Innehållsförteckning för November 18, 2013 från The Nation

Miami Vice 
 I always enjoyed Carl Hiaasen’s humorous writing about the corruption in Miami, but I thought he was exaggerating. After reading Ken Silverstein’s “Miami: Where Luxury Real Estate Meets Dirty Money” [Oct. 21], I realize that Hiaasen has understated the level of corruption. NELL FARR Elk Grove, Calif.
 _________________________ Hillary Fever 
 Richard Kim provided a refreshing note of dissent regarding the premature anointing of presidential candidates [“It’s Not Hillary’s Turn,” Oct. 21]. I share his lack of enthusiasm for being stampeded into accepting Hillary Clinton, or anyone, until there is an understanding of a candidate’s position on the issues that face America. Kim’s call for vigorous debate on these issues (e.g., “the yawning gap between the rich and everyone else”) to help determine the best person to…

The candidate confronts a dark chapter in US history.
 As a young adult, Warren Wilhelm Jr. became so alienated from his moody, alcoholic father that he adopted his childhood nickname, Bill, and his mother’s surname, de Blasio. The recent discovery that Warren Wil­­helm Sr.’s government career was truncated in the 1950s by allegations of disloyalty to the United States may help de Blasio come to terms with his ­troubled family history. More significant for us, de Blasio’s candidacy for New York City mayor presents an opportunity for Americans to confront the enduring legacy of the Red Scare—and to consider the possibility of escaping its shadow. 
 Warren Wilhelm met Maria de Blasio in 1939 when both were on the editorial staff at Time. Recent graduates of Yale and Smith, they…

Oklahoma amended its Constitution nine years ago to restrict marriage to “the union of one man and one woman.” 
 But because of tribal sovereignty, the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes are not bound by state law. 
 When longtime partners Jason Pickel and Darren Black Bear realized that they fulfilled the tribes’ marriage conditions, they applied for and received an official tribal marriage license. And Oklahoma can’t take that away.
 —Aura Bogado Colorlines.com
…

Dr. Danielle Lee is a blogger for Scientific American and a zoologist at the University of Oklahoma who studies animals like the prairie vole and the giant pouched rat. Early in October, she received an invitation from “Ofek,” the pseudonymous blog editor at Biology-Online.org: “I encountered your blog ‘Urban Scientist’ and am wondering if you would be interested in joining us as a guest blogger…. You could serve as ‘educator’ and guide for your world of science.”
 Lee was interested: “Please tell me more about this…. What are your payment rates for guest bloggers?” Ofek informed her that “we don’t pay” but suggested that writing for his site might “have a direct effect on the traffic and rank of your blog, and that in turn has a direct effect on…

In 2011, the DEA raided medical marijuana growers and dispensaries across Montana. My dad, Richard Flor, one of the partners of Montana Cannabis, was arrested. Medical marijuana was legal under state law at the time, but federal laws dictated that he be sentenced to five years in prison.
 A Vietnam vet with numerous health problems, my dad was supposed to be sent to a medical facility, but he never made it. Instead, he sat in general population inside a private prison for four months, his health rapidly deteriorating. He suffered from broken bones, severe stomach pain, unstable blood sugar and much more. Prison staff ignored most of his cries for help, accusing him of faking his symptoms. It was only when he was being transported from one facility to the…

“Whites Smoke Pot, but Blacks Are Arrested.” That was the headline of a column by Jim Dwyer, the great Metro desk reporter for The New York Times, in December 2009. Although Dwyer was writing about New York City, he summed up perfectly two central and enduring facts about marijuana use and arrests across the country: whites and blacks use marijuana equally, but the police do not arrest them equally. A third important fact: the vast majority (76 percent) of those arrested and charged with the crime of marijuana possession are young people in their teens and 20s.
 Over the last fifteen years, police departments in the United States made 10 million arrests for marijuana possession—an average of almost 700,000 arrests a year. Police arrest blacks for marijuana possession at higher…

