Of course, as part of the second generation BoingBoingTV team, I have some inside dope into this situation. Part of the split had to do with a dispute over revenue sharing with BBtv’s co-owner and production company DECA. DECA wanted to use the revenue from its flagship program, BBtv, to fund some of its other video ventures, and the BBtv crew wasn’t too keen on that happening.

Anyway, I still look back on my BBtv time with fondness, as I learned a tremendous amount about new media, production, and how to deal with a thousand things at once. But this new announcement does seem to close a chapter that I’ve looked back on for some time.

And while I’m thinking about such things, here’s the favorite episode I ever wrote/produced/ and starred in… An homage to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Greatness: Bought or Bred?, Tiger’s Scruples vs. Big Mac’s Deltoids, Philandering Ad Campaigns, Glorifying the A-Political, and Uplifting the Downtrodden One Category at a Time.

Download Mep Report #120

Recent research shows that coffee addiction is more like our addiction to water or oxygen than our addiction to alcohol or tobacco.

While I have long touted coffee as the only viable migraine medicine I’ve found to date (when taken in regular daily doses as a prophylactic), much popular “wisdom” has lambasted caffeine and coffee generally as some sort of health risk.

It should be noted, of course, that the only discernible negative health impact anyone seems able to cite (even in the above article) are issues with sleeping. Which, uh, look at the poster. Sleep would be best if eliminated altogether and has certainly never done me any favors.

It must also be said that while I like the results of this particular study, the practice of trying to isolate particular foods and beverages for their health impacts in scientific studies is probably best categorized alongside reading tea leaves or ancient runes. After all, most research tends to bob back and forth between “red wine will kill you by the time you turn 35″ and “red wine will guarantee that you live to 100″.

The underlying reality is that everything one ingests involves trade-offs, which pertains to medicines as much as it does to food. And coming to understand these trade-offs is interesting, but probably very hard to universalize. Individual bodies are remarkably different and we will all always be our best diagnostician, if we’re paying attention and staying informed. After all, coffee causes migraines for some people and my grandmother smoked a pack to three a day from age 16 to 91.

Your homework: figure out how much 1-3 packs a day for 75 years costs in 2010 dollars.

Terrific and heart-rending article written by a GTA4 addict who consciously decided to abandon his life of productivity to gain a greater understanding of both cocaine and Pixeltropolis, San Andreas.

For more on video game addiction, listen to this classic Mep debate on WoWs similarity to crack.

Surprisingly absent from the debate in the article seems to be the issue of whether parents will be sneaking some alcohol to their accompanied minors. I guess people assume that only mid-ranged kids leaning toward teenhood are the ones who want to sneak some sips, or more importantly that any parents who want to give their helpless children alcohol already can under the cover of their private homes.

Come to think of it, I remember some vague family friends in Oregon who would regularly feed their baby half a beer, in part to aid in sleeping. Ah, rural Oregonian child abuse.

In any event, it looks like Clea may find it harder to get a drink with Senavene in tow, even close to home. So much for respecting the princess.

When I first got into baseball, the Oakland Athletics were my team. It’s hard to admit as a loyal baseball fan that I had a team before the Mariners, that my eternal and undying fanhood is not to my first love. It has become acceptable in our society not to marry your first love or have the same job for life, but sports fans are basically supposed to stick with one horse forever, for some reason especially in baseball. But alas, such is not my story.

I first discovered baseball watching softball games in public parks in Washington DC in the spring of 1988. I was intrigued by the strange shape of the field, the amalgam of so many people doing such specific things. More than anything, it looked like fun. It was nothing like the sports they had us play in PE, nothing like the endless running that people seemed to equate with organized sports. It had an artistry to it, a mystery, it demanded explanation. I wanted to know more and my parents – not exactly big baseball (or sports) people – couldn’t give me much beyond the very basics, which only deepened the mystery. They enjoyed the camaraderie of the public park games, too, though, and we were sometimes the only fans in the bleachers at these loosely organized games.

Then we moved to Oregon that summer and took a trip down to retrieve our stored items from the Central San Joaquin Valley in October. In a random hotel lobby, there was a TV displaying – wonder of wonders! – the same basic game I’d seen in the DC parks. But it was shinier, with classier uniforms, and thousands of fans. I parked in front of what turned out to be a World Series game, having no idea the significance or even that these were professionals. The desk clerk took me for an avid fan and bemusedly asked me which team I was rooting for. It hadn’t occurred to me. I looked back at the screen.

“The green team.”

Green, you see, was my favorite color. And so I was enthralled by the Oakland uniforms, triply thrilled when I realized the next spring that their mascot was an elephant. And their nickname was associated with the grade I diligently pursued in every subject. I fell hard for baseball. And not just baseball, but Major League Baseball. I learned most of the rules through third grade playground kickball, started reading boxscores in the daily paper (I remember vividly poring over the details of a matchup that appeared to be between the Boston Royals and the Kansas City Red Sox), tried out for Little League, infamously (in my own memory) thinking that the glove was supposed to go on the hand one found dominant, to the point of arguing with the person who gave me a glove out of the bucket of extras that my right-hand glove wouldn’t fit properly on my right hand. I overcame this, adored Little League, and started setting my sights on a Major League career.

And then came baseball cards, which were to dominate an incredible amount of my time and energy for the rest of my time in Oregon. And with baseball cards, a new awareness of the players. And quickly, before even the midpoint of the 1989 season, I had picked a clear favorite. He was a towering hulk of a player, but thoroughly competent and, moreover, seemed like an affable guy. He was the heart of the Oakland A’s lineup. His name? Mark McGwire.

Mark McGwire was my favorite baseball player for years, even after I had shifted gears from the A’s to the Mariners, the result of a long geologic wearing down from hearing over a hundred M’s games a year on the radio and falling for the excitement of the likes of Ken Griffey Jr. and Randy Johnson. Before the ’89 World Series, I had a lifesize Mark McGwire poster on the back of my door, which stayed there till we moved to New Mexico. I loved Big Mac, loved his effortless grace in smashing homers, his fearsome glower as he awaited the next hopeless pitch. He was perhaps an unlikely hero for a scrawny, terribly short right fielder (though I was quickly falling for Rickey Henderson too, with his wily speed, and I would soon become a catcher and really deepen my understanding of the game), but he just seemed to have the game figured out. He had the right attitude. And a cool name.

