Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 320

Is Cannabis A Crime Fighter?

A new paper finds no evidence that medical marijuana leads to more crime:

[T]hese findings run counter to arguments suggesting the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes poses a danger to public health in terms of exposure to violent crime and property crimes. To be sure, medical marijuana laws were not found to have a crime exacerbating effect on any of the seven crime types. On the contrary, our findings indicated that [medical marijuana legalization (MML)] precedes a reduction in homicide and assault. While it is important to remain cautious when interpreting these findings as evidence that MML reduces crime, these results do fall in line with recent evidence and they conform to the longstanding notion that marijuana legalization may lead to a reduction in alcohol use due to individuals substituting marijuana for alcohol. Given the relationship between alcohol and violent crime, it may turn out that substituting marijuana for alcohol leads to minor reductions in violent crimes that can be detected at the state level. That said, it also remains possible that these associations are statistical artifacts

Emily Badger explains the study’s methodology:

Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas looked at the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report data across the country between 1990 and 2006, a span during which 11 states legalized medical marijuana. Throughout this time period, crime was broadly falling throughout the United States. But a closer look at the differences between these states – and within the states that legalized the drug before and after the law’s passage – further shows no noticeable local uptick among a whole suite of crimes: homicide, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny, and auto theft.

Sullum adds:

How relevant is research on medical marijuana laws to the debate about broader forms of legalization? Highly relevant, if you take the view that medical marijuana is mostly a cover for recreational use, as prohibitionists tend to argue. In truth, the legal regimes governing the medical use of marijuana range from very strict (such as New Jersey’s) to very loose (such as California’s). But it is fair to say that a lot of people with doctor’s recommendations in the looser states are recreational users in disguise. It therefore makes sense that legalizing medical marijuana would be accompanied by a decline in drinking, as Morris et al. suggest.

Pop Music’s Stockholm Syndrome

Whet Moser considers the historical irony of Sweden’s hugely successful music industry:

Sweden, and in particular Stockholm, is home to what business scholars and economic geographers call an “industry cluster” – an agglomeration of talent, business infrastructure, and competing firms all swirling around one industry, in one place. What Hollywood is to movies, what Nashville is to country music, and what Silicon Valley is to computing, Stockholm is to the production of pop. In fact, Sweden is the largest exporter of pop music, per capita, in the world, and the third largest exporter of pop overall. …

So how did Sweden, a sparsely populated Nordic country where it’s dark for much of the year, become a world capital of popular music? Rarely does such a complex question lead to such a satisfying answer: Three-quarters of a century ago, Swedish authorities tried to put a stop to the pernicious encroachment of international pop music, and instead they accidentally built a hothouse where it flourished.

Yes, you can thank WWII-era Lutheran ministers for Katy Perry’s latest:

In the 1940s, church leaders and cultural conservatives in Sweden rallied together around a solemn mission: to safeguard the country’s youth against the degenerate music — the “dance-floor misery” — that was being piped in from America. To combat this threat, the country built one of the most ambitious arts-education programs in the West. Municipal schools of music spread across the country, offering morally uplifting instruction in classical music. Many of the schools, which were often free to attend, allowed students to borrow instruments, as if from a public library, for a nominal fee. The aesthetically conservative intent of the municipal schools created an extremely democratic form of education. … An initiative that started out as an antidote to the licentious sounds of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and the like, instead set loose a musical juggernaut that would help give the world such hits as Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” and Britney Spears’ “If You Seek Amy” (try saying it out loud: F, U, C…). As the super-producer Max Martin once said, “I have public music education to thank for everything.”

What Ukrainian Neo-Nazis?

Reporting from Ukraine, Frum finds little evidence of them:

Since February 22, there have been six notable anti-Semitic incidents in Ukraine: four involving the defacement or desecration of synagogues and cemeteries, and two involving outright violence. These incidents have alarmed Jewish communities worldwide. In Ukraine, however, they are regarded with unanimous skepticism, if not outright disbelief.

All my conversations on these subjects were off-the-record. The incidents are ongoing police matters, and older Ukrainians have developed a hard-learned caution about being identified in the media. However, I spoke to more than a dozen people who occupied a variety of leadership roles within the Ukrainian Jewish community. And not a single person took seriously the idea that these anti-Jewish incidents had been carried out by “neo-Nazis.”

Jamie Dettmer is more worried about Ukraine’s pervasive corruption problem:

Ukrainians had high hopes for the Orange Revolution a decade ago only to see them dashed as the politicians and their backers and allies in the business elite clawed back power and unleashed ten years of squalid political manipulation that culminated in the Yanukovych kleptocracy.

