Saturday, June 30, 2007

News of the Day, Saturday, June 30, 2007

Just a couple of quickies, thought-provokers for your weekend:
  • NM has taken an unusual approach to the medical marijuana legalization effort. The state itself will be growing the pot and issuing with doctors' guidance. This does two things: it leaves the decisions to medical authorities who know drugs as opposed to crim just types who get rewards from fighting them but tell some predictably odd stories about drugs, and it puts the state rather than growers and doctors in the crosshairs of the feds should they decide to prosecute in the state. A tad more formidable. This clearly should be the model for future states that want to give sick people relief without having the collateral damage of attacks from those who can't accept far better authority than they are that pot might actually have good medicinal effects for suffering patients as good as or better than legal drugs that do far more harm when used both as prescribed and not.
  • Derrick Jackson in the Boston Globe has a great op-ed calling out the Democrats and particularly Bill Clinton for their role in both exacerbating the incarceration overgrowth in this country and for not proposing anything much now to really deal with what's even worse on the horizon. A little "oh, crack isn't worse than powder" and the Democratic candidates think they've made a stand. As Jackson notes, Bill Clinton made even grander statements of understanding WHILE PRESIDENT and did virtually nothing positive. George W. Bush has been better for the country on incarceration than Clinton was and likely better than any of these characters who are clearly too focus-grouped to deal seriously with any of the many problems in criminal justice, not just corr sent, that need addressing.

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