By 1998, I had grown to almost dislike the A’s after some intensely rivalrous years with the M’s in the new six-division structure of MLB and Big Mac had left them anyway. But I was over the moon about his season the summer before college, remember watching on a friend’s computer every at-bat after 60 homers. Wherever we were, whatever we were doing, someone would keep watch at the computer during Cardinals games and call us in and we’d all crowd around. Maybe it wasn’t every game, but that’s what it felt like at the time, and I’ll never forget 62, sending me over the moon with the high arc of the ball. There was the All-Star Game later, too, maybe the summer of ’99 or 2000 if I recall correctly, watching Big Mac rip what felt like 50 straight homers, all of them 450+ feet, just taking the cover off the ball and sending it as far as possible. I couldn’t stop smiling and my parents watched too and said that I knew all along, had picked the best guy so long ago.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately or hate baseball, you’re doubtless aware of Mark McGwire’s recent admission that he used steroids. The news is hardly earth-shattering for those paying attention to baseball in the last decade or so, watching people balloon into caricatures of themselves, popping out homers left and right amidst rumors of juiced balls and diluted pitching while baseball enjoyed the increased “game-saving” profits and turned a blind eye. The recrimination McGwire and his cohorts have faced has been severe and one might expect, given all my other proclivities, that I would feel betrayed by Big Mac, that he’d play Bill Richardson to my baseball fandom and I’d walk away thinking they were all crooks and cheats, unworthy of the homage we try to pay them.

But it’s not so. I diligently attended tens of San Francisco Giants games during Barry Bonds’ pursuit of the career home-run record, cheering every time he came to the plate. I still think fondly of McGwire, even as the media eviscerates him and the baseball writers laughably refuse to grant him passage to the Hall of Fame. I’m not wild about Rafael Palmeiro, but I think that’s just because he lied so vehemently about the whole thing. And I’ve always hated Roger Clemens and A-Rod since he ditched the Mariners for greed, so it’s really just an excuse to gang up on those guys.

Why? Is this just my loyalty to baseball overwhelming everything else I rationally feel? Everything I think about drugs and authenticity and everything else out the window? I mean, how inconsistent could I get, right?

The issue for me, and I haven’t seen this argument anywhere else (nor do I expect to), so I suspect I’m on my own here, is that the difference between steroids and everything else is basically nil. Yes, steroids are technically illegal, but so is refusing to sign up for the Selective Service. We live in a country where smoking marijuana is a vilified criminal activity while drinking alcohol is a lauded social rite. Law alone is no argument, no justification. Folks, the laws are stupid. And even if the laws about steroids are designed to protect people from long-term ill health, I know plenty of people who’ve been prescribed steroids for one thing or another. Heck, just a year ago, a Kaiser doc tried to put me on a lifetime steroid nasal spray to prevent all these ear infections.

Mark McGwire started talking early on about Andro, his legal daily supplement that he took to help build muscle. (I think it’s short for something, but I’m not sure what.) He recommended it to people publicly. And it was always the part of him that made me most uncomfortable, because something felt weird about taking a drug that would make you better at baseball in some way. And that, I think, is the point. All of it – lifting weights, even, let alone nutritional supplements or legal chemicals or other artificial inducements – is weird. Professional athletics have long relied more on science than on straight hard work. It’s about what to eat and what to drink and what to ingest and what to inject and what to build to specifically construct, through carefully researched science, the greatest athlete possible. It’s all artificial.

At that point, we have two choices. Either only let people play who walk in off the street and refuse to try to change their bodies… or let them do whatever they want. There are countless players who are on prescription ADD drugs that would otherwise be banned stimulants, but they get a special exemption. You probably can’t find a Major Leaguer (at least a position player) who isn’t on countless chemical supplements and substances. The science of sports is carefully managed and throws everything into doubt, especially when compared with the era of Babe Ruth, whose scientific regimen consisted of eating as much as possible. I mean, come on. Can you imagine Babe Ruth getting by in today’s game? They wouldn’t even give him a tryout till he shaped up.

I just don’t see the bright line between steroids and the rest of it. And while the law may have made things “unfair,” deterring a Ken Griffey Jr. or a Will Clark from trying steroids, baseball’s policy throughout the Steroids Era made it clear that they didn’t see the difference between steroids and other artificial substances either. You can call something illegal all you want, but if no one’s going to enforce the regulations and everyone heaps praise on what you’re doing, you pretty quickly realize that word doesn’t mean what you think it does.

As we get closer to a world of genetic engineering, this question isn’t going to go away. People will look first for the genes that impact growth and size and strength, beefing up their children in the hopes of lucrative contracts. And then where will we be? Do we bar these people and their unfair advantages, penalizing them for things they had literally no control over? Or do we start a space race for 11-foot tall mutants who hit every single ball over the wall till we have to rebuild the Polo Grounds to keep things in play? And what of our society’s increasing proliferation of BGH and other substances which have already increased our relative size and height?

Science will keep pushing the bar. And if one’s going to let some things in and not others, one’s being inconsistent. I don’t blame any of the people who took steroids in the so-called Steroids Era, though I still hate Clemens and A-Rod. I look down a bit more on those who lied, but I even understand their frustration with the double-standard retroactively being enforced on them. Big Mac, I forgive you. I get it. And I hope all the baseball writers get off their sanctimonious high horses long enough to let you into the Hall of Fame someday. After all, they didn’t exactly blow the cover off these stories in 1998 or 2000, however obvious they think your actions were then. They pocketed their money and made their reputations at those times, so who are they to deny you yours? Ex post facto standards are never fair and certainly not in America’s pastime.

And thanks for being honest about it, however long it took you to open up.

