Mark Kleiman

Clive Bates skewers a paper by a pair of UCSF researchers purporting to show that e-cigarettes lead to cigarette smoking, using purely correlational data. In polite company, you can’t infer from “People who have used e-cigarettes are more likely to have used tobacco cigarettes than people who haven’t” to “E-cigarette use is a gateway to […]

Shatterproof is a new organization intending to do for substance abuse disorder what the American Heart Association does for cardio-vascular disease: combining collective self-help, research support, and policy advocacy. What excites me is that the policy advocacy will be relentlessly aimed at reducing the damage, rather than at fighting the culture war (from either side). […]

If you’re a scientist, and your findings might cost a big company some money, expect that company to try to destroy you, personally as well as professionally. Of course, we only get to find out when the effort at least partially fails. If you’re wondering why climate scientists don’t want to give their industry-sponsored critics […]

There’s lots of nonsense being talked about how the Republicans don’t have a natural candidate for 2016. In fact, there’s someone with (1) huge name recognition; (2) a strong anti-gay record; (3) unlimited willingness to violate human rights in “anti-terrorist” campaigns; (4) a love of weapons and cheap machismo; and (5) no liberal tendencies whatsoever. […]

As 42 Senate Republicans push for a quick vote on the Mendendez-Kirk Iran sactions bill – guaranteed to derail the current negotiations if it were to pass – Sen. Menendez follows most of his Democratic co-sponsors in asking that consideration of the bill be delayed to give the diplomats a chance. And guess who’s on […]

If in fact 68 million U.S. adults live in unbanked households, why not let the US Postal Service provide basic financial services? Not, it seems to me, either checking accounts or loans – USPS isn’t really equipped to deal customers writting NSF checks or with loan underwriting and chasing defaulting borrowers, though it might allow […]

The discussion of “rescheduling” marijuana is confused because most of the people engaged in it don’t know how the law works. Jacob Sullum, always willing to let his ignorance be the measure of other people’s knowledge, utterly unwilling to let mere facts get in the way of libertarian ideology, and eager to please his paymasters […]

I see that “conservatives”(Howard Husok and Scott Johnson, for example) are showing their respect for traditional values by pissing on Pete Seeger’s grave before it’s even been dug. Like Mike O’Hare, I have no apology to offer for Seeger’s support of a totalitarian system in Europe except that he failed to grasp the full nature […]