On January 10, 1965, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg led a march for marijuana legalization outside the New York Women’s House of Detention in lower Manhattan. A dozen demonstrators waved placards and chanted slogans, resulting in one of the iconic images of the 1960s: a picture of Ginsberg, snowflakes on his beard and thinning hair, wearing a sign that said Pot Is Fun. Another picket sign read Pot Is a Reality Kick.
 The pro-pot protest was the inaugural event of the New York chapter of the Committee to Legalize Marijuana, a group launched by Ginsberg and fellow poet Ed Sanders at a time when most pot smokers remained in the closet about their recreational substance of choice. The idea, Sanders explained, was “to get people who use marijuana to stand…

On July 24, nearly nine months after
Washington State passed Initiative 502, which legalized the recreational use of marijuana by adults, the Drug Enforcement Administration raided four medical marijuana “access points.” The first major federal pot busts since voters passed the groundbreaking law in November sent an immediate chill through the marijuana-law reform community, as speculation arose that the Obama administration was sending an all-too-familiar message to the states. 
 But upon closer inspection, it appeared that more complicated forces might be at play. The targets were accused of operating outside not just federal law, but state law as well—for example, allegedly by hiding huge cash profits from the state and selling large amounts of marijuana to people (likely without prescriptions), including undercover DEA agents.
 The raids would provide a window…

We were sitting in his office, Ted Foss and I, on the third floor of Judd Hall at the University of Chicago. Foss is the associate director of the Center for East Asian Studies, a classic area studies program that gathers under its roof specialists in various disciplines who work on China, Korea and Japan. Above us, on the fourth floor, were the offices and seminar room of the university’s Confucius Institute, which opened its doors in 2010. A Confucius Institute is an academic unit that provides accredited instruction in Chinese language and culture and sponsors a variety of extracurricular activities, including art exhibitions, lectures, conferences, film screenings and celebrations of Chinese festivals; at Chicago and a number of other schools, it also funds the research projects of local faculty…

@RichardKimNYC: Each top 10 CEO made as much as 92,126 average Americans.
 @brycecovert: The unemployment rate for blacks (12.9%) is more than double that of whites (6.3%).
 @garyyounge: New York Times headline: “Are the Roma Primitive, or Just Poor?” Better headline: “Is The New York Times Racist, or Just Ignorant?”
 @ZoeSCarpenter: The infuriating irony of the designation “pro-life”: groups sue to keep poor Ohioans uninsured.
 @gzornick: Too many reporters refuse to think through the horrors of the Iraq War. Those now comparing it to a hinky website still haven’t learned.
 @aurabogado: Our schools have become literal battlegrounds in the so-called debate over the Second Amendment. 
 @MiriMarkow: Why yes, that was me editing with an eyebrow pencil on the subway this morning!
…

In 1990, Paul Butler was a federal prosecutor in Washington, DC, when he was arrested for a crime he did not commit. The ordeal led him to question his career, a topic he discusses in his book Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice. Today, he is a leading proponent of jury nullification, encouraging jurors to refuse to convict guilty people on nonviolent drug charges. I spoke with Butler over the phone in October. The interview has been edited for clarity and condensed.—Liliana Segura
 LS: You once made your living urging jurors to send drug offenders to jail. Now you say they should refuse to convict. Explain.
 PB: My values have remained consistent. I’ve always been concerned about making communities whole and especially protecting African-American communities. I started out…

For decades, Native American activists and allies have fought to get the Redskins, the Washington, DC, National Football League franchise, to change its name. For decades, they have pointed out that the name is a slur. For decades, they have argued that it is the dishonorable product of the team’s original owner, George Preston Marshall, an arch-segregationist with a love of minstrelsy whose team was the last in the NFL to sign African-American players. For decades, these arguments have fallen on deaf ears. Every league commissioner and subsequent owner has refused to listen. But no one’s hearing has been quite as impaired as current owner Dan Snyder, who bought the team in 1999. In May, Snyder told reporters, “We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER—you can use caps.”…

This special issue marks our first-ever endorsement of national marijuana legalization. But soon after pot came to cultural prominence in the 1960s, Nation contributors began undermining the fundamental assumptions behind its prohibition. In “Drugs on Campus: Turned On and Tuned Out” (January 31, 1966), Mervin Freedman and Harvey Powelson, a psychologist and psychiatrist respectively, questioned whether growing pot use was really as alarming as mainstream authorities claimed: 
 “It is difficult to fashion a serious case against smoking marijuana except that a user will find himself in serious trouble if he is caught by the police…. Within the current limits of use, there is little evidence that marijuana damages the individuals who smoke it.” 
 They also hinted that prohibition was counterproductive: 
 “The consistent pot smokers are for the…