For those interested in more than mere amusement, here’s another segment of the same lecture on the subjects of continuity and discontinuity. You should probably have your quantum mechanics textbooks handy for this one…

(Ahem… Warning for language… You may have to cover your virgin ears should you decline to be properly educated)

As Ellis recounted it:

“I can only remember bits and pieces of the game. I was psyched. I had a feeling of euphoria. I was zeroed in on the (catcher’s) glove, but I didn’t hit the glove too much. I remember hitting a couple of batters and the bases were loaded two or three times. The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder. I started having a crazy idea in the fourth inning that Richard Nixon was the home plate umpire, and once I thought I was pitching a baseball to Jimi Hendrix, who to me was holding a guitar and swinging it over the plate. They say I had about three to four fielding chances. I remember diving out of the way of a ball I thought was a line drive. I jumped, but the ball wasn’t hit hard and never reached me.”

As the nation’s health care debate/debacle (debatecle?) crescendos into to a high-pitched whine, one champion’s advances threaten to trump all the efforts of the medical community, pharmaceutical industry, and lobbying covens. And this champion, this potential savior, is an unlabeled, off-brand, non-invasive, patent-free, discount store sugar pill.

According to Wired magazine, placebo effects have dramatically increased over the past few years, making it monumentally tough to get new drugs approved by the FDA.

While the newfound effectiveness of placebos continues to baffle doctors and drug researchers, it comes as much less of a shock to this Mepper. Firstly, as cited in the Wired article, placebos seems to be wildly effective when treating depression and other mental ‘disorders’. How is it surprising that a purely mental treatment (a pretend pill) is the most effective medicine to treat a purely mental disorder? Isn’t this a much more direct form of treatment than a chemical approach? As we are beginning to learn, when it comes to altering molecular structures, chemists still can’t hold a candle to the power of the human psyche.

It also bears mentioning that pharmaceutical companies probably have themselves to blame for placebo’s rise to power. Here is an industry that spends billions of dollars in advertising and marketing inventing new and ever more vague disorders (i.e. Restless Leg Syndrome) while simultaneously convincing people that a new slew of wonder drugs are going to solve their problems. Pfizer, Merck, and Glaxo have won the battle for the hearts and minds of America. Virtually everyone now believes that pills can fix their problems. This campaign has been so incredibly effective, now it doesn’t even matter which pills patients take. Whether it’s derived from sugar, fairy dust, or unicorn turds, it will fix what ails ya.

However, in the Golden Age of Placebo, medical applications are just the tip of the iceberg.

Our current President ran on what was predominantly a placebo campaign. Yes, he had a great deal of policy expertise and wonkiness at his disposal, but the overriding message of the Obama campaign wasn’t any policy proposal or platform plank. It was simply that of “Hope.” Similarly, when our economy tanked (our mostly theoretical economy that no single human fully understands), our government attempted to spur the most important economic indicator of all — “consumer confidence.” If only there were a pill for that. Perhaps one day soon, there will be.

It seems that, for Americans, marketing is a far, far more important thing than producing. We don’t produce much of value any more, but we sure can craft a perfect 30 second spot to tout the amazingness of our nothing much. In a country where blowing smoke up people’s asses is a cottage industry, placebos should continue to be the most highly effective medicine.

While this piece won an Academy Award a decade ago, and is hardly new news, it was recently released in a larger IMAX format, which is enough excuse to watch it again…

Last week, the Huff Post published a heretofore little known letter sent from 101-year old LSD developer Albert Hofmann (who passed last year at 102) to Captain of Industry, Steve Jobs. The letter referenced Jobs’ well known affinity for psychedelics and requested support for the first medicinal study of LSD in over 35 years.

One reason that the letter took over two years to reach the public eye was that it was written entirely in “Hallucinese,” a language developed by Hofmann after a century of heavy LSD consumption. The letter was originally thought to be a sketch of ever-expanding monkeys breathing sublimated banana-air out of a squid with umbilical cords for tentacles.

Whenever he completed a piece in Hallucinese, Hofmann would famously shout, “Buy my hoary wares, ye Toblerones!” He’d then proceed to dance around an invisible trapezoid.

It took a cadre of Swiss psychiatrists, linguists and surrealists several years to translate the sketches into French, then Swiss German, then regular German, Italian, Serbo-Croat, and finally English. The rest, is history.

DEA agents and New York City’s finest were shocked last weekend to find yet another segment of society corrupted by the War on Drugs — Teddy Bears. In a raid on a Bronx safehouse, police and federal agents uncovered over 44 lbs of heroin and $150,000 in cash trafficked by the customizable bedtime friends known as Build-A-Bears.

According to one onlooking neighbor at the raid site:

My daughter has one of those toys. I’m very surprised something like that was going on right here and I’m especially surprised it was a Build-A-Bear.

While the news certainly comes as a shock to the community that calls the bears home, one wonders whether we might have seen this coming earlier. After all, these bears are so diverse in the way they choose to live their lives. There are firefighter bears, surgeon bears, even subprime mortgage-lending bears. Is it any wonder that some of these bears turned to the high-risk, high-reward lifestyle of smack trafficking?

In this economy, trying to eek out a living as a high school musical bear or a bear on a military pension just isn’t possible the way that it was in the halcyon days of beardom. A bear has got to make ends meet, just like anyone else.

Some will argue that these bears, as couriers, were just bit players; pawns in a game played by weathered New York City drug traffickers. And every single Build-A-Bear caught up in this mess will have his day in court. But before they go out and summon their fancy lawyer bears and publicity bears, they’ll have to own up to the part they had to play in this operation. Yes, these bears were built for a purpose. They were designed and raised as heroin mule bears. But does your build determine your fate? Does not every bear ultimately choose his or her own destiny?

Perhaps the most famous bear of all, Winnie the Pooh, once said:

People who don’t Think probably don’t have Brains; rather, they have grey fluff that’s blown into their heads by mistake.

Even bears with grey fluff upstairs should have known better on this one. Thanks, Pooh.

Originally posted on The Fresh Scent.

Strike that, reverse it… Comes a bit of pure imagination.

And while we’re at it, here’s my favorite moment from Broken Lizard’s SuperTroopers.

Christopher Duncan of Copiague, NY is thanking his lucky stars that he was born a white, rich, child. This week, his lucky accident of birth earned him a free pass in a federal drug court that fell all over itself to spare him the humiliation of going to prison for knowingly breaking the law.

