Later On

Very interesting article in the Economist, which begins:

A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission—just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.

That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.

Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.

“Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

The evidence of failure

Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has “stabilised”, meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world’s adult population, still take illegal drugs—roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.

This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.

Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States…

Continue reading.

The title is a quotation from the book A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano, a thoroughly entertaining book by Katie Hafner. The speaker was J.D. Ansell, who taught Charles Edquist how to tune pianos. Edquist later was the guy who made the piano work the way Gould wanted.

The book is highly recommended.

Here’s some good news, reported by the indomitable Daphne Eviatar of the Washington Independent:

Even with the Obama Justice Department on the side of John Yoo, the former Bush administration deputy assistant attorney general at the Office of Legal Counsel, a federal judge hearing former enemy combatant Jose Padilla’s lawsuit against Yoo on Friday seemed wary of dismissing the case, The New York Times reports.

The Obama administration is now in the odd position of defending Yoo, who made the legal arguments justifying such extreme interrogation methods as waterboarding, or simulated drowning, a well-known form of torture. Padilla, an American citizen, claims he was subjected to those techniques during his more than three years held in isolation without charge or trial at a U.S. military brig. (He was eventually transferred to civilian custody and tried in federal court, convicted in 2007 on terrorism-related charges.) Represented by a Yale Law School clinic, Padilla and his mother are now suing Yoo for being responsible for the treatment he endured as an “enemy combatant”.

The Times reports that U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco, appointed by President George W. Bush, seemed skeptical of the government’s argument that the case should be dismissed because Yoo is immune from suit and his actions could not be directly connected to Padilla’s treatment, noting that Yoo’s 2001 memo for the Office of Legal Counsel deciding that the president can override the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures was “a pretty scary position.”

Padilla was convicted in 2007 on terrorism-related conspiracy charges. In his lawsuit against Yoo, Padilla claims that the torture memorandums were directly responsible for his detention, interrogation and torture.

Interestingly, Padilla is not seeking large monetary damages for his treatment:  he’s asking for only $1. What he really wants, his lawyers say, is a declaration from the government that his incarceration and harsh treatment were wrong…

Continue reading.

Not totally surprising: a post from Mind Hacks:

An article on the psychological characteristic of vicious dog owners has just appeared online in the compelling academic publication, The Journal of Forensic Sciences, finding that those who who own dangerous dogs are more likely to endorse antisocial and psychopathic character traits and more likely to report criminal behaviour.

The study was led by psychologist Laurie Ragatz who collected data from 869 college students who completed an anonymous online questionnaire assessing type of dog owned, criminal behaviors, attitudes towards animal abuse, psychopathy, and personality.

It’s only a correlational study but the introduction has a nice summary of the research findings as well as a previous study on the same topic:

Each year, 4.7 million people are bitten by dogs, of which 386,000 are seriously injured and over 200 die. Several dog breeds have been labeled "vicious" or of "high-risk" for aggression. To date, only one empirical study has examined the characteristics of persons who choose to own their high-risk dogs. Barnes et al. reports that owners of Akitas, Chow-Chows, Dobermans, Pit Bulls, Rottweilers, and Wolf-mixes endorsed approximately 10 times more criminal convictions than owners of nonvicious dogs. Further, vicious dog owners reported more crimes involving aggression, children, alcohol, and domestic violence than owners of nonvicious dogs.

The current research sought to replicate and extend these findings with a college sample. The present study compared nondog owners and owners of vicious, large, and small dogs on engagement in criminal behavior, general personality traits (i.e., impulsive sensation seeking, neuroticism-anxiety, aggression-hostility, activity, and sociability), psychopathy, and attitude towards animal maltreatment.

…As hypothesized, a significant difference in criminal behavior was found based on dog ownership type. Owners of vicious dogs were significantly more likely to admit to violent criminal behavior, compared to large dog owners, small dog owners, and controls. The vicious dog owner sample also engaged in more types (i.e., violent, property, drug, and status) of criminal behavior compared to all other participant groups.

Personality traits were examined and vicious dog owners were significantly higher than controls on impulsive sensation seeking. Examining psychopathic traits, owners of high-risk dogs endorsed significantly more characteristics of primary psychopathy (e.g., carelessness, selfishness, and manipulative tendencies) than small dog owners.

