Category: News

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.

“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.

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>

HIV Conferences are dangerous to genital integrity.

Following up on my previous post, some typical and not-so-typical arguments appeared at the Third South African AIDS Conference earlier this week. First, the typical in describing the apparent risk-reduction from the recent HIV studies:

“The effect was long-lasting, there wasn’t disinhibition [increased sexual risk-taking], they didn’t screw around more, they didn’t use condoms less,” said Neil Martinson¹.

Remember that both circumcised and intact groups in the studies saw a more significant drop in their rate of HIV infection over their national HIV infection rate than the effect presumably provided by circumcision. But it’s easier to keep focusing on circumcision, because that (allegedly) removes the human factor from HIV prevention. Sure.

Next:

“There’s no question that we need a male circumcision programme, but a mass programme is more debateable. Operationalising it is going to be complicated,” said Professor Alan Whiteside of the University of KwaZulu Natal.

He advocated routine opt-out male circumcision at birth. “Thirty years from now we’ll be so glad we did it.” He believes that “if we’d started 25 years ago we wouldn’t be in this godawful mess.”
…

An audience member suggested that op-out circumcision should also become standard practice for adult males who attend sexually transmitted infection clinics.

…routine opt-out male circumcision at birth. When talking about saving for retirement, opt-out programs make sense. It involves only the person whose money will be siphoned off into a separate, presently untouchable account. There is a (mostly) objective rationale behind the requirement. It’s a form of “we know better what you should do”. But he can easily reject this. He can also reverse his decision later.

Routine opt-out male circumcision at birth requires a specific action from one group (parents) to avoid violating another’s (their male child) right to not have part of his genitals cut off without medical need. There is an entirely subjective reasoning behind the requirement. Parents could reject this, although they’d likely receive information with overblown, fear-based hysteria. The experts are counting on the well-intentioned parental desire to protect children, with a bit of residual goodwill toward the procedure if the father’s chosen it for himself. But the male child can never reverse this decision. This is little more than social engineering with children and their genitals as pawns for the public health nannys.

If African nations had started routine infant male circumcision 25 years ago, they might not be in this “godawful mess, but they’d also have a generation of cut males to demonstrate that HIV infection is still possible and that more effective, less invasive methods of prevention already exist. But don’t bother to learn from the United States the lessons that are inconvenient to learning what you want to learn from the United States.

Now, for a moment of respite from insanity, something non-typical:

However Professor Timothy Quinlan of the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division at the University of KwaZulu Natal was sceptical about the need for a mass programme, arguing that the evidence doesn’t justify it.
…

… he said, prevention needs to focus on the two factors known to have the biggest effect on HIV transmission rates: concurrent partnerships and high viral load during primary infection.

There’s a need for clearer messages to communicate these facts,” he said. “We need to promote serial monogamy.”

I know, that’s unworkable because it assumes some sense of personal responsibility and ability to learn among African men.

And now a return to the typical:

Audience members raised some of the practical issues that are likely to arise in the implementation of any sort of circumcision programme. Traditional healers in particular will need to be brought on board, said numerous speakers.

“Don’t talk about circumcision in isolation from the initiation processes going on in all the different cultures in South Africa,” said one male audience member.

But there was general agreement that traditional healers who carried out circumcision during the initiation of young males into adulthood had a captive audience for passing on important prevention messages, and that this potential wasn’t being exploited.

Yes, what about those traditional healers? Ahem:

A 22-year-old unregistered traditional surgeon was arrested for illegally circumcising two boys in Libode, the Eastern Cape health department said on Saturday.
…

Meanwhile, police were searching for another unregistered traditional surgeon who allegedly circumcised 24 under age boys in Mthombe.
…

Kupelo said three of the boys were taken to hospital with serious complications.

And:

2006 Eastern Cape summer-season circumcision deaths have declined markedly compared to 2005, Eastern Cape provincial health department spokesperson Sizwe Kupelo said, adding that only four would-be initiates had died so far this season, compared with 24 in 2005.

Of those four, only two were the result of complications of the circumcision operation. …

And. And. And.

This reliance on traditional healers is an acceptance that, among several challenges, the public health community doesn’t have the resources to provide full, clinical circumcision in Africa. Yet it pushes the notion that it must be done both “mass” and “soon”. Why is it so difficult to see how this will end? How many deaths are acceptable? Are we really ready to rely solely on the utilitarian argument that more lives will (probably) be saved with mass circumcision than will be taken through mass circumcision? I’m not, since I’m capable of understanding individual rights.