A former University of Vermont student, Duncan, was running a cocaine trafficking operation out of his frat house back in 2007. Local authorities raided the house the week of graduation finding it full of drug paraphernalia, coke, and cash. In danger of receiving some serious jail time, the judge let him off with 100 hours of community service and two years of probation.

District Court judge William Sessions III saw fit to take it easy on the young cocaine trafficker because he was “a stupid kid” and, as he said to the defendant:

It shows your lack of serious involvement and your absolute naivete, frankly.

Speaking of naivete, one wonders why judges find their soft streaks only when faced with the Caucasian Children of the Rich? Couldn’t a little leniency be in order for the bus baggage-handler busted by the DEA for passing along small packages of contraband? What about the church minister that set up a little weed garden for some of his sick parishioners? Or any number of low level street dealers who were certainly naive, certainly bit players in their own little neighborhoods. Where is their leniency? Where is the compassion for them?

The simple truth is, what was going through this young man’s mind when he decided to play Blow Daddy with the local sorority girls, is the same exact thing that goes through the mind of every aspiring drug dealer, large or small. It’s a mixture of greed, opportunism, and indifference for his fellow man. Once this mindset is in place, it’s all just a question of scale; of entrepreneurship. And when the hammer comes down, it’s all a matter of skin tone.

Originally posted on The Fresh Scent.

The Modesto Bee told a heart-wrenching story last weekend of a young Tijuana meth dealer named Hector Rodriguez Estrada, who was killed in cold blood along with his pregnant girlfriend, by a rival gang attempting to seize his drug turf. The story gives a face to the deteriorating social system in many parts of Mexico, in which cities are morphing into nothing more than shooting galleries between rival cartels.

In impoverished areas where factory workers make $60 a week, selling meth on a corner can be a very attractive economic option. According to Rodriguez’s older brother, Samuel:

“When you live by the sea, you look for fish.”

In other words, for many people in the poorest nations of the world, drug production or distribution is not a moral or ethical issue. It’s a matter of survival. These people exist within a black market that provides massive financial incentives to participate. Without any regulation or government-imposed morality, there is also a huge incentive to kill off competitors. This is a completely free market economy. There are no longer any rules or norms.

Perhaps once cartels saw benefit in respecting rival turf and developing in areas without conflict. But an aggressive campaign by President Calderon, coupled with an influx of US military weapons and aid has turned a tenuous balance into a virtual anarchy. Tijuana drug rivalries fueled 443 murders in the last three months of 2008. Gang members were left in dumpsters by the dozens with severed heads, limbs, and fingers.

Until this economic system is supplanted with another, the cycle of violence will continue. There will be many more Hector Rodriguez Estradas. And there will be just as many rivals willing to punch his ticket for a new drug corner to run. Madness begets madness.

Originally posted on The Fresh Scent

In the “Countries That Shouldn’t Emulate America” category, comes the tale of six of London’s finest metro police. After apprehending a couple suspects who were carrying a large weed shipment, the officers decided to seize the property of the suspects, and give them the old Dick Cheney workover for good measure.

According to Britain’s Telegraph UK this is one of the most egregious police corruption scandals in the city department’s history. Apparently the officers, who included a detective sergeant, seized several flat-screen TVs, computers, and other electronics from the drug suspects. They then proceeded to repeatedly dunk the men’s respective heads in buckets of water, presumably to find out where they were hiding their Xbox 360.

Few of the specifics are being released due to an extensive corruption investigation. Obviously the city dropped the charges against the torturees, as it tries to smooth over this embarrassment. Though the details released were unusually grizzly for this sort of case, the corruption of law enforcement by drug money is an old and reliable standard.

Perhaps this is why President Obama declined to release bonus photos of the Abu Gharib victims. He didn’t want to give our War on Terror partner nations any bright ideas.

Originally posted on The Fresh Scent

Look out, Canadians… Skynet is now online.

The US Border Patrol is preparing to deploy a ‘Predator B’ unmanned drone aircraft along Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River, presumably to detect drug growing and smuggling operations along the US-Canadian border.

Also known as the MQ-9 Reaper, the drone is a second generation version of the original Predator that the US military has been using in some capacity since 1995. Still enjoying the fruits of a post-9/11 spending spree, the Border Patrol now has at least five of its Predator toys patrolling the US-Mexico border. It launched its first US-Canadian mission along the Dakota-Manitoba border in February as part of the Border Patrol’s “Northern Border Air Wing,” a high-tech surveillance plan called for by the 9/11 commission.

Make no mistake, these drones are not toys. The Reaper has a wing span of 66 feet and can weigh up to five tons when fully armed and loaded. Part of that weight is the 3,000+ lbs of missiles and bombs that it is equipped to carry. Whereas the original Predators were designed primarily for surveillance, Reapers are lauded by the military for their role as “true hunter-killers.”

Of course, without human pilots, these drones are only as good as the electronics and software that keep them airborne, as evidenced by the 2006 drone crash in Arizona. Let’s hope that these new Reapers aren’t running Windows Vista.

Originally posted on The Fresh Scent

I want you Meppers to know that this video was incredibly difficult to find. HBO has been on a censorship rampage in trying to shield Buck from the humiliation of having his first talk show railroaded by the longtime Howard Stern co-host.

This was amazing to see live. You could tell that Lange was at least half in the bag, and that Buck had neither the charm, nor skill to stop him. To be fair, Buck was a particularly useless talk show host. He isn’t witty, engaging, or even particularly interesting. He has a job because he inherited his father’s pipes. That’s about it. I don’t think we’ll be seeing him in Bob Costas’ seat again.

For those of us caught up in the day to day world of drug politics, it can be easy to forget just how new the concept of ‘illegal drugs’ really is. Pharmacy blog, Pill Talk, provided a big dose of historical perspective this week in releasing a collection of old posters and billboards hocking all manner of substances that no upstanding company would affiliate itself with in today’s whitewashed corporate culture.

Most stemming from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the ads feature some truly amazing concoctions.

Miss Winslow’s Soothing Syrup was designed to quiet restless babies especially at the time of teething. Little did babies and their mothers know that the syrup’s secret ingredient was morphine. Those babies were soothed alright. There’s even a terrific vintage testimonial in the New York Times archive lauding the syrup’s ability to quiet entire households of screaming rugrats.