Comparing owners of vicious dogs to other groups, no significant differences were found regarding secondary psychopathy (e.g., impulsiveness or self-defeating behaviors) or attitudes towards animal maltreatment.

Among the college sample, the vicious dogs were predominantly male and weighed 68 pounds. The owners had more self-reported overall criminal behaviors as well as violent criminal behavior. They endorsed significantly more sensation seeking and primary psychopathic traits.

Disappointing story by Mike Lillis in the Washington Independent:

The Obama administration’s opposition to controversial drug treatment programs has helped kill a prominent global effort to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases among drug users.

Gathered in Vienna, members of the United Nations are drafting a nonbinding framework to guide the next decade’s international drug policy. The United States has rejected initial language promoting “harm reduction” measures, which include needle exchanges, safe injection facilities, drug substitution therapies and other programs designed to mitigate the damaging effects associated with illegal drug use. In doing so, the biggest U.N. contributor has, in effect, condemned certain drug abuse programs supported by some of its closest allies.

Many countries — most in Europe, but also including Canada and Australia — have adopted some of these programs on their own, arguing that monitoring drug use not only offers a safer alternative to criminalizing it, but also provides a clearer path to treatment and recovery.

While the Obama White House has come out squarely in support of clean-syringe programs, it opposes the broader reference to harm reduction on the grounds of the term’s ambiguity. Largely due to U.S. opposition, no mention of either harm reduction or needle exchange will appear in the U.N. declaration, which is set to be finalized next week during a special meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. The document, to which no funds are attached, will next be updated in 2019.

The White House position is some indication that, despite early signals that the Obama administration intends to refocus the nation’s drug policies on public health, the decades-old law enforcement mentality — encapsulated by the Reagan-era “war on drugs” slogan — still rules the day in Washington.

Many health care advocates and human rights groups are blasting the administration’s stand against harm reduction, arguing that it represents a missed opportunity to approach drug abuse from the pragmatic angle that its eradication is a practical impossibility. Some blame an old-school thinking they say is embedded among senior State Department and other agency officials — holdovers from other administrations who view drug policy strictly through the lenses of law enforcement.

“Inertia took over,” said John Walsh, senior associate for drug policy at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group. “The people in place have been adamantly opposed to harm reduction, and they’re the ones advising the White House what to do.”

In a statement explaining the White House opposition to harm reduction, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, deputy chief of the U.S. mission to the U.N. in Vienna, emphasized the administration’s support for needle exchange programs and “other evidence-based approaches to reduce the negative health and social consequences of drug abuse, including access to medication-assisted treatment for narcotic addiction.”

“However,” Pyatt continued, “the United States continues to believe that the term ‘harm reduction’ is ambiguous. It is interpreted by some to include practices that the United States does not wish to endorse.”

Such practices, according to State Department spokeswoman Laura Tischler, include drug legalization, drug consumption rooms, heroin prescription initiatives and programs to provide drug paraphernalia that has no tangible health benefit to the user…

Continue reading. It’s a long article with many good things in it. The above is just the beginning.

Extremely interesting post at Mind Hacks:

The latest Trends in Cognitive Sciences has a fantastic review article on the cognitive neuroscience of eye contact, demonstrating how this fleeting social connection has a powerful impact on the mind and brain.

Past research has shown that making eye contact has an impact on social perception and subsequent behaviour.

The article notes that eye contact has been found to increase the likelihood of recognising someone and helps work out whether someone is male or female.

It also seems to increase general arousal and fixes attention – we’re less likely to notice things happening on the periphery of our vision if we’re staring at a face with eye contact than at a face where the eyes are diverted to the side.

In neuroimaging studies eye contact has been found to increase activity in a group of areas (medial prefrontal cortex, superior temporal gyrus, fusiform gyrus) that have often been associated with social interaction across a wide range of studies.

Interestingly, the authors suggest that basic eye contact information might be detected by a specific subcortical mechanism that quickly detects simple light/dark differences, presumably to pick out the direction of the pupil, which then triggers more complex social processing to make sense of its social meaning.

It’s an interesting field, not least because recognising eye contact and following the gaze direction of others are thought to be some of the most fundamental building blocks on which social communication develops in babies.

