Author: Tony

Freedom for $1.05 or drugs for $2?

The words leading to the coordinating conjunction in this story’s lede sentence gives the reader more than enough information to know how this will affect drug enforcement policy.

A cheap, highly addictive drug known as “cheese heroin” has killed 21 teenagers in the Dallas area over the past two years, and authorities say they are hoping they can stop the fad before it spreads across the nation.

“Cheese heroin” is a blend of so-called black tar Mexican heroin and crushed over-the-counter medications that contain the antihistamine diphenhydramine, found in products such as Tylenol PM, police say. The sedative effects of the heroin and the nighttime sleep aids make for a deadly brew.

We’re going to get fear to justify more brutal attempts to enforce prohibition. It’s stupid, but typical. And being so obvious, it’s not what warrants the most attention. Better to start here:

“Cheese” is not only dangerous. It’s cheap. About $2 for a single hit and as little as $10 per gram. The drug can be snorted with a straw or through a ballpoint pen, authorities say. It causes drowsiness and lethargy, as well as euphoria, excessive thirst and disorientation. That is, if the user survives.

I expected a multimedia presentation with the requisite pause and ominous drumbeat after that last sentence.

It makes no sense to pretend that something like “cheese heroin” is bad. I’m sure it is. But what evidence do we get to excuse “if the user survives”? After all, we’re told that 21 teens have died in 24 months. That’s an awful statistic, but outside of some other context, it doesn’t tell us anything meaningful.

Authorities say the number of arrests involving possession of “cheese” in the Dallas area this school year was 146, up from about 90 the year before. School is out for the summer, and authorities fear that the students, with more time on their hands, could turn to the drug.

The first statistic we get is an approximation that 236 people were arrested for possessing this drug in the two years in which 21 students have died. I’m left wondering whether these arrests involved teens or not since the article doesn’t say. It does use the academic calendar to measure arrests. That’s a quaint device.

But looking at the numbers, are we to assume that almost 10% of users die? Highly unlikely, for no rational person would believe that Dallas police have arrested every possessor of “cheese”. (I’m sure they’ve tried, mightily.) I’m still left trying to triangulate a rational context for this hyper-fear.

Drug treatment centers in Dallas say teen “cheese” addicts are now as common as those seeking help for a marijuana addiction. “It is the first drug to have even come close in my experience here,” says Michelle Hemm, director of Phoenix House in Dallas.

Without hard numbers¹ it’s difficult to draw concrete conclusions, but I’m guessing the number of marijuana users addicts is high enough that a comparison implying a 10% death rate among “cheese” users is flawed. So the death rate is lower, as a percentage. What percentage are we looking at? Is the level of fear and panic implied in this story justified?

I don’t have the answer, unfortunately. Again, I’m sure “cheese heroin” is nasty, dangerous stuff. But I’m left wondering if there isn’t a message in this story about prohibition?

[Dallas police detective Monty] Moncibais then asked how many students knew a “cheese” user. Just about everyone in the auditorium raised a hand. At one point, when he mentioned that the United States has the highest rate of drug users in the world, the middle schoolers cheered.²

“You know, I know being No. 1 is important, but being the No. 1 dopeheads in the world, I don’t know whether [that] bears applause,” Moncibais shot back.

Decades of prohibition and we’re the best at having people use drugs. A sane policy would not continue pursuing prohibition at all costs. It would acknowledge that people will use drugs, despite a general consensus among fans of prohibition that drug use is bad. Reasonable officials would seek to minimize the damage from that drug use instead of trying to win an unwinnable “war”, even if it meant decriminalization.

But that doesn’t win elections or justify larger budgets. Fear does that.

¹ The next paragraph in the article:

From September 2005 to September 2006, Phoenix House received 69 “cheese” referral calls from parents. Hemm says that in the last eight months alone, that number has nearly doubled to 136. The message from the parents is always, “My kid is using ‘cheese,’ ” she says.

