have failed to keep our eyes on what has really been going on, failed to keep people honest, and preferred to switch on the football game rather than take a glimpse at the foreign-affairs columns or use our computers to access the mass of information which is availably so readily today, yet ignored by most. If we are at an Epoch’s End, it is indeed our own damn fault.

Climate Change: Penguins, Polar Bears & People

The western Antarctic Peninsula, that limp arm jutting out of Antarctica towards the similarly limp arm of South America’s Patagonian tip at Tierra del Fuego, is warming faster than any place on Earth. Wintertime temperatures have risen a staggering nine degrees Fahrenheit in 50 years. The polar seas off the peninsula, similarly, have risen nine degrees in just 13 years, defying expectations.

On Penguin Island, researchers with Lindblad Expeditions have recorded a 75 percent plummet in the number of Adélie penguins since 1980. Across the island, where normally 600 southern giant petrels can be found, now only 75 have been seen nesting.

It is the North Pole, not the South Pole, that has received the bulk of climate change reporting in the past two years, making Mother Jones recent coverage all the more interesting. The polar bear, as identifiable with the Arctic as Santa Claus, was reported to be dying out, evermore stranded on ice floes that have taken it to the endangered species list. Once a fantasy, the Northwest Passage is becoming a new reality, and Canada and Russia are investing billions building ports in their once-godforsaken northern reaches, ready to take advantage of new shipping routes.

Oil, the ultimate cause of this melting ice, has apparently found its own solution to the rising trend of pirates in the Gulf of Aden and the Strait of Malacca: Skip the pirates, sink the icebergs and burn a path through a newly watery ocean. Adding insult to injury, new oil was discovered under areas once covered by sea ice.

The South Pole, on the other hand, gets a lot less press coverage. While the potential for exploitation and one-day settlement may exist on Antarctica, economic interests are not as obvious as with the better-known Arctic. The land remains far away and mysterious, a two-mile high continent of ice larger than Europe that receives less precipitation than any place on Earth.

University of Chicago climate theoretician Ray Pierrehumbert worries that the most devastating impact of climate change could be on natural ecosystems that have little direct dietary or monetary value to humans, much like these petrels and penguins. He doesn’t believe the impact on natural ecosystems has gotten enough traction in the press. “The systems that are hardest hit by climate change are natural systems,” Pierrehumbert says. “We just don’t have a good track record of even helping salmon survive dams. That’s a much easier technological problem than helping polar bears survive the loss of sea ice. My question is, how much do people care about animals?”

These poor penguins, while appearing cute and cuddly and cartoon-friendly, live in an obviously endangered ecosystem. Several species could be going the way of the great auk, and the flightless birds are declining faster than Pittsburgh, the shrinking steel city that has made them its mascot.

MEDIA GETTING BETTER

Pierrehumbert does take heart in the public reaction to the bleaching of the coral reefs and the listing of the polar bear under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

Additionally, he and other experts and media figures agree that journalistic coverage of climate change is better than it once was. “Ten years ago, the main fault was that the media would always try to balance any opinion by one scientist with some opinion by someone else,” says Pierrehumbert, who believes the mass media are doing a better job of respecting serious science of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Science is just not open to debate like more familiar topics for journalists, such as politics, which require a sense of balancing two sides in the name of objectivity. “There may be 99 people who say ‘A,’ and may have very good reasons for saying ‘A’ is the right thing, and if you only quote one person who says ‘B,’ you don’t get the idea of the actual weight of the evidence,” he says.

Andrew Revkin of The New York Times notes that more than ever before, scientists have immediate access to the general public, managing Web sites such as realclimate.org, climatepolicy.org, and climateethics.org to set everything straight. But certain challenges remain.

Julia Whitty of Mother Jones states: “We know that since 2000 atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased 35 percent faster than expected, despite the pledges of 180 nations to rein them in. We’re aware that polar seas are defying the laws of expectation, warming, in places, a staggering 9 degrees Fahrenheit since 1995, opening the door for non-native plants and animals to cross the polar thresholds and claim new waters for themselves. We get that all this bodes poorly for penguins and humans alike.

