Adam Nagourney in the New York Times was not paying much attention the first time California voters fought back against the drug war:

Washington has generally looked the other way as a growing medical marijuana industry has prospered here and in 14 other states and the District of Columbia, but Mr. Holder’s position — revealed in a letter this week to nine former chiefs of the Drug Enforcement Administration that was made public on Friday — made explicit that legalizing marijuana for recreational use would bring a whole new level of scrutiny from Washington.

To say that the Federal Government has “generally looked the other way” as medical marijuana has been introduced in over a dozen states is a fairly big misreading of the history. Previous to Obama, both the Clinton and Bush Administrations aggresively targeted medical marijuana providers in all states where it was legal. Under Obama, the DOJ publicly promised that they’d leave the states alone, but they haven’t lived up to that pledge. Even Congress has been unable to pass legislation that would’ve made it impossible to use federal resources to undermine state medical marijuana laws (side note: both Rick Larsen and Dave Reichert voted to continue to have the feds come into Washington to undermine our medical marijuana laws).

It’s worth pointing this out because Nagourney makes it sound as if this time it’ll be different. It won’t. As Dan Riffle points out in this post, the Federal Government would be powerless to overturn a successful vote in California to remove the state-level penalties on marijuana (even if whack-job Scientology-promoting sheriffs believe that they make the laws). Their only option is the enforce the law themselves, something that they have neither the manpower – or the political will – to accomplish.

Even so, it’s hard to know exactly how it will play out if Proposition 19 passes. Just because the Federal Government doesn’t appear to have much of a leg to stand on doesn’t mean that they’ll back down. It will certainly trigger some kind of a fight, but just as with medical marijuana, the will of the people and the forces of the market will eventually outlast it. But that’s still only part of what we’ll see if this domino falls.

What I think will be more interesting is to see what occurs outside of our borders. One of the particularly egregious aspects of our drug war is how effectively we’ve been able to force other countries to keep their marijuana laws in line with ours. In the recent ACLU forum, Rick Steves provided his perspective on this, noting that some countries enforce their marijuana laws solely to retain favored trade status with the U.S. If the U.S. isn’t able to maintain that level of control over one of its own states, it’s likely to change the perspective of those outside the U.S. looking in.

The Seattle PI’s David Horsey waded into the debate on California’s Proposition 19 this week. He looked to parallels with alcohol prohibition to understand our current predicament, but he missed the mark on a few of the details:

My mentor at the start of my journalism career was a man named William F. Asbury. He was a fine newsman and a recovering alcoholic. After he left the newspaper business, he began writing and lecturing about alcoholism prevention and developed a take on Prohibition that went against the conventional wisdom that it was an experiment in social control that did not work.

Apparently, not everyone was sneaking off to a speakeasy during the 1920s. According to Asbury, the ban on booze actually kept a lot of people away from alcohol, lowered the number of broken families and reduced the alcoholism rate.

That’s partially true, but it doesn’t tell the entire story. Once alcohol prohibition officially became the law of the land in 1920, alcohol consumption certainly decreased significantly. Since it was illegal, accurate statistics were hard to come by, but by looking at related statistics like alcohol-related deaths and arrests for public drunkenness, it’s believed that alcohol use quickly returned to about 60-70% of pre-prohibition levels. And in some cities, the number of speakeasies far surpassed the previous number of legal bars.

The gains that Asbury spoke of were a temporary one-time phenomenon that came from the shifting of alcohol production from legal distributors to organized crime syndicates. Once that transition ended, we saw the return of all the problems related to alcohol – with a grisly bonus in the form of significantly higher rates of crime from the organized crimes groups that were making obscene profits from the trade.

It’s likely true that a certain percentage of people who drank before prohibition refrained from breaking the law once it became illegal. But those were primarily folks who aren’t going to have a problem with alcohol ruining their lives in the first place. The barrier that prohibition put up only deterred the people least motivated to have a drink – moderate drinkers who aren’t going to wreck their lives on the stuff.

But there was one other particularly nasty aspect of alcohol prohibition that Horsey doesn’t discuss:

Amid this debate, one question sticks in my mind: What will this do to kids?

Like anyone who has raised children, coached a youth sports team or spent time in schools, I have seen how teenagers – especially boys – can be thrown off track by marijuana. The more they smoke, the less interested they become in school, in sports, in homework or in friends who don’t share their preoccupation with getting high.

Solid medical research has proven that human brains do not fully develop until a person is well into his twenties and that, the earlier a teenager starts using marijuana, the greater the risk of permanent impairment to the parts of the brain that govern rational behavior and mature judgment. The risk is exacerbated by the hugely increased potency of today’s drug, compared with the pot of the 1960s and ’70s. An early marijuana habit may enhance a kid’s prospects for winning a bit part in a Seth Rogen stoner movie, but cuts chances for achievement in most other endeavors.