That provides more numbers, but I don’t think they help or hurt my argument.

² At this point in the story, CNN has a video link titled “Watch middle schoolers raise hands, admit they know drug users”. I laughed at the stupid absurdity.

They are equal human beings.

Consider:

For 3-year-old Amira, a law banning female genital mutilation in Eritrea came too late.

Wrapped in an orange traditional dress, Amira’s mother, who gives her name only as Gerejet, says she circumcised the child to please her future husband.

“It was the culture that we have taken from our grandmothers, but we also do it for the pleasure of the men,” the 30-year-old told Reuters in a small village 100 kilometers (62 miles) west of the Eritrean capital, Asmara.

When people say there is zero comparison between cutting the genitals of males and females, they are blind to the obvious. Change the pronouns in that excerpt and it would be eerily familiar to the unspoken thought process of several thousand surgeries carried out every day in America. There are complexities within the comparison that should not be shoved aside, of course, but the justifications for cutting are too similar to ignore.

“Congress shall make no law…”

The NCAA kicked a reporter out of the press box for liveblogging a game at the baseball super-regional yesterday. I find that absurd, but the NCAA can set whatever restrictions it wants. What’s amusing is the inevitable reaction from the reporter’s newspaper:

Courier-Journal executive editor Bennie L. Ivory challenged the NCAA’s action last night and said the newspaper would consider an official response.

“It’s clearly a First Amendment issue,” Ivory said. “This is part of the evolution of how we present the news to our readers. It’s what we did during the Orange Bowl. It’s what we did during the NCAA basketball tournament. It’s what we do.”

It’s clearly not a First Amendment issue. The government has played no part in this. This is a dispute between two private parties who agreed to a set of rules. Obviously one party is either misunderstanding or ignoring the rules. But the government didn’t violate any free speech right.

Convoluted hat tip required. Link found at Instapundit, via KnoxNews, which linked from Poynter Online.

Health care economics are not different.

Sebastian Mallaby is correct in explaining that Republicans have embraced economic stupidity surrounding globalization, as evidenced by its stance on immigration. Although the root cause appears to be more xenophobia than economic ignorance, the point is taken. However, Mr. Mallaby quickly loses any credibility when he switches to health care and Rudy Giuliani’s proposal to fix the system. His intro:

Giuliani is also spouting nonsense about health care — a challenge that the nation must address if it is to assuage middle-class anxiety about a turbulent globalized economy. As employers have stopped offering coverage, Americans have discovered that it’s almost impossible to buy decent insurance because the market for individual purchasers is plagued by a vicious cycle. At the start of this cycle, insurance premiums reflect the cost of covering the average person, so healthier-than-average people realize they are getting a bad deal and choose not to buy coverage. That leaves a sicklier group in the market, which forces premiums up, which drives more relatively healthy people to exit, which drives premiums up still more, and so on.

I’d like to see some statistics verifying that claim. I’m a healthy individual insurance purchaser, and I’ve found my premiums to be reasonable enough. That doesn’t mean I think my insurance shouldn’t and couldn’t be cheaper. I do. But I realize that the disincentive to switch to a robust insurance market devoid of a sole reliance on groups organized around individual employers is based on our flawed tax code, not Mr. Mallaby’s absurd theory:

This market failure is a basic fact of health-care economics. But Giuliani is oblivious to it. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last week, he indicated that he wants to triple the number of people in the dysfunctional individual insurance market without taking the one step that might fix it, which is to force every American, healthy or not, to buy coverage. Depending on whether he understands how dumb this is, Hizzoner is either a coward or a lightweight.

There’s so much to challenge. Most obvious, he trips himself in the beginning. If “health care” economics (economics is a science, remember) states that society will see a race to the bottom where only sick people will have an incentive to minimize their risk through insurance, then how exactly is this adherence to economics a market “failure”? It sounds to me as if the market is behaving exactly as expected. Yes, we have to rely on Mr. Mallaby’s misunderstanding of economics, but in his worldview, market failure cannot happen according to “health care economics” unless insurance companies ignore profit incentives and offer health insurance at a loss. I don’t believe that’s happening, but maybe Mr. Mallaby has evidence to the contrary.