Children with autism have been found to show radically different patterns of eye contact recognition and gaze direction, and the authors suggest that one cause could be a problem with the these eye contact neural circuits which leads to slow or impaired social understanding.

Mary Kane in the Washington Independent:

Congress is finally getting around to asking a question it should have asked long ago, before doling out billions of dollars to troubled insurance giant AIG – Where, exactly, is that money going?

A Senate panel pressed the Federal Reserve on that very point Thursday. even threatening to cut off future bailout funds (god forbid AIG comes back yet again) if the Fed doesn’t cough up some answers, The New York Times reports.

Tens of billions of those dollars have merely passed through A.I.G. to its derivatives trading partners, shielding them from losses. The Fed has refused to provide the names of those financial institutions, and senator after senator, Democrat and Republican, said that was an outrage.

“We need to know who benefited, and we’re going to find out,” said Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama and the ranking member of the committee. “The Fed can be secretive for a while but not forever.”

If only that were true.  Consider this little nugget, from Bloomberg: …

Continue reading.

Paul Krugman:

I’m as cynical as they come. Even so, I’m shocked by the total intellectual collapse of the Republican Party in the face of this economic crisis.

I suggested a little while ago that the GOP has become the party of Beavis and Butthead, reduced to snickering at line items in legislation that sound funny. And we’re not just talking about the usual crazies: we’re taking about Saint John McCain, cracking jokes about “Mormon crickets” and “beaver management” when a minute or two on Google reveals that these are, in fact, serious issues.

But it’s getting truly serious when the House minority leader — essentially, the nation’s second-ranking Republican (after Rush Limbaugh) — declares that the answer to the economy’s downward spiral is a spending freeze. That’s not a retrogression to Herbert Hoover; even Hoover knew better than that.

I’d really like to see some genuine bipartisanship in America. But that can’t happen until we start having at least somewhat sane partisans.

Often what is needed in reporting is an educational function: explaining clearly certain complex ideas (in science, economics, manufacturing, whatever). Unfortunately, most reporters are ignorant about what they’re reporting, so even when they try to explain, they get it wrong. So the default seems to be to simply ignore certain topics whose reporting would require explanations. Paul Krugman gives an example:

One major sin of news coverage, especially on TV, is the way certain points of view just get excluded from consideration — even if many of the best-informed people hold those views. Most famously and disastrously, the case against invading Iraq was just not heard in the months before the war.

And still it happens. According to the invaluable Media Matters, the idea that the Obama stimulus plan might be too small — a view held by many well-known economists — basically went unreported on broadcast news during the stimulus debate. Out of 59 broadcasts addressing the plan, only 3 mentioned concerns that the plan was inadequate. And it’s actually even worse than that: one of those three involved Harry Reid talking about longer-term goals on health and education — and one of the other two was me.

Meanwhile, it’s rapidly becoming clear that yes, the plan was too small.

Steve Benen at Political Animal:

I argued yesterday that congressional Republicans are guilty of a "pre-recession mindset." Evidence to bolster the argument is hard to miss.

The top Republican in the House is seizing on the latest spike in unemployment to call for a freeze on government spending and to urge President Barack Obama to veto a $410 billion spending bill.

Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the jump in unemployment to 8.1 percent and the loss of 651,000 jobs in February is a sign of a worsening recession that demands better solutions from both parties.

Boehner criticized the spending bill as chocked full of wasteful, pork-barrel projects…. Boehner said he hoped Obama would veto the bill. He urged the president to work with House Republicans to impose a spending freeze until the end of this fiscal year.

This is, of course, completely insane. As Pat Garofalo recently explained: "The economic stimulus package’s main purpose is to close the GDP gap and jumpstart the economy by spurring spending by households, government and the private sector. A spending freeze would act as an ‘anti-stimulus,’ cutting spending precisely when it’s too low and the economy is moving too slowly."

But stepping back and considering the larger context, that the top House Republican is seriously and publicly advocating such an idea is genuinely scary. As Paul Krugman noted, "I’m shocked by the total intellectual collapse of the Republican Party in the face of this economic crisis…. I’d really like to see some genuine bipartisanship in America. But that can’t happen until we start having at least somewhat sane partisans."

