Mark Kleiman

Dishonest advocacy aside, what are the actual risks of stoned driving? The answer, from what seems to be a well-done case-control study, is that driving stoned is hazardous, but much less hazardous than driving drunk. (A relative risk of 1.83 – meaning that driving a mile stoned is about as risky as driving two miles […]

If they can’t offer policies that a majority of voters will support without relentless brainwashing, they free up the billionaire beneficiaries of the policies they actually offer to help them buy elections. If buying elections won’t give them a majority, they rig the districting so they can hold a minority of seats with a minority […]

Why, in a universe supposedly designed by a good and loving Deity who is also all-wise and all-powerful, does Maureen Dowd not only exist, but have a column in the New York Times where she gets to inflict her utter cluelessness on unsuspecting readers? And why, in that very same universe, does Ann Althouse not […]

Annie Lowrey has a smart piece in the NYT Magazine about how the cannabis business is likely to look after legalization. She gets one key point – much lower prices – though she doesn’t develop its implications for the size of the cannabis market and the prevalence cannabis abuse disorder; that’s not what her story […]

I completely failed to see this one coming. A brief history lesson: Washington State has had a medical marijuana law since 1998. In 2011, the legislature passed a bill allowing the creation of “collective gardens” (aka stores) to grow cannabis for patients registered with the state, and regulating those outlets in various ways: all members […]

A friend emails, “Bill Bennett read your book … or, at least, every other page of it.” Well, yes. Bennett and his sidekick Christopher Beach, in using the Caulkins et al. Marijuana Legalization book to support their argument against legalization, illustrate the point made here yesterday about the contrast between analysis and mere advocacy. To […]

Kevin Drum, whose “Criminal Element” essay linking violence rates to lead exposure has been (as it deserves to be) extraordinarily influential, links to a BBC story in which a more-than-usually-dim criminologist explains that he disbelieves in the lead-crime link because all biological explanations of crime are outside “the mainstream” (presumably meaning “the mainstream of criminological […]

Cliven Bundy, right-wing hero, is a howling racist. Good to watch Rand Paul and Greg Abbott backpedaling now. But wasn’t it enough that Bundy denied the jurisdiction of the government of the United States and organized an armed mob to threaten federal officials carrying out lawful court orders? It should have been. This just illustrates […]

Sometimes b.s. science in support of drug policy advocacy reflects the choices of the scientists. Sometimes it reflects the choices of the advocates. I got a note from a friend about a report that frequent cannabis users consume less alcohol. Of course, it would be fabulous news if cannabis use actually substituted for heavy drinking; […]

If you were a neuroscientist and discovered that there were, on average, measurable anatomical differences between (1) the brains of 20 young right-handed people who smoke an average of a little more than 11 joints per week and had been consuming cannabis for a little more than 6 years and (2) the brains of an […]