Bayer, the long-time drug manufacturer, experimented with several substances before focusing on wonder drug, aspirin. One such substance was heroin, which, not surprisingly, turned out to be a terrific cough suppressant. As it happens, it also tended to suppress just about everything else, except for the desire to buy more Bayer Heroin, of course.

And finally, there’s the soft drink of lore, Coca Cola. As urban legend (and PillTalk) tells us, the name came from the fact that the drink used to be a simple mix of wine and cocaine. I fail to see how corn syrup and phosphoric acid could ever hope to compete with their far more stimulating predecessors.

Originally Posted on The Fresh Scent

To the chagrin of progressives everywhere, the Obama budget was released last month without any alteration to the 20-year old ban on funding needle-exchange programs.

According to White House Spin Meister Ben LaBolt:

“We have not removed the ban in our budget proposal because we want to work with Congress and the American public to build support for this change.”

The Obama White House is making an appeal here to higher minded politics by claiming to put the needle exchange debate on the floor of Congress instead of obscuring it in the murky land of Omnibus. Unfortunately, there are several problems with this approach:

Firstly, if Republicans have been waging political war through the budget for the better part of a decade, Dems are ceding a great deal of ground by refusing to go back and revise it. A budget provision to ban needle exchange funding is inherently political, in itself. We’re not talking about a grey area where funding can vary administration to administration. This is a prohibition on federal support for all time until the ban is lifted.

Secondly, wasn’t the Obama budget already hailed as a political statement? Obama’s first address to Congress repeatedly stressed the budget’s importance in setting a new national agenda. Health care, renewable energy, and education funding were hammered into the budget as a direct statement of purpose by the new administration. Therefore, we can only assume that Obama is selectively choosing what budget items to play politics with and what not to. This is exactly what Bill Clinton did on this issue in 1998, when a lifting of the needle exchange ban became a victim of political negotiations and remained intact.

The new dialogue on drugs in this country (as embodied by Obama and Kerlikowski) is supposed to dispose of the crusader’s ‘moral’ approach to the problem. In point of fact, there is no moral approach to the problem. What people choose to put in their own bodies is not a moral issue, it’s a public health issue. And public health officials have been crystal clear on the benefits to having these clean needle programs.

The premise of this program is mind numbingly simple. Needle exchange reduces the spread of HIV, and thereby reduces suffering and death. No one on either side of the political aisle disputes this. Any stance that opposes needle exchange, therefore, fosters an increase in HIV and deaths. If that’s the moral approach to the issue, then I’m a monkey’s uncle.

Originally posted on The Fresh Scent

Anti-weed advocates are slowly being painted into a corner. Realizing that the good old modes of propaganda and fear mongering aren’t fooling teenagers anymore, crusaders are turning to circular logic in an attempt to confuse and disorient those still on the fence. Gateway Theory is an old standard, along these lines: If smoking pot makes you more likely to shoot pure anthrax into your left ventricle, then clearly it should be kept illegal, right?

This week, DRC.net’s Scott Morgan made a very compelling scientific caseagainst any possible causality between smoking weed and trying harder drugs. He cites several studies, including a University of Pittsburgh paper that concluded:

“…the likelihood that someone will transition to the use of illegal drugs is determined not by the preceding use of a particular drug but instead by the user’s individual tendencies and environmental circumstances.”

While it appears that science comes down decisively against the side of the Gatewayers, common sense does so even more powerfully. Think for a moment about the insanity that would be unleashed upon us if our Congress regularly decided to ban innocuous things that could potentially lead to illegal behavior later on.

* Bandannas and colored shirts lead to gang associations.
* Water gun fights seem a clear gateway to indiscriminate shootings.
* Unemployment would be made illegal for fear it would turn honest men into grifters and thieves.
* Cellphones and pagers are critical to drug dealing, so clearly they are gateway products.
* Computers and the Internet are responsible for the appearance of countless pedophiles, rapists, and other undesirables.

Clearly they would all have to go.

No lawmaker could ever productively act using Gateway Theory. We humans are pretty lousy at predicting causality. If we begin to ban things that could lead to harm, we’ll ban ourselves right out of existence.

(Originally Posted on The Fresh Scent)

Originally posted on the Fresh Scent.

Today’s object lesson on the consequences of having a rational national drug policy comes to you from the Netherlands.

The Dutch, well known for their allowance of casual drug use and incredibly low resulting addiction rate, have found that they no longer have enough criminals to keep their prisons at capacity.

The Dutch have announced a closing of eight prisons as well as a new initiative to import Belgian criminals to fill cell vacancies.

One wonders what domestic drug warriors will have to say about the Netherlands plummeting crime rate. This situation does seem to utterly eviscerate any arguments that drug use increases violence or criminal activity.

On the other hand, this news will almost certainly scare the bejesus out of the U.S. Prison Guard Labor Force, who will undoubtedly double their efforts to stifle any drug policy reform. After all, when your job is on the line, it’s hardly the time to think about gedoogbeleid.

I finally figured out what I want for my birthday… Unfortunately there’s only one known set in existence and it’s going for $5,500.

For those not initiated, this art installation/board game is based on the Hunter S Thompson novel/movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Speaking of which, here’s an old BBtv show I created with a similar theme.

To get a sense of what the enhanced version of this otherwise craptastic Ben Stiller movie might sound like, look no further than this history lecture by former University of Florida Professor, John Hall. Unfortunately, he’s a former professor now because the University got wind of this command performance and immediately dismissed him from the faculty.

That doesn’t seem particularly fair. Apparently the University of Florida operates on the ’stoning for being a stoner’ philosophy. Code of Hammurabi? Duuuuuude…

Originally posted on The Fresh Scent.

Like a hungry stoner scavenging through the kitchen cupboards for a stray graham cracker, the US Border Patrol has found its resources sadly lacking recently. Amidst administration demands for more recruitment and hiring, the Border Patrol has turned to a tried and true tactic of depleted armies throughout history — conscripting children.