Don’t we?”

GET THERE WHILE YOU CAN

Not that the Antarctic is suffering from any lack of interest among the tourist crowd. Whether directed by the wiles of computer animation in March of the Penguins, too much expendable cash, or sincere concern for this last, vanishing frontier, tourism to the uninhabited continent is at an all-time high. Making Julia Whitty’s coverage in Mother Jones all the more interesting, she reports that the tourists are starting to get in the way of the ornithologists trying to chart the continent’s birds while the penguins are still there.

The public still gets too much of the story and the science wrong and there is disagreement both on which direction the media should take or whether the media is the place where change can be directed at all.

Pierrehumbert says he spoke to Revkin about what makes a climate change story worthy of The New York Times, and they both agreed that the public only had so much interest in hearing the same story about, say, a certain species headed for extinction because of man-caused global warming. “There are only so many things that are really new. The problem is not primarily that the news media is not telling the new stuff; it’s that people don’t understand the old stuff. It’s not the job of the news media to tell people about the old stuff. You have to have enough hooks in the news to tell people that this is still an issue,” the scientist notes.

Anthony Perl, a Canadian urban studies professor, used an ironic metaphor to describe the public’s ignorance of climate change science, citing shallow reporting by the media. “I think that only the tip of the iceberg is being fully discussed in the mainstream media, and all this stuff below the water line is somehow unclear,” Perl said. “Until science is clear, the story is not ‘ready.’ And I’m afraid the media has bought into it. By its nature, science is a question of uncertainty.”

In Perl’s search for a solution to the North American energy and climate crisis, he wrote a book advocating a radical departure from the gasoline-powered private automobile and the jet plane to a transportation system based on electrical mass transit: buses, mass transit light rail and high-speed intercity trains, much like in Europe or Japan.

Perl said some scientific studies have shown airplanes may cause many times more damage from carbon emissions pollution than previously thought because jets send their emissions directly into the high atmosphere while they’re in flight. He said such emissions have two to eight times the impact of ground-level engines. But the science is not universally accepted and goes against the official word of the airline industry, leaving the media skittish. “It’s a big piece of news that routinely gets ignored,” Perl said.

Max Boykoff, however, an Oxford University research fellow, warns in Nature that climate change must be reported more carefully to help distinguish widespread scientific agreement from legitimately contentious issues. “To the extent that mass media fuse all climate-related issues into a gestalt as ‘the climate change debate,’ the public is poorly served. It contributes to continued illusory and counterproductive debates within the public and policy communities.”

SORTING THE DUBIOUS FROM TRUE PERIL

Pierrehumbert says it is hard for the media and the public to grasp the epoch time scale of climate changes, compared to the relatively short-term effects and recovery from traditional man-made environmental degradation. “It’s not like other air pollution problems where if you fix it, the thing turns normal in a couple of years. Every time we ratchet up the CO2 level, you’re committing the earth to climate change at that level for a 1000 years, and some aspects of it actually last for more than a 1000 years and you just can’t ratchet it back.”

There is little doubt in the scientific community that the steady rise in CO2 levels are courtesy of human activity, namely, fossil fuel combustion. The impact of this warming is much more debatable. Will icebergs sail across an underwater Florida? Pierrehumbert said that is dubious. But how high will the oceans rise? What just will the climate of the next hundred years look like?

“We have turned our atmosphere into an artifact. With the atmosphere now composed of so many greenhouse gases, we don’t know what the future holds,” said Scott Stine, a geoscientist at California State University, East Bay, who studies climate through the ancient lake beds of the Great Basin.

“Scientists see persistent disputes as the normal stuttering journey toward improved understanding of how the world works. But many fear that the herky-jerky trajectory is distracting the public from the undisputed basics and blocking change,” wrote Revkin.

