Sharing: Muhammad Yunus

Posted on March 12, 2008

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, free markets have swept the globe. Free-market economics has taken root in China, Southeast Asia, much of South America, Eastern Europe, and even the former Soviet Union. There are many things that free markets do extraordinarily well. When we look at countries with long histories under capitalist systems—in Western Europe and North America—we see evidence of great wealth. We also see remarkable technological innovation, scientific discovery, and educational and social progress. The emergence of modern capitalism three hundred years ago made possible material progress of a kind never before seen. Today, however—almost a generation after the Soviet Union fell—a sense of disillusionment is setting in.

To be sure, capitalism is thriving. Businesses continue to grow, global trade is booming, multinational corporations are spreading into markets in the developing world, and technological advancements continue to multiply.

But not everyone is benefiting. Global income distribution tells the story: Ninety-four percent of world income goes to 40 percent of the people, while the other 60 percent live on only 6 percent of the world income. Half of the world lives on two dollars a day or less, while almost a billion people live on less than one dollar a day.

Poverty is not distributed evenly around the world; specific regions suffer its worst effects. In sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, hundreds of millions of poor people struggle for survival. Periodic disasters, such as the 2004 tsunami that devastated regions on the Indian Ocean, continue to kill hundreds of thousands of poor and vulnerable people.

The divide between the global North and South—between the world’s richest and the rest—has widened.

Even in the United States, with its reputation as the richest country on earth, social progress has been disappointing. After two decades of slow progress, the number of people living in poverty has increased in recent years. Some forty-seven million people, nearly a sixth of the population, have no health insurance and have trouble getting basic medical care. After the end of the Cold War, many hoped for a “peace dividend.” Defense spending could decline, and social programs for education and medical care would increase. But today the U.S. government has focused on military action and security measures, ignoring the poor. Read more

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“Fre-eeeeeze”

Posted on March 11, 2008

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In My Solitude

Posted on March 9, 2008

Pacific Beach, San DiegoPhoto by WJ

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Going to Dr. Feelgood

Posted on March 6, 2008

My experience with medical marijuana began in January 2007. I’d been smoking pot regularly for the past few years, a thick toke coming as a relief from an increasingly complex personal world spiraling around me. I was struggling through an undiagnosed illness that made me want to do nothing but sleep. I was self-employed but too sick to chase work, and all I could do was plaintively sit and watch the floodwaters rise. All of life’s softest corners—balmy personal relationships, money in the bank, even control over my body, were slowly being stripped away and replaced with little but sharpened edges. My family wanted me to fight, but I barely had the strength to load the fucking dishwasher. I sank into deep isolation, contact pared to texts and Myspace. I wondered why I was even here. How had I become god’s cosmic chew toy? Until, finally, fortunately, just as I thought I couldn’t stand another minute, I was hallowed with an immaculate hookup. Her name was Jenny, we’d met online, she was friendly, punctual and in command of quality product. No bammer weed burning a hole down my throat. Jenny got ‘good. And so a respite came into my world, a chance to reflect on my day without terror. Or not reflect. To quit circling those same old roads, eat a pint of Chunky Monkey and watch something bad starring Will Ferrell.

I thought, “What’s the federal case with that?”

There were no seismic shifts to my personality. I didn’t morph into a homicidal maniac like that dude who goes apeshit in Reefer Madness. My brain didn’t molt into soylent green. It was all very dry and anti-climactic. Those dirty hippies had been right. Marijuana offered relief from the daily chemistry of hormone injections and eased the strain of being sick. No, it didn’t solve my problems, but at least it provided a measure of peace. And all was good and right in that world for two years until Jenny retired, weary of the grind. She referred me to an associate but things weren’t the same. Deliveries gave way to late night trips to a bad neighborhood. The new girl was odd. Jenny was all reggae and feng shui, while the new girl seemed to be harboring rage. She was heavily stoned each time I visited—just a hazy smile and a sly non-sequiter. But I’d also heard stories about those who crossed her. Of screaming car chases through South Los Angeles and men hired for Tuesday beat downs.

I asked myself: “If not for bud, would I ever be here in my life?”