I completely share Horsey’s concern here, and it’s one of the biggest reasons why we should be supporting Proposition 19 and an end to marijuana prohibition everywhere. While alcohol prohibition did manage to lower overall rates of alcohol consumption, that wasn’t necessarily true for younger people:

Drinking at an earlier age was also noted, particularly during the first few years of Prohibition. The superintendents of eight state mental hospitals reported a larger percentage of young patients during Prohibition (1919-1926) than formerly. One of the hospitals noted: “During the past year (1926), an unusually large group of patients who are of high school age were admitted for alcoholic psychosis” (Brown, 1932:176).

In determining the age at which an alcoholic forms his drinking habit, it was noted: “The 1920-1923 group were younger than the other groups when the drink habit was formed” (Pollock, 1942: 113).

Even worse, since there was a strong incentive to avoid getting caught with alcohol, drinking smaller quantities of more powerful forms of alcohol became more common. People carried flasks of homemade liquors as opposed to drinking less potent beers. When it came to preventing younger people from developing bad habits with alcohol, prohibition was a serious step back from the pre-prohibition era. And it’s very likely that if prohibition had continued for another generation that the end result would have been much worse than the problems of alcoholism before prohibition.

This is similarly true for marijuana prohibition today, as high school students continually report that it’s easier for them to obtain marijuana than alcohol. And compared to Holland, where marijuana sales have been tolerated for over 30 years, American teenagers use marijuana at a much higher rate. If Horsey is concerned about teenage drug use, his worries seem to be misplaced. It’s our current policies that put more young people at risk, not the policies that would exist with the passage of Proposition 19.

Last week’s contest was a bit of a lay-up, which Liberal Scientist solved in quick fashion. It was Sioux Falls, SD.

This is the second Sunday of the month, so this week’s contest is the first of my new contest theme, TV and movies. The picture I choose for this will be related to something in a TV show or a movie (new or old). Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Unlike a lot of other political bloggers, the election season is a time when I tend to step back a little bit from the blog. The obnoxious (and often wildly inaccurate) TV ads that constantly run leave me feeling hopeless about the ability for anyone to go to the ballot box informed enough to make the right decisions about which initiatives and candidates to vote for – and about my power to make any difference in that. Being able to separate truth from fiction is a challenge for anyone who isn’t already devoting significant amounts of their time to following the issues and candidates themselves.

But there are a handful of races out there where I feel like I need to speak up more. One of them is the race for the House seat in the 45th Legislative District currently held by Roger Goodman. Goldy wrote about the challenger there the other day, and I don’t have anything to add to that. Unlike Goodman’s last opponent for this seat – Toby Nixon, who I have a lot of respect for – Kevin Haistings is a partisan hack with absolutely no qualifications for that seat.

It’s no secret that I’ve worked with Goodman a lot in the past. I’ve supported his campaigns because I think that he’s one of the most courageous and principled legislators in the state. He’s one of the few people in Olympia (from either party) who understands what makes government effective and efficient, and can truly call himself “fiscally responsible”. So when I read this from the endorsement of Haistings in the Seattle Times, I was floored:

For Position 1, Republican Kevin Haistings would bring a pragmatic, independent voice to the principal task in Olympia: wrestling a tight budget. The Carnation resident and Seattle Police Department sergeant is a political novice. Haistings’ budget approach — which includes looking at spending and asking not if a program is of value, but rather who should bear the cost — ought to be the standard in Olympia. Haistings proposes a public-private partnership to help pay for parks and other public needs.

Rep. Roger Goodman is the Democratic incumbent. An attorney, Goodman is best known for drug-law reform. But his tenure lacked independent leadership and efforts toward pragmatic budget solutions.

What amazes me the most about this is that Goodman is considered such an expert in “pragmatic budget solutions” that he travels to other states to talk to their legislatures about how to reduce their criminal justice costs. If that’s not enough, and you want to see an even clearer illustration of how odd the Times endorsement is, the following video was taken last week at a candidate’s forum. Goodman asked Haistings about the specifics of his budget approach, and Haistings admits that he can’t answer it because he doesn’t have specifics:

Our state budget isn’t going to be fixed by slogans. It needs real solutions from people who take these issues seriously. The Times may have fallen for Haistings’ empty rhetoric, but the voters in the 45th LD don’t have to make the same mistake.

Anyone who reads my posts here knows that I generally distrust (and often dislike) politicians from across the political spectrum, but with that cynicism comes a real appreciation for the politicians who truly defy special interests and win by standing against the corporate shills and obnoxious nanny crusaders. It pains me to see Russ Feingold potentially losing his seat in Wisconsin this year, and I wish that more principled conservative politicians who truly believe in small government had a larger voice against the Tea Party crazies. Roger Goodman is one of the few politicians out there who belongs in that category – and he belongs in Olympia too.