A blissfully ignorant public could not be called out anymore than by Whitty’s piece on the Antarctic pleasure-seekers aboard her lady the National Geographic Explorer.

A vocal contingent of confused ignoramuses and global warming denialists were aboard this tourist ship, as Whitty recalled, able to see with their own eyes drastic changes to the Antarctic landscape from just 20 years ago and still peering over the bow in disbelief about “this global warming business.” “The two groups manage to exhibit all five stages of climate-change denial: There’s nothing happening; we don’t know why it’s happening; climate change is natural; climate change is not bad; climate change can’t be stopped. The true believers discover each other mostly through shared incredulous silence.”

GORE: CARBON-FREE BY 2018

Al Gore himself believes political will could be built to move to a carbon-free electricity system in 10 years, the same amount of time it took for man to reach the moon after a similar, seemingly radical call by President Kennedy at the dawn of the 1960s.

“There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenges of a present danger,” Gore wrote in a recent issue of Mother Jones. Such a call to action is possible, Gore wrote, and carbon levels can be returned to the “magical” threshold of 350 CO2 parts per million in the atmosphere, as addressed in a separate essay in the magazine. (The atmosphere historically contains 275 CO2 parts per million, and now is up to 385 parts per million and climbing.)

The Europeans have been taking these issues seriously for a decade, and in 2008, both major American political parties put up candidates who promised to address the issue seriously. The victor, Barack Obama, has vowed to make the issue integral to the nation’s economic recovery. As the Earth’s climate worsens for mankind and other species, the American public must follow their lead in recognizing the problem.

But obviously, difficulties remain and an unscientific debate has been allowed to go on for too long. The media are less at fault for this misinformation than they once were. But steps should be taken, whenever new science is released, to gently and firmly repeat the basic premise behind this global warming business: Humans, by burning massive amounts of carbon fuels, have released gases that warm the earth, setting off climatic changes with potentially devastating consequences we are only beginning to understand.

As Charles Darwin said, offering similar advice in regards to that other supposedly debatable scientific theory, evolution: “[T]hus only can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.”

Federalism and Medical Marijuana: A Match Made in Confusion

Federalism is a funny thing. At its best, federalism provides for states’ individual personalities and needs. At its worst, federalism means “no one really knows who’s in charge.” Federalism led to several “nullification” crises in the 1820s when some Southern states, backed by southerner John C. Calhoun (vice president at the time), believed they had the power to “nullify” acts of Congress. Of course, they didn’t, and the states stewed for forty more years until they had a little fight about it.

But, Federalism is here to stay, mostly because it prevents the concentration of all powers in the hands of the federal government. The phrase “United States of America” should be taken more literally than it is: the Founding Fathers thought that this country would, literally, be a bunch of disparate states united by the federal government. In Article I of the Constitution, they laid out Congress’ specific powers: what it can, and cannot, do. Congress’ powers are limited only to those ennumerated in Article I. In 1791, the amendments within the Bill of Rights were ratified, further limiting the federal government’s power. Of note to us now is the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” This is important to remember: if there’s a power someone out there can think of, and that power is not specifically granted to Congress, then the state governments or the people themselves have that power. Take liquor control: there’s no federal law governing alcoholic beverages because regulating liquor is not one of Congress’ specifically-granted powers; therefore, that power defaults to the states.

Sure, great history lesson, but this is all so boring. Does any of this have a point?

Let’s begin in 1970, with the passage of the Controlled Substances Act. This marked the beginning of the War on Drugs. The Controlled Substances Act clearly defined what drugs were always illegal, sometimes illegal, and legal. It divides drugs into five categories, or schedules. Schedule I drugs have a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical value. Schedule II drugs have a high potential for abuse and physical or psychological dependence, but have accepted medical value. And so on down to Schedule V, which are drugs with a low potential for abuse and limited psychological or physical dependence. Marijuana is classified as a Schedule I narcotic, meaning it has a high propensity for abuse and no accepted medical value, as far as the U.S. Congress is concerned.