According to Ukrainian officials more than $20 billion of gold reserves may have been embezzled and $37 billion in loan money disappeared.  In the past three years more than $70 billion was moved to offshore accounts from Ukraine’s financial system.

Many in the political class are still wedded to those old ways, judging by the bribes they have been offering investigators from a new anti-corruption agency set up by the interim government on the insistence of the Maidan revolutionaries.

Previous Dish on fascist fears in Ukraine here and here.

A Victory For The Courts

The  on yesterday’s major terrorism conviction:

Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, former al-Qaeda spokesperson and Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law, was found guilty of three counts: conspiring to kill Americans, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and providing support to terrorists. The jury returned its unanimous verdict fairly quickly, on the morning of the second day of deliberation. Mr Abu Ghaith was the most prominent member of al-Qaeda to be tried in a civilian court.

Adam Serwer feels vindicated. He notes that “Ghaith, who was captured in Turkey in February 2013, was charged, tried and convicted in about a third of the time it’s taken for the trial of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his co-conspirators to even get started”:

It’s been three years since charges were sworn against Mohammed and his co-defendants, Abu Gaith, an actual Al Qaeda preacher, was convicted in about a year, and somehow without creating “a whole new generation of terrorists.”

Although Republicans did criticize the decision to try Abu Gaith in civilian court – Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Abu Gaith was “an enemy combatant and should be held in military custody” – the reaction to the trial in New York has been muted compared to the frenzied hysterics of 2010 and 2011. Media coverage of the trial has drawn scant attention. An accused terrorist received a fair trial, and somehow New York City managed to survive. There was no need to abandon the very Constitution public officials are sworn to protect.

Amy Davidson also contrasts this case with that of KSM and his co-conspirators:

Back in 2009, Holder announced that those 9/11 defendants would be tried in the same lower Manhattan courthouse where Abu Ghaith was convicted, but there were loud complaints from all sorts of parties, from Congressional Republicans to Mayor Bloomberg. (It is one of the small shames of my native city that some people objected because a trial would tie up traffic.) The Obama Administration backed down, opting to keep K.S.M. at Guantánamo and make use of a military commission there. That was five years ago; the stop-and-start pretrial hearings for his tribunal since have been so disjointed that, at times, they verge on the absurd. …

Abu Ghaith’s conviction may end “the political debate,” but when the military trial of K.S.M. finally begins – maybe next year – we’re still likely going to have to sit through a farce where the great Al Qaeda courtroom drama should have been. Abu Ghaith’s successful trial does prove something, but it’s something we ought to have already known: putting on a trial is not actually that hard when you have a justice system that is a couple hundred years old and rich in precedent, with hundreds of terrorism trials behind it.

America’s Missing Workers

Ben Casselman looks at how the labor force participation rate has changed over time:

The recession and weak recovery have led millions of jobless Americans to give up looking for work, meaning they no longer count as part of the labor force.

He calculates that 2 to 4 million of these workers could return:

A sufficiently strong economic recovery today could repeat the 1990s magic, drawing back all the missing workers, even the ones on disability. But there is also a more troubling possibility: If the recovery remains weak, people we now expect to return to the labor force will instead drift further away. More of them will go on disability, or retire, or otherwise drop out. The pool of 2 to 4 million workers who are still reachable by economic policy will eventually become unreachable, and the decline in the labor force will at last be permanent.

Admitting They Have A Problem

Quite literally: Secret Service, go home, you're drunk. wapo.st/1gzLb1v via @washingtonpost—
Amanda Cormier (@amandalcormier) March 26, 2014

Ambinder believes the Secret Service needs an intervention:

The Secret Service has a drinking problem. It’s much worse than any other cultural deficit the elite agency has. It’s more widespread than sexism, certainly, and the other isms that have been attached to the agency since the prostitution scandal in Cartagena, Colombia. It’s something that every journalist who covers the White House kind of knows, intuitively, if they’ve ever traveled with the president. Pick your favorite White House correspondent and ask him or her whether agents on President George W. Bush’s detail created problems at the Wild West saloon in Waco. One former White House scribe told me that although reporters regularly witnessed agents drinking heavily before shifts, “we just assumed they could control themselves. After all, they were the ones who were the most responsible of all of us.”

For the most part, the agents are fine the next day. The job is stressful. But looking back at a string of incidents, many of them not well-publicized, over-consumption of alcohol is the common denominator. Sometimes, agents drinking alone make bad choices. But often, agents drinking with each other don’t have the foresight, or the ability, frankly, to tell their colleagues to stop drinking without losing face.