¹ To another point by Dr. Neil Martinson:

“It’s all about cold steel – it’s more akin to sterilisation, it’s not like giving people clean water, it’s not like breastfeeding that we can all get warm and fuzzy about.”

Promoting mass circumcision is primarily about giving advocates warm and fuzzy feelings that they’re doing something monumental. Otherwise, why the rush to circumcise infants based on three studies of voluntarily circumcised adult males? It also reassures parents with a warm and fuzzy feeling that they’ve “protected” their sons from HIV rather than violated his rights.

Also:

There was confusion about who would be targeted with messages about circumcision. Would it be young men, or would it be their parents? Or must their future sexual partners be targeted, “so that they say `I won’t sleep with you unless you’re cut’,” asked Neil Martinson?

“I won’t sleep with you unless you’re cut.” Let’s promote such non-thinking. Maybe, if we work at it enough, we can convince African women that they prefer, and sh
ould prefer, the aesthetic look of the circumcised penis. It’s okay if that implies that men should change themselves to meet a woman’s expectation. The reverse is sexist and unacceptable, of course, but we all know that’s okay.

We can’t stop access to weapons, if we understand the term “weapon”.

This appears to be an unfortunate vindication of what I argued in this recent post:

A vehicle hurtled through a crowded street festival in the District last night, knocking people down, throwing some in the air and pinning others beneath its wheels, according to accounts from police and witnesses. Authorities said 35 people were taken to hospitals, seven with severe injuries.

The chaotic scene occurred about 8 p.m. at Unifest, an annual street festival sponsored by a prominent Anacostia church. Witness accounts indicated that a gray station wagon, with a woman driving, plowed through swarms of festival-goers on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and W Street SE, among other thoroughfares.
…

The driver of the station wagon “was purposeful,” said a man who saw some of the incident from his porch. “She was going purposefully. She was not going to stop.”

If this was intentional, can I expect to soon hear a call for a ban on cars?

No? Why not?

“Actually, gingervitus is the medical term.”

This story requires the obligatory link to “Ginger Kids“, the greatest episode of South Park:

A shaken family told how they have been hounded out of three homes — for having ginger hair.

Kevin and Barbara Chapman and their four children have been targeted by thugs for three terrifying years.

The youngsters have been verbally abused and beaten up, while vandals have regularly smashed the family’s windows and sprayed hate-filled graffiti on the walls of their council homes.

Only this week, the slogan “Gingers are gay” was daubed across one wall.

I find it hard to believe something like this could happen, so my crap detector is going off. It just seems too ridiculous. But small-minded people will find anything to taunt someone different. That’s not going away.

Wondering whether there’s a disconnect to the typical sort of nonsense directed at redheads in America and a taunt that includes “gingers are gay”, I researched the ramifications of the British slang for ginger. I found this dictionary:

  1. Homosexual. Rhyming slang, from Ginger beer – ‘queer’.
  2. A ginger or red haired person. Pronounced with hard g’s as in goggles.
  3. Carbonated drink, such as cola. [Scottish use]

Who knew? And I didn’t realize that it’s pronounced with a hard “g”. Overall a banged-up mental process to arrive at such a derogatory term, but still fascinating.

For an example, consider this story from December in the UK:

The BBC has upheld a complaint against Jeremy Clarkson, the Top Gear presenter, after he described a car as a “bit gay”.
…

He provoked the ire of the gay community when he asked a member of the show’s audience if he would buy a two-seater Daihatsu Copen, retailing at £13,495. The man said, “No, it’s a bit gay”, to which Clarkson added: “A bit gay, yes, very ginger beer.”

Story link via Fark. “Ginger beer” link via Citizen Crain, where you’ll find good commentary on the free speech implications of this example. Daihatsu Copen here. A better image here.

People will continue to commit evil acts.

This letter to the editor of Time, in response to the Virginia Tech shootings, is curious. The letter writer is from Toronto, so his perspective on our Constitution is probably a little bit different. Yet, what he says is similar to what we hear from many gun-control proponents in the United States. Here’s an excerpt:

If there are protections in the Constitution, drag that document kicking and screaming into the 21st century by amending it. Let the military and the police have their weapons, and let legitimate hunters and farmers have their long guns. But everyone else? Just let them try to club or stab 32 people to death in one go.