That could be our endpoint, as it’s enough to dismiss his argument. That wouldn’t be any fun. There’s so much more wrapped into one paragraph. Not getting the results we want? Blame the market without looking at all inputs in that market. Ideology over facts!

I don’t know enough about Guiliani’s plan to critique it fairly, but using what I have here, how would expanding the pool of candidates for individual health insurance, which would spread risk further across the client pool for the individual insurance companies, exacerbate the problem? If it would work with employers, what would be different?

The answer is obvious if you look not at intention (affordable health care) and look instead at intended action. Here Mr. Mallaby offers only force. He has no interest in incentives, only playing the role of central planner. His justification is obvious later in the essay:

Instead, the Democratic candidates are focusing on helping the economy’s losers without restricting trade, which is exactly what they should be doing.

Why does he show no concern for why there are economic “losers”? I assume he believes that our benevolent government can’t possibly create losers. That’s capitalism’s fault. Because capitalism is only “I win, you lose”. It’s a fascinating narrative, even though it’s 100% incorrect.

From the rest of that paragraph:

John Edwards, the contender who sounded most protectionist in 2004, seems to have turned over a new leaf. He has admitted that trade benefits poor countries and has declared that arguments over labor standards should not be an excuse to obstruct liberalization. Meanwhile, Edwards has proposed a thoughtful health-care reform that would require everyone to buy insurance. He supports market-minded social programs such as an expanded earned-income tax credit and housing vouchers.

Market-minded social programs is as informative as it is bone-headed. (Mr. Edwards shouldn’t get credit for proposing stupidity.) Mr. Mallaby wants a socialist solution with a few free market curtains to pretty up the proposal. It won’t work in the way he predicts. Incentives matter. You don’t fix a disincentive by encouraging the offending entity to create new misguided incentives.

Hear the wind blowing through his ears.

I’m not ashamed to have voted against Bush for Kerry-Edwards in 2004, but it gets harder every day.

Responding to a question at a bookstore here, John Edwards said he has never heard of PETA, the animal rights group.

“I can honestly say I have never heard of PETA,” said Edwards. “They don’t want people to eat meat? Well I am not in favor of that.”

Can he possibly be that moronic? If he is so unaware of the news to not know who PETA is, he’s clearly not capable of ever being fully informed about our world. We have a president like that now, we don’t need another.

On a more fundamental note, is he really be such a dunce that he thinks somehow meat-eating versus vegetarian/veganism is going to become a campaign issue requiring a public stance? Alright, now I’m a little ashamed.

Link via Elaine Vigneault.

Voters as Spoiled Children

Courtesy of an e-mail Andrew Sullivan received from a reader, here’s an ill-informed defense of majoritarianism, referencing Mitt Romney.

What’s wrong with politicians doing whatever it is we want, regardless of their own personal views? Isn’t that what we elect them for, to do the will of the people? It’s better than politicians who stick to their own asinine views as a matter of principle, the will of the people be damned.

No, that’s not what we elect them to do. We elect them to uphold the Constitution of the United States, as expressed in the oath of office found in Article II, Section I.

The will of the people plays a part, as it’s our government, but the president’s role does not involve indulging our whims. He who will pander instead of upholding the Constitution should not be president. Few can live up to this simple standard, requiring us to do the best we can with who we have. But that’s why we have constitutional checks on the executive (and other elected, political offices).

Semantic lunacy demonstrates intellectual lunacy.

Via Hit & Run, I see that Nebraska has an interesting understanding of the Constitution and legislating.