But the U.S. Congress isn’t always correct. In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 215, which permitted physicians to legally prescribe marijuana as a treatment and further permitted a patient or a patient’s caregiver to grow marijuana plants for the patient’s medical use. Proposition 215 has been the basis for many a federalist showdown over who has authority in the realm of legal drugs. The U.S. Justice Department has refused to recognize the legitimacy of Prop. 215, and as such, continues to raid medical marijuana dispensaries in California because, hey, federal law always trumps state law (this is the “supremacy clause” of the U.S. Constitution).

The U.S. Supreme Court, while not ruling specifically on the issue of California’s statute, has twice upheld the supremacy of Congress when it comes to drug enforcement. In 2005’s Gonzales v. Raich, the Supreme Court used some curious reasoning and the commerce clause to find that Congress can regulate marijuana cultivation, even if the marijuana never crosses state lines (disclosure: I wrote the above-linked article).

As much as proponents of legal marijuana may not like to hear it, the law is very cut and dry: when federal law and state law are in conflict, federal law always wins. In this case, California law says that marijuana has medical value and should be prescribed legally. Federal law completely disagrees. Federal law wins. This is most likely what the U.S. Supreme Court will find if they take up the case of San Diego County.

San Diego County and San Bernadino County, two counties in southern California, have been trying for the past three years to overturn Prop. 215. They argue that they should not be required to do something under state law which is illegal under federal law. California’s Fourth Circuit Court disagreed, upholding the legality of California’s statute. The California Supreme Court declined to hear the case on appeal. Now, San Diego and San Bernadino County are taking their fight to the top and asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule against California.

Which is probably what they will do. As for the Controlled Substances Act itself, marijuana has been shown to have some medical value, but these studies are routinely overlooked by anti-drug advocates who, for some reason, believe that marijuana is the most dangerous drug ever invented. These people are also in charge of our nation’s drug policy. Not only is marijuana not that dangerous (the risk of overdose is zero, for example), but there are many other drugs that are far more dangerous (in the link above to a Rolling Stone article, the author points out that the government ignored the real danger of methamphetamine for years, preferring instead to fight the make-believe scourge of marijuana). The War on Drugs has escalated even into the free speech zone, causing people to be prosecuted under the Controlled Substances Act merely for advocating the use of marijuana or for selling devices that could be used to smoke marijuana.

California, though, is not alone. Other states and municipalities have attempted to circumvent the federal ban in other ways. The most popular method is to make arrest and prosecution for marijuana possession a city police department’s lowest enforcement priority — below traffic tickets, below jaywalking. San Francisco currently has such a policy. The city of Denver passed a referendum in 2005 permitting marijuana possession, even though state law still forbids it. When state, federal, and municipal laws conflict, there’s an enforcement problem. It gets even worse when the people doing some of the enforcing fundamentally disagree with the law. And what happens when the law forbids something that many people do, regardless? Should all those people go to jail, or should the law be re-examined? In Ontario, Canada, a 2008 study showed that 14% of adults used marijuana in 2005. That’s a lot of people; are they all criminals beyond the definition of “criminal” as “one who breaks the law”?

Even if potential Surgeon General Dr. Sanjay Gupta doesn’t think marijuana should be legalized (and for good reasons, too: Dr. Gupta acknowledges that smoking anything is bad for your lungs, and some users report anxiety or depression), he recognizes that some studies have shown marijuana to be an effective treatment for nausea or even Alzheimer’s disease. Marijuana is not illegal because it is bad (cigarettes and alcohol are far worse for your health); it is illegal because a minority of people (the same people who brought you alcohol prohibition) seventy years ago convinced Congress that it was immoral and evil, and that taboo has endured.

