Open Thread

“bullet” You know they’re going to get coal in their stockings… Santa Claus shot at by drug dealers while flying south.
“bullet” Ethan Brown: Big Easy offers only tough choices for America’s drug war in the Guardian
“bullet” Jacob Sullum: The Dose Makes the Poison, Even for Marijuana Smoke. Sullum clears up mis-information about a recent study published by the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology. The media is always looks for the smoking gun when it comes to marijuana, but it simply isn’t there.
The obvious problem with the media doing scare stories about marijuana is that there are no bodies. Marijuana has been smoked by hundreds of millions of people over the course of hundreds, if not thousands of years. Where are the bodies — the mass graves of people who died when all the toxic aspects of marijuana caught up with them? Every time a new scare comes out, I look around me, but fail to see large numbers of people suddenly drop dead, so then I have to dredge through the actual details of the study to determine… yep, no big deal. Fortunately, Jacob Sullum and NORML have already done that with this study.
“bullet” Jerry Paradis of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) visited Colombia and and talked to farmers, activists, bureaucrats, cops, and soldiers. He writes about his experiences in this blog series. Part One – Part Two – Part Three – Part Four