Margaret Carlson adds that the punishment for Colombia’s escapades obviously didn’t teach them a lesson:

Note that it wasn’t a supervisor or another agent who was worried that this behavior could compromise the agency. It was the locals — which gets to the real problem in the Secret Service. The job brings with it hours of boredom for men (it’s mostly men) ever-ready to take a bullet for the president (and a long list of lesser officials), followed by moments of danger, real and imagined. There are many nights and days away from home on an expense account, in exotic locales, some where prostitution is legal or easy to access. The temptation to turn advance trips into spring break is great.

Previous coverage of Secret Service shenanigans here.

Face Of The Day

US President Barack Obama meets Pope Francis at his private library in the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City on March 27, 2014. By Vatican Pool/Getty Images.

The Down’s Spectrum, Ctd

The thread grows and grows:

A close relative of mine has a three-year-old girl with Down’s, and she is an angel. Whatever the spectrum is, she is on the high-functioning end. This year she started attending preschool, and the hope was to mainstream her eventually. All that is on hold now because she was just diagnosed with leukemia.

Seeing her family cope with this situation is quite difficult, but it is not uncommon. Even though this little girl was mentally high-functioning, she is more susceptible to physical problems because of her extra chromosome. Another reader mentioned a hole in the heart, which is another common health issue for Down’s kids. A quick Google search will show you just how many physical problems are more likely with Down’s. It’s daunting.

Some good news: prior to the ACA, Down’s was a pre-existing condition, subject to all the limitations that went along with that. Now my family is at least not worried about hitting a lifetime dollar limit on her care. (She is receiving excellent care and responding well to chemo.)

The thing about her Down’s is that it is tough, but it is manageable and a well-known, well-researched condition. Her family has immense support, and people truly do understand Down’s in a way they did not used to. This little girl requires far less care than, for example, my cousin who has hydrocephalus, among other things. He is 22 years old and over six feet tall, but he is cognitively two years old. He requires constant care and has no hope of ever functioning on a higher level. The mother of the girl with Down’s knew with a simple blood test that her fetus was at a higher risk for Down’s. My aunt did not know until after her son was born that he would be so disabled.

Because of my relationship with these two families, I do not understand choosing to terminate a pregnancy because of a blood test that says there is an extra chromosome in the fetus. That bit of information simply does not tell you much. Your child could have far more severe problems that don’t show up until well after birth. Getting pregnant at all is a huge risk and a commitment to another person for the rest of your and their life.

I am pro-choice, and I firmly believe the decision to end a pregnancy is too personal to be handled by the government or anyone but the person in that situation. I am not trying to pass judgment on someone who does choose to end a pregnancy because of the blood test; I just have trouble understanding it.

Another is on the same page:

I recently gave birth to my first child in November. I am part of a group of online mothers, and one mother delivered a premature baby girl who has Down Syndrome. She is an adorable baby and very lucky that she has such a caring mother. Her mother has recently become a very vocal advocate for banning abortion (in cases of Down’s) and even prenatal testing! I’ve kept my mouth shut, but it’s been hard. I do not know how someone, who is so intimately aware of the struggles that come from having a child with special needs, feels they can dictate other families decisions in this way. Then again, that’s the issue with the whole abortion debate. But special needs seems to be a special case, not only because of the suffering a child or adult with disabilities may endure, but because of the impact it will have on any other children or family members.

I should add that I have a sister-in-law with Down’s. She is at the higher end of the spectrum but could never live alone. She is very sweet and loving and caring. But she’s a child in a woman’s body. I’ve often asked my husband what would happen if her parent (my father-in-law and my husband’s step mother) passed away. Where would his sister go? He assures me that his step-mother has a large family who would care for her. But I really worry that there isn’t a plan. And where does that leave us?

Another:

Your reader who shared anecdotes about her 62-year-old cousin with Down syndrome is exactly why the PSA video you highlighted on World Down Syndrome Day is important and necessary. It’s important and necessary because it articulates a point of view that is often drowned out by messaging consistent with your reader’s mindset, i.e., your life will be horrible if you have a child with Down syndrome. It’s scary enough for parents who get a diagnosis of Down syndrome – pre or postnatal. Those parents will immediately seek out information, and often times the information they will find is overly pessimistic, horribly one-sided and often antiquated.

Hence, it is nice to see the other side of the story – the side that shows that while there will inevitably be challenges, your child will be more alike than different from your other children and will bring immense joy to your life. I know from experience that that is a dark and scary time and you naturally focus on the real or perceived negatives of your situation. I wish I had seen that video during those first few weeks for a brief respite from the doom and gloom. I have three sons, one of whom happens to have Down syndrome. I have a ton to be thankful for, both professionally and personally, but having and raising my son with Down syndrome is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I really could not care less if someone believes that is an overly optimistic viewpoint. It’s the truth.