The Explorers Program, a Boy Scouts of America affiliate, trains the pubescent in the art of raiding dens of iniquity, seizing illegally imported goods, and patrolling barren wastelands. In the words of a California sheriff’s deputy involved with the program:

This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl.

While it’s unclear what his hermaphroditic reference is all about, it does seem like a wonderful opportunity for these kids to participate in the formative experience that is pepper-spraying a starving immigrant right in the eye socket. That kind of invaluable interaction will really put some hair on the chests of our next crop of soldier-kids.

Originally posted on The Fresh Scent.

The Medical Marijuana referendum brigade is on the warpath.

Today it’s setting its sights on Illinois, where State Senator William Haine (D) has sponsored the Compassionate Use of Cannabis Pilot Program Act. And, as per usual, some of Senator Haine’s colleagues are playing the role of Cretin’s Advocate, as they argue for the logically challenged.

Soft-brained Senator Patricia Bellock (R) noted:

“It is the No. 1 drug that introduces young people to other drugs.”

Common knowledge would tell one that a plant doesn’t have the sentience or social skills necessary to introduce people to other inanimate objects. So, unless Senator Bellock is secretly an Herbal Animist Witch (and thus privy to inside information), this argument doesn’t seem to hold much weight.

Simple State Rep Julie Hamos expressed some further concerns about the bill:

…I’m worried about giving plants to patients.

Perhaps Julie is right. It does seem incredibly dangerous to give sick people access to plants. Much better to keep them in sterilized tube-bubbles while they pop rainbow-colored pills that are seventeen steps removed from anything that occurs in nature. We should be pumping as many chemicals into the sick and dying as possible. Giving them access to plants only reminds them that there is a living world outside their hospital cell windows. This could dangerously reinvigorate the suffering.

State Rep. Lou Lang (D) summed the whole thing up pretty well:

The opposition is coming from members… who don’t have the guts to say ‘yes’… They are fearful of their next election and looking for excuses, while people are out there suffering.

Lou’s right on the money. Politicians have a history of being a heck of a lot more paranoid than pot smokers. Rationality can be very hard to come by this time of year.

A Florida mayor, apparently nostalgic for Nazi Germany, has lobbied to criminalize the wearing of baggy pants in his town. Last year, Riviera Beach mayor, and assumed facsist, Thomas Masters, convinced 72% of his constituents to pass a town ordinance that fined baggy pants wearers to the tune of $150. Repeat offenders can earn larger fines and even mandatory jail sentences.

Riviera Beach officials consider baggy pants to be part of a culture associated with drug dealing and other criminal activity. Apparently local police have found it too difficult to effectively prosecute laws already on the books, so they have taken to locking up those citizens without pre-approved wardrobes.

An unusually sane Palm Beach judge has already ruled the ‘Saggy, Baggy Pants Law’ unconstitutional, but Mayor Masters isn’t giving up so easily. Reports from his administration indicate that he is considering future proposals to criminalize slang speech, wearing crooked baseball caps, and driving while under the influence of 50 Cent.

Originally posted at The Fresh Scent

Richard Fleihr, 21, son of WWE Hall of Famer, Ric Flair, was arrested Sunday when officers found heroin inside his car. Apparently Fleihr was setting up for his patented double-axe handled syringe-injector suplex, when a Charlotte police officer executed a dramatic wrist lock immobilizer.

Though this was Fleihr’s first recorded smack-related arrest, he had been booked on a DUI less than two months ago, and was driving without a valid license. When the arresting officer pointed this out, Fleihr raised his hands to an invisible crowd and shouted “Wooooo!”

He sure has a lot of his father in him.

Originally posted at The Fresh Scent

Spending long hours traveling back and forth to your local lab? Tired of lining up huge networks of hydroponics to get the grow houses running? Then, drop all that effort-intensive work and try some crack today! All you need to start is a microwave oven. It’s the easy, breezy way to create your very own illegal narcotics.

According to the TCPalm, Javaris Kirk, of Fort Pierce, Florida, was arrested last week after allegedly admitting to making crack-cocaine with his microwave oven. Mr. Kirk later admitted that he was a convicted felon and, as such, felt a special bond with Martha Stewart.

Authorities searching his home also found five ecstasy tablets in his bathroom, a 9mm pistol with no serial, and a homemade tea cozy crafted out of extra table cloth.

Yet another reason why the TARP bailout packages failed the American public… Explained in a recent article I wrote for Scenario Magazine.

“Banksters, Enronites, Ponzi schemers, pin striped pimps! Public rage against bankers and the banking industry has never been stronger since the recent economic meltdown. Raping our IRAs, forcing us all into poverty, and foreclosing on the middle class seems to be the bankers’ business plan. People would really blow up if they realized that there is still another category of ongoing financial crimes that is flying completely under the radar. Just like all the others, this type of financial crime is firmly entrenched in the banking community and is part of the Business as Usual mentality. The forgotten outrage? Money Laundering.

Experts and congressional investigators estimate that US banks launder between $250 to $500 billion annually. In many cases, federal regulators look the other way while the dirty money is directly deposited into US accounts. In other cases, banks deal with overseas “correspondent” or “shell banks”, which allows drug cartels to transact with major US financial institutions without stepping foot in this country. A study by Binghamton Sociology Professor James Petras described how institutionalized money laundering has become:

U.S. banks have developed a highly elaborate set of policies for transferring illicit funds to the U.S., investing those funds in legitimate businesses or U.S. government bonds and legitimating them… the sum of dirty money grows exponentially, because both the State and the banks have neither the will nor the interest to put an end to the practices that provide high profits and buttress an otherwise fragile empire.

Evidence abounds that current laundering projections represent just the tip of the illicit iceberg. In the summer of 2007, the US Federal Reserve fined American Express $65 million dollars for its role in a massive and systemic “Black Market Peso Exchange” that had been running on behalf of Mexican and Latin American drug cartels. Last April, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. prosecutors were investigating a Wachovia bank scheme to transfer US narco dollars to Mexican and Columbian money-exchange houses, or “casas de cambios.” And just this January, Lloyds of London admitted that it allowed billions of Iranian dollars to flow through New York banks from 2001 to 2004, in a clear violation of US sanctions.

