Mark Kleiman

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Turns out my earlier plea for someone to invest some shoe leather into finding people who were seriously damaged by Conegate has been answered. Emergency responders were delayed in attending to four medical situations – including one in which a 91-year-old woman lay unconscious – due to traffic gridlock caused by unannounced closures of access […]

That was an email from Bridget Anne Kelly, Deputy Chief of Staff in Chris Christie’s office, to David Wildstein, Christie’s Port Authority patronage appointee, two weeks before Wildstein gridlocked Ft. Lee traffic for the first four days of the school year by shutting down two of the three access lanes from Ft. Lee to the […]

I’m not qualified to judge whether the sale of Climate Corporation to Monsanto is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, or how much of the “Monsatan” label Monsanto has actually earned. But I’d like to hear the climate-change deniers explain why Monsanto wanted to pay almost $1 billion for a company whose business model […]

David Brooks and Ruth Marcus both have anti-cannabis legalization essays up. Brooks doesn’t mention 650,000 arrests a year, 40,000 people behind bars at any one time, or $35 billion in annual illicit income. Brooks does mention the issue of personal liberty, but immediately bats it away: apparently the liberty to do what Brooks disapproves of […]

Question for David Brooks, Ruth Marcus, Joe Scarborough, and other opponents of cannabis legalization: It seems likely that very heavy cannabis use starting in adolescence and continuing for many years can lead to measurable decreases in some cognitive abilities. It is possible that occasional use might also cause damage, but right now there’s no strong […]

Anyone who has followed the drug threads on RBC will have noticed the presence of opinionated, stubborn, ignorant, irrational, and angry advocates of drug legalization. That might create a false impression. In fact, there exists a parallel group of fanatics in the drug-war camp, though that viewpoint has been absent from the discourse here. I […]

George Will thinks we should put more money in to plasma-fusion research. He may well be right. Obviously he would be right if for $30 billion we could have cost-competitive fusion power in 20 years. But that confident assessment comes from the head of the Princeton fusion lab; those of us who remember that fusion […]

Debating whether to legalize pot is increasingly pointless. Unless there’s an unexpected shock to public opinion, it’s going to happen, and sooner rather than later. The important debate now is how to legalize it. The results of legalization depend strongly on the details of the post-prohibition tax and regulatory regimes. In the current situation, continued […]

I’ve just finished reading Neverwhere for the third time since I picked it up at random in a used-book store four months ago. Gaiman, apparently, is rather well-known, but I’d never heard of him. I’ve now read American Gods, which I thought was pretty good but not nearly comparable to Neverwhere, a text which, in […]