Federal marijuana policy is very childish and must be changed, but the Supreme Court is not the appropriate place for relief. If the Court takes San Diego’s case, it will undoubtedly mean the end of medical marijuana legislation for the states. No, appropriate relief must come from Congress, which must remove marijuana from its list of Schedule I narcotics (which is also populated by heroin, mescaline, peyote, and LSD; even cocaine has accepted medical uses!). Rep. Barney Frank took a tremendous step last year when he introduced legislation to permit the possession of small amounts of marijuana by adults (disclosure: I wrote the above-linked article). In the meantime, the people who actually do rely on medical marijuana to get through their day (which, it turns out, are AIDS patients who find marijuana much more effective than the anti-nausea medication they must take with their AIDS drug cocktails) will be ill-served by their government.

Obama’s Progressive Street Cred

The selection of Rick Warren for the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration is troubling, to say the least. Many progressives are rightly outraged at the selection of a man who is virulently anti-choice and homophobic. Yet, this is only the latest in a series of Obama decisions that has left many progressives wondering who it was, exactly, they voted for. Apparently, “change” looks a lot like the Clinton administration. Rahm Emanuel is back. So is Eric Holder, formerly Deputy Attorney General. Most conspicuous of all, Hillary Clinton will be Secretary of State. A bevy of liberal-but-not-quite-progressive apologists have tried to explain away all of Obama’s decisions. Here is a list of some of their justifications:

• Obama is pursuing Abraham Lincoln’s “team of rivals” approach. Authors of this justification also cite Lyndon Johnson’s phrase: it’s better to keep one’s enemies “on the inside, pissing out” rather than “on the outside, pissing in.” By keeping his enemies in the White House, those enemies are not in Congress or on K Street trying to defeat his plans.
• Remember how we all said for six months that Obama’s qualifications don’t matter? Not so much. As such, he’s surrounding himself with a group of people who have experience working in a presidential administration, and the last Democratic presidency was Bill Clinton’s, so it only makes sense that he would choose people from there.
• Obama is sneakier than he seems (think I, Claudius, I suppose). He’s putting a lot of center-left (and, in some cases, center-right) Washington establishment politicians in key positions to pay lip service to that establishment. Don’t worry, it’s only a front. The real reforms are going to happen, but from behind a veil of mainstream non-reform. That’s the only way he can get things done down there.
• Obama does not want to continue the divisive politics of George W. Bush. Even though it might anger those on the hard left, Obama would rather heal and reconcile than punish.  Turn that cheek!

Some of these justifications are disturbing. The last one, that Obama should be conciliatory instead of punitive, is put forth by people who believe that the crimes of the George W. Bush administration should not be investigated. The country needs to heal, they say. It’s time to get on with the business of the United States, where “business” is defined so as to exclude investigations of the previous administration. Of course, this logic ignores the fact that the law has been broken. As Glenn Greenwald has observed, politicians are more than ready to throw the full force of the law at marijuana dealers, but when it comes to prosecuting their own, politicians are equally ready to be lenient, even though the marijuana dealer harmed no one and the politician may have, oh, I don’t know, been responsible for torture, extraordinary rendition, and warrantless wiretapping at the least. When crimes are committed, they should be investigated and prosecuted – not just for poor people, but for everyone, including politicians. For Barack Obama to suggest that Bush administration criminals should go free is to suggest that politicians live in a special class above the reach of the law. It also encourages more illegal activity in the future, once it is known that the government won’t prosecute those activities.

Furthermore, it’s not even up to Barack Obama to decide what is or is not investigated. The cult of personality surrounding him is great (in fact, it contributed to getting him elected), but even though we like him we must not forget that, as the president, he has constitutional limitations. It was irresponsible for the media to even ask what Barack Obama thought about Joe Lieberman being kicked out of the Democratic caucus. On November 5, Obama’s life as a senator ended, even though he didn’t officially resign the position until three weeks later. The president has absolutely no say – none! – in the operation of Congress. It would be different if Obama were acting in his capacity as a senator, but after winning the presidential election, especially in a nation eager for a new leader, any notion of Obama acting solely in his capacity as a senator would be extremely naïve. Obama must repudiate the unconstitutional powers that George W. Bush has claimed for himself, either through complete fabrication or malicious misreading of constitutional law.

