Medical Marijuana

To the Editors at Time:

Your articles on medical marijuana made 2 bizarre observations that need to be called into question.

Andrew Ferguson wrote “… what is emerging in many places is a strange, bipolar set of rules: dope is forbidden for everyone but totally O.K. for anyone who is willing to claim a chronic muscle spasm. Does anyone take such farcical distinctions seriously?” How is this any different from the way we treat morphine, Vicodin, or even Sudafed, all of which are “forbidden” unless you have a prescription? The distinction seems to be anything but farcical. Indeed, the farce is in treating it otherwise than rational.

Jeffrey Kluger quoted the DSM’s definition of addiction as “compulsive use of a substance”, which puts pot in the same boat with such dreadful scourges as water and oxygen (tho without the devastating withdrawal symptoms).

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Repeal Prohibition. Again. For all the same reasons.

Legalizing Pot

To the Editor:

Everything Joel McNally wrote about legalizing pot is absolutely true, and here's one more thing that he forgot.

Making recreational drugs illegal has always been marketed on the premise that we have to do it to "keep the kids off drugs". The irony is that it does exactly the opposite.

Suppose you're a teenager and you want to buy beer or cigarettes. Who sells them? Only legitimate stores which can be fined or lose their licenses if they sell to underage customers. Why would they do that? Well, they wouldn't, which is why it's a challenge for kids to get their hands on those LEGAL drugs.

Contrast that with illegal substances. There's a huge market for them, since customers range all the way from 12 to 92, the sellers are taking the same risk no matter what age their customers are, and a 10-spot from a teenager spends just as well as the same sawbuck from the kid's grandpa. The question here is why WOULDN'T they sell to an underage customer? As, of course, they're more than happy to do.

One more thing. It's way easier to recruit pre-adults as mules, runners, and lookouts because they only face juvenile justice if caught, not serious hard time, so there's an added incentive for drug dealers to lure them in.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insane. And that pretty well sums up the grossly expensive, socially destructive, epically catastrophic failure that is the War on Drug-Using Americans.


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Repeal Prohibition. Again. For all the same reasons.

-- bumper sticker

I Think I've Discovered the Problem

Real-Life Jeopardy

If someone were to ask you “Who was Ulysses S. Grant?”, you’d probably say something like “a Civil War general and president of the United States”. If you were a grade schooler writing a history exam, you’d probably supply more details and better sentence structure. What you would NOT say is “This Civil War general and US president is buried in Grant’s Tomb.”

Yet that’s the kind of contortion you’d go thru to participate on the deservedly popular TV game show Jeopardy, where the gimmick is that you are given an “answer” and are required to come up with the “question” that supposedly inspired it. As it plays out in practice, it’s a fraud, of course. What Alex Trebek is really giving you is a question with the “Who is” stripped off the front and the “?” stripped off the end so you can transplant them over to the answer. Yes, it’s artificial and stilted, but it’s worked well for decades, and Alex isn’t about to change it now.

What has been lost from view over the years, however, is the conceit on which the format is based: that you’re so clever, hip, and well informed that you can be mingling at a cocktail party, catch the tag end of a conversation, and instantly infer from the last comment what the initial question must have been.


Example #1: What you overhear is:

“Sam Bowie”

Therefore the question had to have been:

“Who was taken in the NBA draft between Hakeem Olajuwon and Michael Jordan?”

because that’s the only reason Sam Bowie’s name would ever come up in casual conversation.


Example #2: Context is important. For example, suppose it’s a sports-minded crowd having a peri-Olympic chat and you hear the response:

“a stick”

Here you infer that the question was:

“What do you call it when a gymnast nails a perfect landing after a dismount?”

but at any other time it would be:

“What do you call a boomerang that won’t come back?”


Example #3: It also helps if you’re familiar with riddles and brain teasers. For instance, if the answer is:

“Aha! The bear is white!”

the question had to have been:

“Suppose you walk a mile due south, then turn left and walk another mile, then turn left again and walk another mile. You’re back where you started. You see a bear. What color is it?”

because the only place that particular triangular journey works is the North Pole.


Which brings us to today’s exercise. What you hear is:

“We are SOOOOOO totally fucked!”

Therefore the question had to have been:

“Did corporate ‘persons’ just prove they could buy an election any time they want to?”


Welcome to real-life Jeopardy! Sorry about the mess. It’s under construction. Look for our grand re-opening real soon, under the name Potterville.


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I see in the near future a crisis approaching. It unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. The money powers prey upon the nation. ... It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than an autocracy, more selfish than a bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods. ... Corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power ... will endeavor to prolong its reign ... until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the republic is destroyed.

-- Abraham Lincoln, speech made after passage of the National Banking Act of 1863