Josh Marshall added, "When the crisis is a rapid and catastrophic drop off in demand, you handcuff the one force that can create demand (i.e., the federal government) in the throes of the contraction. That’s insane. Levels of stimulus are a decent question. Intensifying the contraction is just insane and frankly a joke. It’s time to recognize that the only debate here is happening among Democrats and sundry non-affiliated sane people. The leaders of the GOP are simply not part of the conversation." …

Continue reading. 

Very good list of projects to help science.

Kevin Drum:

Barack Obama supports a provision in the spending bill before Congress that would allow Cuban-Americans to visit relatives on the island once a year and end limits on the sale of American food and medicines in Cuba.  New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez (D–Lunaticville) is so outraged by this that he’s threatening to oppose the entire bill. And he’s holding up two of Obama’s science nominations (John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco).  And he’s threatening to hold his breath until his face turns blue.

Jeebus.  What is it about Cuba that drives people into decades-long fits of insanity?  Even JFK, the guy who instituted the Cuba embargo in the first place, thought we were all kind of crazy on the subject.  But 50 years later?  Crazy doesn’t begin to describe it.

What’s more, it’s a different kind of crazy from most exile communities.  What accounts for it?  A Cuban-American congressional candidate told me last year that the difference was simple: most Cuban exiles, when they fled the island after Castro’s takeover, left with their entire families.  So for a lot of them, there’s literally nothing remaining there that they care about.  You could drop a nuke on Havana and they’d be OK with that.  This promotes a different brand of insanity than in most exile communities, which might hate the current regime in their home country but still have deep personal ties to it.

I don’t know if that’s really the explanation or not.  Comments welcome on this score.  But there’s got to be something that explains this.  It’s just nuts, and Menendez should be ashamed of himself.  It’s time to grow up.

Interesting development.

Source: Associated Press, March 4, 2009

Doctors who don’t want their patients to complain about their services are signing up with a service called Medical Justice, which has developed a standardized waiver that patients are asked to sign, agreeing not to post online comments about the doctor. The company “advises doctors to have all patients sign the agreements,” reports Lindsey Tanner. “If a new patient refuses, the doctor might suggest finding another doctor. … Doctors are notified when a negative rating appears on a Web site, and, if the author’s name is known, physicians can use the signed waivers to get the sites to remove offending opinion.” Dana Blankenhorn writes that patients rights advocates are angry at the attempt to stifle patients’ speech: “MyDocHub calls it an attack on First Amendment rights, while ePatients.Net calls it an ‘almost comical attempt to hold back the tide.’ Consumer advocates are also grumbling.”

So we don’t get a court decision on the President’s legal authority to imprison without due process. Here’s a review, and note the problem of Federal court schedules:

After being held in captivity as an accused "enemy combatant" by the U.S. Government for more than five years without charges or a trial of any kind, Ali Al-Marri — who was a legal resident in the U.S. and was on U.S. soil at the time of his detention — was, two weeks ago, finally indicted and charged with various crimes in a federal court.  The indictment came as the U.S. Supreme Court was set to rule whether the Constitution allows the President to imprison legal residents inside the U.S. as "enemy combatants" and keep them imprisoned indefinitely with no charges or trial (both sides of the appellate court decision agreed that the legal analysis is the same for the power to imprison U.S. citizens).  But now there will be no such ruling, because the Obama administration (over the objections of Al-Marri’s ACLU lawyer) successfully convinced the Court to dismiss the case on the ground that the indictment of Al-Marri renders the question "moot."  This critical question will thus remain unresolved by the Supreme Court.

What just happened in the Al-Marri case is (with one important exception) a virtual repeat of what the U.S. Government (under the Bush administration) did in the Jose Padilla case.   The Bush administration arrested Padilla, a U.S. citizen, on U.S. soil; accused him of being an "enemy combatant"; and then imprisoned him for the next three-and-a-half years without charges or a trial of any kind (even without contact with the outside world, including a lawyer).  Just as Padilla’s case was about to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, which was set to rule on whether the Constitution allows a President to order American citizens imprisoned in military brigs with no trial, the Bush DOJ indicted Padilla and then convinced the Supreme Court to refrain from ruling on the issue because Padilla’s indictment rendered the question "moot."  The critical question thus remained unresolved by the Supreme Court.