Given his opinion of things like same-sex marriage (he tactfully says that same-sex couples should not be allowed to “marry” as such, but then says that they should have the same rights as heterosexual couples), NAFTA/CAFTA, and Israel, no one could confuse him for a true progressive. Obama’s apologists rationalize his decisions by pointing out that Obama never claimed to be a progressive at all!

Or could they? George W. Bush’s method of saying-without-saying is well-documented. While he never explicitly said that Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11 attacks, there is definitely a reason why, in 2001, virtually no Americans thought Saddam Hussein was responsible, but in 2003, one third of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was responsible.

Could it be that Barack Obama, whose campaign P.R. was spectacular, performed the same saying-but-not-saying function? Yes, it is entirely possible that Obama clothed himself in the cloak of progressivism while still wearing the mainstream Democrat’s clothes underneath. He has suggested massive new spending on entitlement programs, but he wants to increase the size of the military. He wants to let the Bush tax cuts expire, but he voted in favor of retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that assisted the administration in warrantless wiretapping. His foreign policy goals consist of using real diplomacy instead of threats, but he voted in favor of NAFTA. He wants to provide government health care for people who have no health care, but he stops short of suggesting a universal-payer system like Canada’s or Great Britain’s. Obama’s positions are a wash: for every progressive-sounding idea, there is another conservative-sounding one to balance it out.

Or, on the other hand, it could be that Obama never suggested anything, but that he was forthcoming about his non-progressive credentials. It could be that we, the progressive Americans, were so thirsty for a change that we latched onto the only candidate (outside of Dennis Kucinich) who even brought up the issue of health care reform (at those early Republican primary debates, not a single candidate brought up the issue of health care), social reform, and getting out of Iraq (Hillary Clinton and John Edwards failed on at least one of these). We projected onto him the candidate we wanted him to be, ignoring the fact that he was not that candidate. Did we set ourselves up for disappointment? Yes, that is possible, too.

And then there’s the argument that all this complaining is pointless, that Obama isn’t even the president yet, and we should all just wait and see what happens on Jan. 20. Well, Rick Warren will happen Jan. 20, and that gives me even less optimism that, at noon on that day, Obama will suddenly throw aside his centrist mask and shout, “You fools! You thought I was just like Bill Clinton! But you were wrong! Free health care for everybody!” Agreeing to take part in Warren’s Saddleback (which sounds dangerously like “bareback”) debate with John McCain, Obama could conceivably have been seen as paying lip service to evangelical Protestantism, just like every president since Nixon has had to do. But putting Warren on the bill for Inauguration Day? Imagine if George W. Bush had hired Hillary Clinton to give a speech at his second inauguration. Yeah, it’s like.

Most troubling in my opinion, though, is Obama’s own insistence, ever since March of 2007, when he announced his candidacy, that he is not an ordinary politician. His grassroots, fifty-state strategy was unparalleled in its success. His speech about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was intelligent and it treated the American people as though they, too, could understand long speeches that contained nuanced thoughts, as opposed to the Manichean sound bites of George W. Bush. His political maturity happened after the Vietnam War era, and, as Andrew Sullivan has suggested, the very core of his being is not instilled with a reflexive fear of Republicans and conservatism.

Conservatism demands the acknowledgment of a false dualism in every aspect of life, with the promise that conservatism will lead people to the correct side of this duality. Democrats buy into this framework and then try to argue the opposite side. The true progressive would never let the Republicans frame the debate and then proceed to work within their ill-conceived framework. To the progressive, there is no debate about whether or not health care should be free, or if there should be a premium for minimum services, or if the government should control it. The answer is: the current system of privatized health care doesn’t work and it should not be repaired, it must be rebuilt from the ground up. Obama appeared unafraid to work outside the existing framework and create a new framework that works in the interests of everyone. “Should it be a public solution or a private solution?” is not the correct question. “What solution is best for the country?” Now that’s the right question. It’s a question that Obama appeared to be asking during the campaign, but one that is being substituted by justifications for increasingly conservative behavior.

