Mark Kleiman

The grandiloquently-named Global Commission on Drug Policy has issued its final press release report. Not a new idea to be found; just recycled legalization talking points. Not surprising, with a commission long on celebrity but short on relevant expertise and a staff of “advisers” drawn entirely from within the “drug policy reform” cocoon. I wouldn’t […]

The rate of forcible rape as reported on victimization surveys peaked in 1979 at about 2.8 per 1000 population (age 12 or older). In 2009 the rate fell to 0.5: This is an astounding decline, but I don’t know of any reason to doubt the accuracy of the numbers. The National Crime Victimization survey is […]

California has been running an appallingly crowded prison system for more than two decades. In effect, the legislature and successive governors decided that the right way to resolve the tension between the voters’ desire for harsher punishment as expressed in the Three Strikes initiative and their own spinelessness about raising taxes was to crowd more […]

Last Sunday, Newt Gingrich said the following about Paul Ryan’s proposal to replace Medicare with defined-contribution subsidies for health insurance designed to replace a decreasing fraction of total cost from year to year: I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering. I don’t think imposing radical change from the […]

Virgin America has now joined mine; I will never fly that airline (or either of its sister Virgins) again. This post is written from the KLM Lounge at JFK. I’m here as a Delta flyer, though my flight actually has an Alaska Airlines fight number. (Gotta love modern air travel; since it’s a KLM lounge, […]

Most interesting thing I learned at Ernesto Zedillo’s “War on Drugs” conference at Yale yesterday and today: One chronic problem for Latin America, and one of the reasons drug trafficking flourishes, is the underfunded, undertrained, underpaid, undermanned, and often outgunned law enforcement/prosecution/judicial system. That system is also massively corrupt, partly because the people in it […]

… to love Levy’s, say the classic ads. And you don’t have to be a Zionist to hate Hamas. The proclamation that Hamas will never recognize the existence of any Israeli state, even within the 1967 borders is a declaration of war to the death. Under those circumstances, I know who ought to be doing […]

The president pretty much nailed it, I thought. If the economy comes back, Obama may manage to make calm and sanity fashionable again. The thing about gut instinct is if it works then you think, “Boy, I have good instincts.” If it doesn’t, then you’re gonna be running back in your mind all the things […]

In the closing scene of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, the apostate apparatchik, finally re-embraces the system that has destroyed him as a human being and is about to put a bullet into his brain. He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden […]

Peter Beinart gave a very good talk – at once eloquent and morally and intellectually serious – at UCLA Hillel last night. The talk explored the complexity of loving Israel and yet disapproving of the pattern of ethnic subordination that characterizes Israeli rule over the West Bank. Beinart mentioned the fact that settler violence against […]