It doesn’t exactly take great powers of observation to see the pattern here.  Federal courts are excruciatingly slow.  Even when someone’s liberty is being unjustly deprived — i.e., when they’re being held in a cage with no trial — federal judges take their sweet time in issuing rulings:  often many, many months — sometimes longer.  Federal judges are guaranteed life tenure; have virtually no oversight or supervision; essentially rule unchallenged over their little fiefdoms; and thus have no real incentive to resolve cases quickly.  Some work hard, and many don’t.  They get to cases when they get to them.   Thus, it’s virtually certain that it will take a case of this sort several years to wind its way through the various stages of judicial review, all while the detainee sits in prison with no trial.

This time factor alone vests the U.S. Government with the power to imprison legal residents or even U.S. citizens with no trial for at least a period of several years, as the detainee’s constitutional challenge to the process-less imprisonment slowly winds it way through the federal courts.  Before the U.S. Supreme Court can rule on whether that is constitutional, the Government can then finally bring charges against (or simply release) the detainee, and then argue to the Court (apparently, with success) that there is no reason for the Court to rule on the constitutionality of those actions because the case is now "moot."  That’s what just happened in the Al-Marri case (just like in the Padilla case), and there’s no reason why it can’t continue to happen that way…

Continue reading.

Or, as the CIA prefers to call it, "Enhanced interrogation techniques." Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

The CIA has reportedly just confirmed — conveniently late on a Friday afternoon — that 12 of the videotapes it destroyed while its interrogation methods were under investigation and the subject of a pending lawsuit depicted the “enhanced interrogation methods” that detainees’ advocates were worried about.

The American Civil Liberties Union reports that as part of its lawsuit seeking information on detainee abuse, the government today provided new details about the content of interrogation videotapes destroyed by the CIA — specifically, that 12 depict so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” In court documents, the government also said it would produce a complete list of summaries, transcripts or memoranda related to the videotapes by March 20.  However, the inventory of tapes provided to the court is so heavily redacted that it’s virtually all black ink.

“The government is needlessly withholding information about these tapes from the public, despite the fact that the CIA’s use of torture – including waterboarding – is no secret,” said Amrit Singh, staff attorney with the ACLU in a statement released today. “This new information only underscores the need for full and immediate disclosure of the CIA’s illegal interrogation methods. The time has come for the CIA to be held accountable for flouting the rule of law.”

In December 2007, the ACLU filed a motion to hold the CIA in contempt for its destruction of the tapes in violation of a court order requiring the agency to produce or identify all records requested by the ACLU. That motion is still pending.

Earlier this week, the CIA acknowledged it destroyed 92 tapes of interrogations. According to today’s documents, these tapes all related to just two detainees; 90 involved one, and the other two tapes showed the other.  The tapes were not identified and processed for the ACLU in response to its Freedom of Information Act request back in 2005 seeking information on the treatment and interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody. The ACLU notes that the tapes were also withheld from the 9/11 Commission, which had specifically asked the CIA to hand over transcripts and recordings documenting the interrogation of CIA prisoners.

Legal documents in the case are available here.

And probably not at its worst—check out this graph (click to enlarge, then click that image for full size):

This is from Speaker Pelosi’s site, where this comment also appears:

This chart compares the job loss so far in this recession to job losses in the 1990-1991 recession and the 2001 recession – showing how dramatic and unprecedented the job loss over the last 14 months has been. Over the last 14 months, our economy has lost a total of 4.4 million jobs – and continuing job losses in the next few months are predicted.

By comparison, we lost a total of 1.6 million jobs in the 1990-1991 recession, before the economy began turning around and jobs began increasing; and we lost a total of 2.7 million jobs in the 2001 recession, before the economy began turning around and jobs began increasing.

The comparisons to earlier recessions are not accurate: to make such comparisons, the graph should be of the percentage of the work force rather than absolute jobs, to account for the growth in population. But the reason I put up the graph is not for the comparisons but for the shape of the curve for the current recession: it’s still going down, fast, and it does shows little sign of turning around.

Both the shaving soap and the aftershave this morning carry a bit of menthol, so my face is very cool indeed. The Emperor 3 created a fine lather, and the Edwin Jagger razor with a Gillette blade smooth away the stubble in three quick passes. A splash of Floïd and I’m set for the day.