Important decisions are sometimes called epiphanies, or seminal moments, but these are really just clever ways of saying, “I finally had enough of that shit.” My doctors all knew that I smoked marijuana. I’d told three primary care physicians, two endocrinologists, a neurologist, a psychiatrist and a partridge in a pear tree. None voiced any reservations, though none could offer a prescription. All they could say on that front was, “Good Luck.” But not saying anything sure implied something. We writers are good at reading between lines, and I’d watched seven doctors roll their eyes, as if to say—whatever. Hmmm.

I never planned to be a marijuana patient. Prescriptions weren’t covered by health insurance, no surprise, and only a small group of doctors wrote them. A doctor’s letter was good for one year and went for between $125 and $200. This wasn’t an unreasonable amount of cash tender, but it wasn’t money I was eager to spend. But I also wasn’t eager to land on the police blotter. All around LA, I saw neon cannabis leafs hanging in pot dispensary windows. I’d gone with two friends who had medical prescriptions (one for migraines, the other for a mood disorder) and while they sniffed through the display case upstairs, I’d chilled downstairs in a Hollywood Starbucks. Yes, a dispensary over a Starbucks. Only in California, yo. While I was contending with parole violators, my friends could pull into a workaday strip mall and twenty minutes later pull out with a tall Café Americano and a fluffy eighth of Trainwreck.

This was one seed in my bag too many. If I wanted to smoke cigarettes and die of lung cancer, as five million do every year, I could pony over to the local Rite-Aid. Same game for booze, chewing tobacco, and any number of prescription drugs of questionable health or efficacy. But for marijuana, a drug that killed nobody, I had to meet strangers in shadow-soaked parking lots, or survey the miniature pawn shop that my current hookup was assembling. I was tired of the cloak and dagger, disgusted how I had to risk bodily harm because some people (zealots, mostly) believed this the appropriate moral price exacted.

I wasn’t going to play their game. I’m grown, hard working, thoughtful, responsible, capable of making tough decisions. I didn’t need a bunch of paternalistic busybodies telling me what to do.

So one morning, I went online and found a list of “pot docs.” I called the first and made an appointment for later that afternoon. The sun hung low in the winter sky as I bumper-bumpered through Beverly Hills. I was driving into a brave new world, one of towering potential and calculated mystery. It was a place I knew very little about. I was about to learn my first lesson.

NEXT: A Trip to Dr. Feelgood—Part Two

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Sharing: Bill Buckley

Posted on March 3, 2008

Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great. The laws aren’t exactly indefensible, because practically nothing is, and the thunderers who tell us to stay the course can always find one man or woman who, having taken marijuana, moved on to severe mental disorder. But that argument, to quote myself, is on the order of saying that every rapist began by masturbating. General rules based on individual victims are unwise. And although there is a perfectly respectable case against using marijuana, the penalties imposed on those who reject that case, or who give way to weakness of resolution, are very difficult to defend. If all our laws were paradigmatic, imagine what we would do to anyone caught lighting a cigarette, or drinking a beer, or committing adultery. Send them all to Guantanamo?

Legal practices should be informed by realities. These are enlightening, in the matter of marijuana. There are approximately 700,000 marijuana-related arrests made every year. Most of these — 87 percent — involve nothing more than mere possession of small amounts of marijuana. This exercise in scrupulosity costs us $10-15 billion per year in direct expenditures alone. Most transgressors caught using marijuana aren’t packed away to jail, but some are, and in Alabama, if you are convicted three times of marijuana possession, they’ll lock you up for 15 years to life. Professor Ethan Nadelmann, of the Drug Policy Alliance, writing in National Review, estimates at 100,000 the number of Americans currently behind bars for one or another marijuana offense.

What we face is the politician’s fear of endorsing any change in existing marijuana laws. You can imagine what a call for reform in those laws would do to an upward mobile political figure. Gary Johnson, governor of New Mexico, came out in favor of legalization — and went on to private life. George Shultz, former secretary of state, long ago called for legalization, but he was not running for office, and at his age, and with his distinctions, he is immune to slurred charges of indifference to the fate of children and humankind. But Kurt Schmoke, mayor of Baltimore, did it, and survived a reelection challenge. Read more

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