Mark Kleiman

I note with some glee that Ken Cuccinelli, who has made an issue of keeping Virginia’s “Crimes Against Nature” law on the books* (1) said in 2008 that he thought the adultery laws ought not only to stay on the books be to be enforced and (2) is ducking away from that stance now that […]

That’s the Wall Street Journal on the GOP. After all, the plutocrats love them some guestworkers, and when the principle of bigotry runs into the principle of greed, well then the plutocrats think bigotry ought to give way. There’s just one problem: the party’s lunatic fringe is now also its central voting base. Tom Edsall […]

One of the standard glibertarian/Republican lies is that, in the Civil Rights struggles of the early 1960s, Republicans stood for equality and Democrats stood for racism. They’ve even managed to fool PolitiFact on the first half of the claim, ignoring the little detail that in 1964 the Republicans nominated an opponent of the Civil Rights […]

To a pharmacologist, that question is a little bit like “Is water a liquid?” Alcohol is not just a drug, but the archetypal drug: the drug most widely used and the drug that causes the most addiction, disease, and violence. But in ordinary usage, the word “drug” does not include alcohol. If I told you […]

Yes, cannabis has medical value for some people. And yes, the sustained effort of the federal government to make medical cannabis research as difficult as possible is a national disgrace. And then, on the other hand, there’s this, from a report of the Colorado State Auditor: As of October 2012, a total of 903 physicians […]

If you believe, as I do, that the tension between the incentive for sellers in a licit cannabis market to create and maintain addiction with aggressive marketing and product design aimed at those most likely to overuse the drug and the public interest in having cannabis available to those who want to use it in […]

The Wall Street Journal has an op-ed by a Yale psychiatry resident warning that the legalization of cannabis will lead to increased disability due to schizophrenia. That’s based on a couple of studies showing that cannabis use, especially early heavy use, is a statistical risk factor for a subsequent schizophrenia diagnosis. If I had a […]

Texas Sen. Wendy Davis is a hero. Texas Sen. Tommy Williams, by contrast, isn’t even a gentleman. Davis is in now in the final three hours of a thirteen-hour ordeal to block a law that would make legal abortions virtually unobtainable in most of Texas by creating unmeetable rules (e.g., the physician must hold admitting […]

Another BFD. The beauty of it is that he doesn’t need Congression action; all of this is within Executive Branch control. This illustrates why I’m so relentlessly partisan, and so impatient with those who enjoy displaying their moral superiority by distancing themselves from the President when he screws up. There are a dozen key issues […]