The decades-long war on pot has helped fuel a dramatic rise in SWAT and paramilitary-style police raids across the country. Using aggressive tactics once reserved for standoffs and hostage situations, law enforcement agents break down doors and force people onto the ground at gunpoint, often simply for the purpose of serving drug warrants. Today, there are approximately 150 drug raids every day in the United States. Such routine violence inevitably leads to tragic results—Americans have been raided and sometimes killed over insignificant amounts of pot (or, in the case of wrong-door raids, nothing at all). The political forces behind such tactics are investigated by journalist Radley Balko in Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (2013, Public Affairs). With both Republican and Democratic administrations providing
federal funds…

Although I’ve always had fleeting thoughts about the ineffectiveness of our nation’s longest war, the “war on drugs,” it took twenty-four years of policing to begin a focused analysis. 
 I spent the majority of my career enforcing drug laws, working undercover and as a drug enforcement commander for the Maryland State Police. It was after I retired that I felt the pain of losing a very close friend to drug prohibition violence. 
 Maryland State Trooper Ed Toatley was working undercover while assigned to an FBI task force. On October 30, 2000, Ed was making one last buy of cocaine from a midlevel dealer before the planned takedown and arrest. But the dealer had other plans, which would enable him to keep both the money and the drugs. He…

For many years, the federal government has subsidized studies designed to prove the negative effects of marijuana, while blocking inquiry into its potential benefits. Ironically, the government’s steadfast search for harm has yielded remarkable scientific insights that explain why cannabis is such a versatile remedy and why it is the most sought-after illicit substance on the planet.
 Cannabis and the unique chemical compounds produced by the plant, called cannabinoids, have been at the center of one of the most exciting—and underreported—developments in modern science. Research on marijuana’s effects led directly to the discovery of a molecular signaling system in the human brain and body, the endocannabinoid system, which plays a crucial role in regulating a broad range of physiological processes: hunger, sleep, inflammation, stress, blood pressure, body temperature, glucose metabolism,…

In 1991, when I was 23 years old, I was arrested and imprisoned for a drug crime I did not commit. I spent almost twenty years in prison under New York’s Rockefeller drug laws. Five of those years were actually added to my sentence after a marijuana infraction behind bars. The state spent more than $250,000 to keep me in prison for those extra years because of a single joint. My total incarceration cost taxpayers about $1 million for a nonviolent offense.
 Since my release in 2010, I have become devoted to activism. I recently gained the opportunity to work with the Drug Policy Alliance’s campaign to legalize medical marijuana in New York. I have met countless patients—from young military veterans to the elderly—who suffer from pain, nausea and other…

“The gold rush is on once again,” The New York Times declared in 1979, in an article on Humboldt County, California. The “gold” was marijuana, which was just beginning to take root as an industry in Humboldt, located on the northern coast of the state, 200 miles from San Francisco. “In these parts the plants command, ounce for ounce, 
almost the price of the metal.”
 Thanks to federal prohibition, the price of marijuana would exceed that of gold at numerous times throughout the 1980s. Locals referred to prohibition as “the best government price support program in U.S. 
history,” and over time marijuana became the backbone of Humboldt County’s entire economy. By 2010, somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 people in Humboldt grew marijuana or worked for a grower, and the earnings…

Marijuana is indeed a gateway drug,” quips
Sanho Tree of the Institute for Policy Studies. “It’s a gateway drug to the Oval Office!” Indeed. From Bill Clinton’s “I didn’t inhale it” through George W. Bush’s “I was young and foolish” to Barack Obama’s teen years in the Choom Gang (“I inhaled frequently—
that was the point”), the last three presidents have more or less owned up to breaking America’s drug laws.
 All of them were elected. Then re-elected.
 This raises obvious questions: If Clinton, Bush and Obama, ex–pot smokers all, were deemed responsible enough to lead the world’s most powerful nation, largest economy and strongest military (with thousands of nukes), why are we still arresting young men and women—especially young African-Americans and Latinos—for doing what these men did? Why do countless people…