A member of the Kansas group that has drawn criticism for protesting at soldiers’ funerals has been arrested for letting her 10-year-old son stomp on a U.S. flag during a demonstration. She promised Wednesday to challenge the state’s flag desecration law in court.

Shirley Phelps-Roper, 49, will be charged with flag mutilation, disturbing the peace and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, Sarpy County Attorney Lee Polikov said Wednesday.
…

Nebraska’s flag law says: “A person commits the offense of mutilating a flag if such person intentionally casts contempt or ridicule upon a flag by mutilating, defacing, defiling, burning, or trampling upon such flag.”

Let me understand this. In Nebraska, it’s illegal to “mutilate” a flag, but it’s legal to mutilate a boy’s penis. <sarcasm>That seems reasonable.</sarcasm>

No Lacky Left Behind

Fouad Ajami may find it compelling to call on President Bush to pardon I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for his loyal service as “a soldier in your–our–war in Iraq”, but I find it dangerous and intellectually immature. For example:

The men and women who entrusted you with the presidency, I dare say, are hard pressed to understand why former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who was the admitted leaker of Mrs. Wilson’s identity to columnist Robert Novak, has the comforts of home and freedom and privilege while Scooter Libby faces the dreaded prospect of imprisonment.

It’s quite the conservative principle to pardon a guilty man so that we don’t feel bad about another guilty man being free. You know, since there’s no other solution. I’m unconvinced, and again find it dangerous, by the rhetoric that Libby “can’t be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed [factual sic] as its own.”

Not Acting Presidential

This lovefest for Democrats and their progressive rebuke of “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell” is fascinating:

The presidential candidates are dividing starkly along party lines on one of the signature fights of the 1990s: whether the 14-year-old policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” should be repealed and gay men and lesbians allowed to serve openly in the military.

In back-to-back debates in New Hampshire this week, every Democratic candidate raised his or her hand in support of repealing that policy, while not a single Republican embraced the idea. Democrats argued with striking unanimity that it was time to end the uneasy compromise that President Bill Clinton reached in 1993, after his attempt to lift the ban on gay men and lesbians in the military provoked one of the most wrenching fights of his young administration.

Right. Allow me to quote Kip:

… If Biden, Dodd, Obama and Clinton are all so yippee-ki-yay to abolish this abomination, then why haven’t any of them actually introduced a bill in the Senate to do so? Recall that the House version already exists (although it is languishing in committee) — all any Senator has to do is introduce the same text. …

That’s obvious, and as Kip also points out, Sen. Clinton is on the Senate Armed Services Committee, where such a bill would begin. So why exactly should those of us who think that members of our military should be judged solely on their conduct be happy about this?

Geoffrey Garin, a Democratic pollster who also works for the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, argues, “Iraq and the war on terror have created a whole new narrative around the issue of gays serving in the military.” Advocates of changing the policy increasingly argue that it is costing the military talent and manpower it badly needs.

On the other hand, there are political risks, which Republican candidates hinted at this week. If the Democrats emphasized the issue, even in their primaries, it could seem a distraction from issues that are more important to most Americans, including the war, gasoline prices and health care, said David Winston, a Republican pollster. Beyond that, in the view of some Republicans, the issue feeds into the criticism that surfaced in the early 1990s — that the military should not be a laboratory for social engineering.

Why should I vote for a Democratic candidate who can’t figure out that a narrative explaining why booting translators, who are in short supply, from the military during a war in which those skills are most needed is the perfect, impenetrable argument against such nonsense that the war demands institutionalized bigotry? If they can’t understand that, they are idiots incapable of formulating any strategy more complex than basic pandering. If they understand it, they are cowards afraid to challenge stupidity. I’ll vote for neither.

Post Script: Mitt Romney believes that now is not the time to repeal “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell” because we should not undertake a “social experiment” in a time of war. First, as currently defined, that war is permanent. Quite the convenient catch-22. Second, Romney believes that equality under the law is a “social experiment.” I don’t know which point makes him more unfit to be president.