Another reader sends another video, embedded above:

We found out our 21-year-old daughter Sophie had DS in our seventh month and just couldn’t go through with terminating the pregnancy.  When you see the video, you’ll know we made the right choice.

One more:

Reading this thread just about brought me to tears; it’s just so moving.  I’m so grateful for your site and the unparalleled reader feedback that makes it so special.

Asbestos Still Abounds

Nic Fleming traces the history of asbestos regulation. Its harmful effects have been known for a century, but the industry fought hard to keep scientists quiet:

Scientists who published inconvenient results were vilified and harassed. … Any natural gaps or uncertainties in the research that showed asbestos caused disease were highlighted and exploited in an early version of the now-prevalent ‘manufactured uncertainty’ tactic. If these strategies sound familiar, there’s a good reason: the industry was being advised by a U.S. public relations company that had previously defended big tobacco.

Even today, economic interests trump regulation across the globe:

From a peak of 5 million tonnes around 1980, asbestos production fell to 2 million tonnes around two decades ago, and has hovered around that mark ever since. Russia accounts for half of world production, with the other large producers China, Brazil and Kazakhstan. As of April 2013, bans on all types of asbestos use were in place in 54 countries—fewer than the number in which it is still used. China and India consume the most, together taking almost half of world production. Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Brazil and Russia use significant amounts.

In 2013, an attempt to add white asbestos to the Rotterdam Convention [on hazardous substances] was blocked by Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Zimbabwe, India and Vietnam. Supporters of the move said it would have led to improved labelling, handling and safety regulations, and saved thousands of lives. Opponents said it would increase shipping and insurance costs.

Chart Of The Day, Ctd

A reader close to the issue writes:

Clearly that chart was indirectly demonstrating that having a gun in one’s home is much more likely to be associated with suicide than with actually killing someone in self-defence. It is not by any means a definitive chart on “the overall impact of firearms on health.” Your reader remarked that the positives of guns include deterring an unknown number of murders and violent assaults. He disregards the fact that the negatives are massively underestimated, not overestimated, by the chart.

The negative health effects of guns are not just suicides but also the homicides (11,078 in 2010, according to the CDC), the accidental deaths of children and adults (554 in 2009 – see this excellent NYT piece), and the cost and long-term impact of non-fatal gun injuries (73,505 in 2010 per the CDC). It is estimated to cost over $2 billion per year to treat patients with firearms injuries. That does not count the losses in productivity and the chronic healthcare needs of these patients. As for suicides, 19,392 of the 38,364 suicides in the US in 2010 were from firearms. Using a firearm in a suicide attempt is lethal in 85% of patients, far more lethal than any other method.

I am an emergency physician and a medical toxicologist, so I’ve seen up close the costs of suicide.

I have taken care of many patients who have tried to kill themselves, including a 16-year-old boy who fatally shot himself in the head after his girlfriend broke up with him, as well as many who overdosed on medications but recovered. Guns are so lethal so quickly that even if the impulse to commit suicide is transient, the person is often successful. They don’t get a chance to change their minds. That’s why having access to a gun in the home is a risk factor for suicide. The data from an Army Times article back this up:

Troops overseas must abide by the restrictions of host nations, according to military policy. Accordingly, U.S. troops in South Korea, Germany, Italy and elsewhere are virtually without access to personal firearms. Suicides have been fewer among those troops.

Last year, there were three Army suicides among the 25,000 soldiers posted in Germany, one among 19,200 in South Korea and none in Italy, where 3,900 soldiers are based. Meanwhile, U.S. bases often see double-digit suicides each year. There were a dozen among the 30,000 GIs at Fort Campbell, Ky., last year; 17 at Fort Hood, Texas, which has 46,500 soldiers; and 10 among the 20,000 G.I.s at Fort Stewart, Ga., according to Army statistics.

“The takeaway message is we have to do everything we can to limit access to firearms by someone who is depressed, they’re suicidal, struggling with thoughts of self harm,” said Robert Gebbia, executive director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. “It’s just good common sense.”

The NRA has blocked research on these issues because it is not in their interest for people to know the truth. We don’t have the data on gun deaths and gun injuries because they have blocked funding for the research.

I hope you will not leave your other reader’s comments as the only important points to be made about the chart and about the negative health impact of guns. It is time that our politicians developed some backbone and did what is right for the American people rather than for the gun industry. It is ridiculous that they would oppose Dr. Murthy because of his belief that guns are a public health issue. He would be a very poor physician indeed if he did not see the obvious health costs of guns to our society.