On October 24, two institutions held parties to celebrate their birthdays: Dissent, the quarterly journal of democratic socialism, was turning sixty, and the Center for American Progress, the center-left Washington think tank, turned ten. The two have little in common except that American liberalism is fortunate to have both in its bullpen. 
 “When intellectuals can do nothing else, they start a magazine,” Irving Howe observed of Dissent’s founding. The fact of so under-financed and under-circulated an intellectual journal surviving without institutional support is a kind of miracle. Looking back, it’s hard to see just what market niche Howe and co-founder Lewis Coser thought they had identified when, in the magazine’s first issue, its founders promised to “reassert the libertarian values of the socialist ideal.” America was hardly on the…


 The following is an excerpt from Ohio University senior Jess Miller’s finalist entry in our 2013 Student Writing Contest:
 It was the 1970s, and Michael Skladany was spending his summers working at a steel mill on the outskirts of Cleveland. It was backbreaking work, but the son of blue-collar, working-class parents knew that it would pay for his college education.
 Forty years later, 
Dr. Skladany told his story to his introductory sociology class. And all 100 students laughed.
 We laughed because it was preposterous to imagine saving up for an entire year’s worth of tuition, plus housing, with a summer job. We laughed because steel mills in Cleveland have been laying off thousands of workers, not hiring them. And we laughed, perhaps ruefully, because many of us attending our…

In February 2013, three months after Colorado and Washington legalized recreational marijuana, a sullen Gil Kerlikowske, head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), shared his regrets with the Canadian magazine Maclean’s. “The administration has not done a particularly good job,” he said, “of, one, talking about marijuana as a public health issue, and number two, talking about what can be done and where we should be headed on our drug policy.” People in mourning are given to melodrama, but Kerlikowske’s attempt to blame marijuana legalization on poor messaging was evidence of psychosis.
 From day one of Obama’s presidency, the press—from local outfits to the major networks—had hailed his administration’s promise to treat drugs as a “public health issue” as if it were a novel idea.…

Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton all acknowledge illicit marijuana use in their younger years. Of the three, who do you suppose was most at risk for arrest and all of the associated negative consequences, including truncating his political aspirations? 
 To most Americans, the answer is clear: the black guy, of course. For those for whom the answer is less obvious, consider a recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union showing that black people are two to over seven times more likely to be arrested for pot possession than their white counterparts, despite the fact that both groups use marijuana at similar rates. These disparities held up even when researchers controlled for household income. It’s about race, not class.
 As a neuropsychopharmacologist who has spent the…

In 1990, my brother was convicted of growing marijuana with two friends in a garage near Spokane, Washington. They grew as many small garden pots of seedlings as possible­—365 in all. They hoped to produce some fifteen to twenty pounds of pot to split and sell to friends.
 Instead, a neighbor called the police. My brother’s friends were arrested, and they immediately turned him in and testified against him in exchange for probation. My brother, who had no prior record, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in federal prison for possession with intent to distribute 365 kilos of marijuana. Incredibly, federal law assigns a one-kilo weight to each plant regardless of its size. My brother could have informed on others and reduced his sentence, but he refused to…

I first became acquainted with cannabis on a warm California summer evening. Growing up in the turbulent ’60s, I considered it a rite of passage. Little did I know what my future held.
 My work in adult education led me to a position at the California Institution for Women, a women’s prison in Chino. I became a correctional peace officer, more because I needed a steady job with decent pay and benefits rather than out of a desire to be in law enforcement. On the job, I would occasionally smell cannabis smoke wafting down the halls of the prison—as clear a symbol of the failed drug war as was possible. I retired under a medical disability a decade later and moved to Oregon in 1995. By then, I was already…

High Times was conceived in classic outlaw fashion. Founded by a successful pot smuggler and radical ’60s activist named Thomas King Forçade, it was intended as a one-time parody of Playboy, complete with centerfolds of exotic, voluptuous cannabis plants. But that first issue was a runaway hit, selling more than half a million copies and paving the way for what has become a stoner-American institution. In addition to the requisite grow-scene surveys, pot-price appraisals and joint-rolling tips, High Times has published writers like Hunter Thompson, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg and Truman Capote. It also advocated an end to pot prohibiton at a time when marijuana users were being sentenced to years, even decades, in jail. Forty years later, the magazine has much to celebrate. It has survived the…