Meanwhile, Citibank, recent recipient of over $320 billion in bailout money , is responsible for one of the most egregious and publicized cases of money laundering on the record. In 1998, congressional investigators revealed that Citibank had laundered $100 million in drug money from the personal account of Raul Salinas, the older brother of former Mexican president, Carlos Salinas. Without investigating the source of the funds, Citibank deposited the money in an unnamed (and probably fake) offshore corporation, and then transferred it to Switzerland and London. Raul Salinas was in jail on a murder charge at the time of this bank transfer. Citibank then happily accepted a personal check in his wife’s name in the amount of $100 million. The next time you are in jail, try opening a Citibank account with nothing more than a personal check, and see how far you get.

While the bankers have been lining their pockets, conventional drug interdiction efforts have failed. The classic War on Drugs policy has meant pumping money into enforcement, incarceration, seizure, and crop destruction. We have spent billions upon billions of dollars fighting cartels, assassinating drug kings, and spraying herbicides all over the Latin countryside. None of this has worked. The last attempt, Plan Columbia, was an international embarrassment that actually increased the flow of illicit drugs from South America.

The latest “strategy”, called Plan Mexico by its detractors, is officially known as the Merida Initiative. Launched in late 2007, this measure funds and assists Mexican authorities in their pursuit of violent drug cartels. Like Plan Colombia before it, this effort is going nowhere fast. According to the Associated Press, 53% of Mexicans surveyed believe that the drug cartels are winning the conflict with Mexican police and military. Only 24% believed that the government was winning. The remaining 23% apparently knew enough to keep their mouths shut. A total of 5,500 people have died this year due to violence between rival cartels. This includes over 30 federal agents and 170 local police officers. As the death tolls mount, several high ranking Mexican officials taken drug bribes, and Mexico remains the leading distributor of methamphetamine and South American cocaine.

Instead of trying to find cartel storehouses, hidden crops, and corrupt cops, perhaps the softer target is the businessmen and bankers that launder the ill gotten gains. Perhaps we could address the Mexican drug problem and bring accountability to American banks at the same time. With the national spotlight on the financial sector, the new Congress and the new President have ample political capital to implement banking reform. The second half of the $700 billion bank bailout package has been approved, and Congress could easily demand new money laundering rules before releasing the funds.

The simplest solution would be to make a solid societal commitment to enforce existing laws. Money laundering is already a federal crime. With a little more enforcement, we could easily use existing law to lock up some big-wigs. Why not apply search and seizure laws, usually reserved for low level drug dealers, to reclaim the assets of corrupt VPs and CFOs? If seizing a drug dealer’s Corvette deters his friends, perhaps our government should start reclaiming large swaths of Martha’s Vineyard and Fire Island. Let’s see how easily the Mexican Cartels can operate when their financial contacts are living out of self-storage facilities on the 5 Freeway. Also, we should apply those draconian drug-related sentencing guidelines against more worthy prey. A mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years would straighten out any bank VP who wrongly thinks he is above the law.

A law enforcement campaign targeting money laundering operations would take the wind out of the sails of violent cartels. International banks tend to be more conspicuous and easier to target than hidden underground dope dens. And hey, if everything goes wrong, like most Drug War initiatives, at least bankers don’t carry Uzis. ”

It’s a Brave New World out there. Legalization debates have gone from the fringe of freak counterculture circles, to the front page of the most revered conservative economic magazine in Europe.

While it’s encouraging that the mainstream public (or at least the internet public) is starting to rationally discuss possible endings for the half-century debacle known as the War on Drugs, I don’t believe we’ll see any substantial changes from the Obama team.

Yes, he’s stopped the federal circumvention of state medical marijuana laws. But that can be done under the guise of preserving federalism.

I don’t think Obama would allow drug legalization to be part of his legacy. Though rational, lucrative, and having the potential to save thousands of lives, it simply cannot be listed on the resume of the first black President. It would make life too difficult on his successors, giving racist opponents an easy line to draw between minority leaders and the erosion of the rule of law.

Obama has to be untouchable. He has to remain the White Knight (irony intended) of the American public, and have a completely scandal-free term of office.

So, we’ll have to make due with the progressive policy shifts and the slow resuscitation of the economy. The battle for control of America’s top cash crop will be fought another day.

In this clip on the Real Time with Bill Mahr (via The Raw Story), he tells us why we need to end the War on Drugs.

Feel free to fast forward to four minues into this clip:

Here we go again. Alex Rodriguez admits to substance abuse back in 2003, and the Cadre of Crusading Baby Boomer Moralist Sportswriters are again denouncing the current crop of MLB players (and the records they hold) as “tainted.” They are crying to the Baseball Heavens,

“Oh Mercy, Lawd! Take us back! Take us back to a time when baseball was played by the honorable and when records made sense! A time of purity! A time of nobility! We can’t stand the awful sight of these players who have no respect for basic rules and decency! Deliver us, Lawd!”

Let me now disabuse you of the notion that baseball (and its hallowed records) has ever been “pure.”

Exhibit A: The Negro League Era.

Let’s forget, for a moment, that some Hall of Famers like Cap Anson were so virulently racist that they refused to play with colored players. The more important point here is that for 60-odd years of baseball (1880-1947), there were no non-white players in the Majors. Do you think this might potentially skew ALL Major League records from this particular era? I certainly do. World class players like Satchel Paige (who reportedly threw over 50 no-hitters in the Negro Leagues) and Josh Gibson barely got a chance to put a dent in the history of MLB.

Exhibit B: The Black Sox Scandal

In 1919, the Chicago White Sox, considered easily the strongest team in the league, intentionally threw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. This story has been well preserved in the media through movies like Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams. This incident was a huge stain on the reputation of the league, and rightfully so. The greater point here, is that this was simply the most famous case of gambling affecting the outcome of an MLB game. Imagine how many dozens, if not hundreds of other games were controlled by the gambling elite and never reported on. This could call into question the results of decades worth of seasons.