Marc Kramer, TORONTO

Clearly he misses the point that gun ownership among the citizenry is meant as a deterrent to tyrannical government, the kind where “the military and the police have their weapons”. To be fair, Mr. Kramer does not expect all citizens to be disarmed. I am left wondering who will decide who qualifies as a “legitimate” hunter? A farmer? So in the process of disarming citizens, we’re also to give the government the power to decide who meets a narrow definition of acceptable (long gun) gun owners. This argument is far too deferential to state power.

Still, Mr. Kramer’s argument disintegrates in the end because he implies that banning guns will end mass murder. I’m sure someone would have a difficult time stabbing 32 people to death in one go. But what about driving their car into a crowded area? Although these accidents weren’t intentional, is it crazy to believe that someone with murderous intentions could try the same? Should we now ban cars, except for those few who “need” them?

Guns and cars are different. I get that. But we’re not discussing them in the everyday, intended use context. We’re discussing what can be a weapon? Cars can easily be made a weapon, as can many different otherwise innocent objects. When put together, they can become a bomb.

The discussion must move beyond the simplistic “guns are icky and the Constitution is outdated for allowing them”.

I guess I’m now jumping into the 2008 discussion.

I’m not a die-hard fan of Ron Paul. His position on immigration is offensive and his support for returning to the gold standard is ludicrous. But he’s consistently voted against expanding the size of the federal government. So, he’s not a great choice for president, except he’s a better choice than all of the other announced candidates.

Last night, the Republicans held their second primary debate. I didn’t watch, but this clip from Congressman Paul is worth watching.

Rep. Paul doesn’t fully explain what he’s trying to say, but anyone with a shred of sense can figure out the gist. We should probably demand more from a president, of course, but consider Guiliani’s performance in that clip. Would we rather have a president who stumbles on his words (hey…) or a president who’s an unquestioning, deceitful prick?

Video link via Andrew Sullivan.

Did the editor punt this assignment?

Here’s a fascinating story:

Miracles do happen. That’s what doctors said about 30-year-old Shannon Malloy.

A car crash in Nebraska on Jan. 25 threw Malloy up against the vehicle’s dashboard. In the process, her skull became separated from her spine. The clinical term for her condition is called internal decapitation.

I can’t imagine what that must feel like or how I’d respond in the moments after that happened. I’m impressed that she lived.

I can’t add more to that. Instead, allow me to present this horrendous writing in the story.

Five screws were drilled into Malloy’s neck. Four more were drilled into her head to keep it stabilized. Then a thing called a halo — rods and a circular metal bar — was attached for added support. It’s not exactly a pain-free procedure.

Then a thing called a halo? I’m flabbergasted. I predict that will be the worst piece of writing I’ll read this month. At what level of schooling does a writer learn to replace Then a thing called a halo with Then a halo?

I also noted was attached, but I make that mistake, too. Avoiding the passive voice is every writer’s struggle. Every writer struggles with the passive voice.

Story link via Fark.

The Right to Say “No” Versus Restrictions on Saying “Yes”

Fascinating:

The owner of an upscale steakhouse said he asked O.J. Simpson to leave his restaurant the night before the Kentucky Derby because he is sickened by the attention Simpson still attracts.

I don’t care about O.J. Simpson from the voyeuristic value of this story, which is similar to his criminal trial. I do, however, like the correlation to such recent public policies as smoking bans. If we’re to use the logic presented by politicians and advocates of such bans, that a private place of business is actually “public”¹, this restaurant owner, Jeff Ruby, had no right to ask Simpson to leave. Who thinks that makes any sense? I hope no one, so then why are smoking bans reasonable? Private property means the right to set the rules within the bounds of consent.

From a humorous standpoint:

[O.J. Simpson’s attorney, Yale] Galanter said that the incident was about race, and he intended to pursue the matter and possibly go after the restaurant’s liquor license.

“He screwed with the wrong guy, he really did,” Galanter told The Associated Press by telephone last night.

Playing the race card here is mere grandstanding, obviously, but I’m sure the (unintentional?) threat that can be read into Galanter’s statement, given Simpson’s civil conviction, is the reason Mr. Ruby ejected Simpson. Should we congratulate him on proving his opposition’s point?

Second link via Fark

¹ Presumably because a patron uses public streets to get to the private establishment? I can’t think of anything else, although that means your home is also “public” and subject to smoking regulations. Hey, wait a minute…