A Police Officer’s View on Drugs

For 28 years, I served as a member of the Vancouver Police Department, and spent most of that time at the street level, in and around Vancouver’s poorest area commonly known as “Skid Road.” This area is Canada’s poorest postal code zone. It is an area of cheap fleabag hotels, bars, and drugs. The only people who reside here are those whom society has cast aside because of disability, personality disorders, or sheer bad luck. It has been like this for at least 50 years. Only the faces and preferences of the addicts have changed.

Quite early in my career as a law enforcement officer, it became very obvious to me that the most dangerous drug was a legal drug. That drug is alcohol. Every riot, every disturbance, every assault, every serious late night motor vehicle accident, every homicide, and every sexual assault almost always involved alcohol.

Where were the horrific crimes caused by drug addicts? They were there, but generally speaking they were non-violent property crimes and prostitution. It has been estimated that somewhere between 75-80% of all property crimes are committed by addicts. This begets the question that most policemen in our major cities have asked themselves countless times: why not treat addicts for their addictions, not as criminals, and supply their drugs temporarily until they get help. Apparently, a significant reduction in property crime, reduced jail costs, and lower medical costs is not a sufficient answer.

The biggest question, which really changed my thinking toward the criminalization of drugs was, is why do we persist with laws that guarantee that serious criminals will become immensely rich, powerful, and violent toward any other criminals who stand in their way. If drugs were legally available, there would be no profits for the gangsters. U.S. history teaches us of a parallel situation that occurred during alcohol prohibition in the early twenty century, when gangsters became rich and powerful supplying bootleg alcohol. Al Capone’s South Side Gang and similar gangs murdered whoever stood in their way. The crime rate shot up 200%. Finally, when alcohol prohibition was canceled, most of the gangs disappeared as the profits were gone, the murder rate returned to what it was before prohibition, AND everyone didn’t become an alcoholic overnight!

Let’s ask ourselves a question. If heroin and cocaine were legal, would you use them? Virtually everyone says no, which is really no surprise if you think about it. We also know that up until the 1920s these substances were legal. Laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol was the drug of choice to the Victorians. Today the percentage of drug addicts, by which I mean those unable to function in society due to their addictions, remains the same as before there were any drug laws. Hardly a round of applause for the billions of dollars spent on enforcement over the past 80 years. Indeed if drug prohibition were a business that received payment for its results, it would not have lasted a year.

Everyone fears change, and one of the big fears of the general public is the fear of drugs becoming more readily available to our children. Today most of our children can in fact more easily obtain drugs than they can obtain liquor. The gangsters make sure this is the case by ensuring that dealers are present outside most of our schools. These dealers pay no heed to our children’s health, and they often have little knowledge of the substances cut with the drugs or even strength of their products. Drug prohibition causes this situation to persist.

If we look at the history of tobacco, we know education works. Tobacco eventually kills 50% of all regular smokers. Tobacco is legal. Yet through common sense and education, tobacco smoking is down by two thirds from thirty years ago. Education works, but only if honestly given. This spring I was approached by a grandmother whose granddaughter had phoned her in real distress. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been running the D.A.R.E. program in her school, and she was convinced that her parents’ occasional use of Marijuana would cause their deaths. If any of the information given is flawed, kids will reject all information given to them about drugs from parents and other authority figures.

I am a member of LEAP, which is an organization of retired policemen, judges, prison guards, others involved in law enforcement ,and many others. It was founded by a former highly commended U.S. drug enforcement officer, Jack Cole. Today it is worldwide. We all believe that drugs are not good, but it is “the War on Drugs” that is causing most of our problems. This war costs 2.5 billion dollars a year in Canada and 10 times that amount in the United States. WHY?

Next Page »