Exhibit C: Wacky Stadium Design

It has always been part of the character of the national pastime that every city designs its own park to give it an extra degree of home field advantage. You’ve got the ivy walls in Wrigley Park, the short right field porch in the old Yankee Stadium, the Green Monster in Fenway, the cramped and acoustically weird Metrodome (I once described it as like watching eighteen guys play baseball in a living room). Now, I like that teams do this, and it certainly adds to the flavor of games, but it should cause you can throw stat uniformity right out the window.

Wade Boggs was a .354 career hitter at home (predominantly in hitter-friendly Fenway) and a .302 hitter on the road. So, is he a Hall of Famer, or simply just above-average? Depends on what field you’ve seen him play on.

Exhibit D: The Asterisk

On the final day of the 1961 season, Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s single season home run record, belting his 61st home run into the seats at Yankee Stadium. Baseball purists complained that since Babe Ruth had hit 60 in 154 games, and Maris hit 61 in 162 games, it wasn’t truly a new record. Well regardless of who you side with here, this does sort of pose a consistency problem for all records pre and post 1961 (the first year of the season expansion). Should we add five percent to all of the accumulated statistics of pre 1961 players?

So, I think we’ve established how ridiculous it is to talk about numerical consistency in any two disparate baseball eras. Let’s discuss “performance enhancers” for a bit:

Exhibit E: Maple Bats

For the majority of major league history, most bats were cut from ash trees with the rare exception of a hickory or bamboo selected by a player. Robert Redford crafted Wonderboy from a lightning-struck oak tree in the movie, The Natural.

Barry Bonds broke Maris’s home run record in 2001 with a specialty maple wood bat. Now maple bats are all the rage and comprise perhaps up to 60% of the bats used in the league. Players believe that the maple bats (which tend to be drier than ash bats) can make the ball travel farther. And, Major League Baseball seems content to allow this stat-enhancing change in equipment.

Exhibit F: Tommy John Surgery

Beginning in 1974, doctors found that they could replace a frayed or torn elbow ligament (the ulnar collateral) with another ligament from a knee, foot, or hamstring. Named after the first pitcher to undergo the surgery (who pitched to the age of 46), it has now become commonplace. Most players recovery from the surgery in under a year and can actually become stronger and throw harder after rehabilitation.

What I want to know, is where is the Baseball Purist objection to this? Anyone who believes that a player should get by on his God-given ability, without mechanical, chemical, or scientific help, should object to this procedure. Can you imagine how powerful someone could throw a ball with knee-strength ligaments in their throwing arms?

A Wikipedia article on this procedure reports that an increasing number of parents are requesting the surgery on their uninjured children in the hopes of increasing their performance. If someone can make a moral distinction between steroids and Tommy John surgery (other than that the rulebook allows one and bans the other), I would love to hear it.

Conclusion

And surgery is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. The upcoming revolution in sports science and genetics will create a new breed of professional athlete. Players will grow larger, faster, stronger, and play later into their lives. This trend is inevitable. Are we going to hem and haw every time someone breaks a record because they grew up in a world technologically different from the previous generation’s record holder? Are we going to demand that players subsist on a diet of liquor and hot dogs because that’s all Babe Ruth ate during his epic career? Where do you draw the line?

The point here, Baseball Crusaders, is that there is no line. Any comparison of two generations will be apples and oranges. Circumstances were different, morals were different, nutrition was different, environmental effects were different, ballparks were different, equipment was different, medicine was different. There is no consistency. There is only the ever growing, developing, and evolving game of baseball. It is a great game now and it will be a great game when it is played on the moon.

The only constant is that every generation’s players will do whatever is in their power to win. They will hide emery boards in their back pockets to scuff up baseballs, they will slide with their spikes out, they will take drugs, they will have unnecessary surgeries and transplants. They will do this because there are simply too many people willing to die for the lifestyle that they are afforded. That is the nature of competition. So stop being hung up on steroids, and try to enjoy the artistry in our national pastime.

No I’m not suggesting we ban Mariah Carey’s attempt at movie making.  Nor do I mean the harmless, though annoying, glitter graphics people add to their Myspace and Friendster pages.  Finally, I’m not suggesting we waste our valuable legislative time banning Paris Hilton’s addition to the already overly saturated perfume industry.  I’m making a simple request.  Ban that stupid, little bitty, sparkly crap that they attach to greeting cards.  All other forms of fairy dust are fine by me.  After all, we Meppers hate the War on Drugs.

Let’s get down to brass tacks.  You see that card in Target and you think, “gee that’s pretty and sparkly!  I think grandma will love it!”  You don’t think of all the future negative side effects of that decision.

1) Negative health effects of secondhand glitter

To create that card and get it to the shelf of your local Target, thousands of migrant workers had to mine that glitter.*  The health effects to those workers and their families is shameful.  Additionally, every day thousands of trucks transport glitter and risk a glitter spill in the natural breeding grounds of the Gunnison Sage-Grouse.**

2) The lingering glitter effect

You give the glittery card to bring joy to grandma.  But do you really mean for the joy to keep on giving?  Coming off on her hands, getting on her face, in Snookum’s fur?  And it doesn’t stop there.  The glitter cannot be removed and multiplies, so that it shows up in new places every day.

3) Glitter Reduction

Then guess what?  Grandma’s local neighborhood’s senior van takes her to the grocery store where she touches the oranges to see if they are fresh.  GLITTER

They then take her to the library where she touches the books looking for a new one to read to her grandchildren.  GLITTER

Finally, they take her to the local petting zoo where she touches the animals…to pet them…anyway.  GLITTER

In closing I must add that despite my vehement arguments for a glitter ban, I would like to support a person’s right to glitter in private settings where the impact on other people is limited.  However, due to the inherent properties of glitter, its effects cannot be controlled– and like a parasite born on the back of a monkey, so does the glitter escape the confines of the home destined to spread.  If a ban is too extreme, please consider petitioning Meadowbrook Inventions.  There is no way that Rushman, a lowly cattle farmer turned inventor of glitter, could have foreseen the destruction and angst his creation would cause.  I think Oppenheimer said it best, “I am become death…the destroyer of worlds.”   I think it says it all that glitter and the atomic bomb were both created in the 1930′s after the Great Depression.  I only hope that our current economic downturn doesn’t lead to some new form of terror.

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*This is not true

**Neither is this

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