The Nation discovers that Lou Dobbs has some secrets:

I just spent a long weekend back on the east coast – taking Zach to see his great-grandmother for her 90th birthday party. We flew back last night from Philadelphia and while we waited to pre-board I saw a familiar face walking towards the gate. I leaned over to Dana and asked “Is that Mayor McGinn?”

After boarding, as Dana was getting Zach into his car seat on the plane, I kept an eye towards first class to see if it was really him – as I assumed that he’d be seated up there. I didn’t see him boarding with the first class passengers, but about ten minutes later he walked past us and took his seat in one of the last rows in coach. And it was definitely him.

When the plane landed at Sea-Tac, we let everyone de-plane before us as we had several bags, a sleeping 18-month old and a car seat to juggle. From his back-of-the-plane seat he was one of the very last people to walk up to the exit, and I asked him if anyone else recognized him. He said only one person at the gate in Philly. Not even the couple wearing Seahawks jerseys in the back row of the plane seemed to know that the mayor of the city we were flying to was sitting a few feet from them.

Last week’s contest was won by Brian. It was the Tate Modern in London, where former British Prime Minister Tony Blair canceled a book tour event because of the threat of protests.

Here’s this week’s contest – a purely random location. Good luck!

Matt Taibbi has written the most insightful take on the Tea Party movement that I’ve ever seen:

Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry’s medals and Barack Obama’s Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about — and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as here in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of conservative icons like Palin.

…

The individuals in the Tea Party may come from very different walks of life, but most of them have a few things in common. After nearly a year of talking with Tea Party members from Nevada to New Jersey, I can count on one hand the key elements I expect to hear in nearly every interview. One: Every single one of them was that exceptional Republican who did protest the spending in the Bush years, and not one of them is the hypocrite who only took to the streets when a black Democratic president launched an emergency stimulus program. (“Not me — I was protesting!” is a common exclamation.) Two: Each and every one of them is the only person in America who has ever read the Constitution or watched Schoolhouse Rock. (Here they have guidance from Armey, who explains that the problem with “people who do not cherish America the way we do” is that “they did not read the Federalist Papers.”) Three: They are all furious at the implication that race is a factor in their political views — despite the fact that they blame the financial crisis on poor black homeowners, spend months on end engrossed by reports about how the New Black Panthers want to kill “cracker babies,” support politicians who think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government power, tried to enact South African-style immigration laws in Arizona and obsess over Charlie Rangel, ACORN and Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Four: In fact, some of their best friends are black! (Reporters in Kentucky invented a game called “White Male Liberty Patriot Bingo,” checking off a box every time a Tea Partier mentions a black friend.) And five: Everyone who disagrees with them is a radical leftist who hates America.

To hammer home these points, Taibbi follows the campaign of Rand Paul, and notes that the Kentucky Senate hopefuls candidacy – and his standing among most Tea Partiers – hasn’t diminished since he began disavowing all the limited government views that initially made him the “Tea Party” candidate.

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was West Hill, OH, along the PA-OH border.

This is the fourth Sunday of the month, so this location is related to something from the news in September. Good luck!

As we approach the vote on California’s Proposition 19, I’ve been seeing variations of this assertion in a number of places. Here’s David Sirota:

Here’s a fact that even drug policy reform advocates can acknowledge: California’s 2010 ballot initiative to legalize marijuana does, indeed, pose a real threat, as conservative culture warriors insist. But not to public health, as those conservatives claim.

According to most physicians, pot is less toxic — and has more medicinal applications — than a legal and more pervasive drug like alcohol. Whereas alcohol causes hundreds of annual overdose deaths, contributes to untold numbers of illnesses and is a major factor in violent crime, marijuana has never resulted in a fatal overdose and has not been systemically linked to major illness or violent crime.

So this ballot measure is no public health threat. If anything, it would give the millions of citizens who want to use inebriating substances a safer alternative to alcohol. Which, of course, gets to what this ballot initiative really endangers: alcohol industry profits.

Beer distributors believe this to be the case as well. The California Beer and Beverage Distributors, has given $10,000 to defeat the measure. But is it true? Gus Lubin at the Business Insider writes:

Would marijuana legalization really cut into alcohol consumption?

Probably so. The interest group also includes Heineken, which knows from Amsterdam how legalization affects the market.

But the numbers don’t back this up. The WHO statistics on alcohol consumption across European countries don’t show any difference between the Netherlands and other European countries when it comes to alcohol consumption. Nor does it show any marked decrease in alcohol consumption since the Dutch started tolerating marijuana sales in the 1970s. In fact, while alcohol consumption across the entire EU dropped from 1980 to 2003 by 27%, it only dropped by 18% for the same time period in the Netherlands.

Marijuana and alcohol are often compared to each other in order to drive home the parallels between our historical attempts to prohibit each drug. And those comparisons are valid and illuminating. But the drugs themselves aren’t so similar in their effects on users. Marijuana is far more psychoactive than alcohol, but also more safe to consume. Alcohol tends to make people more aggressive and more social, while marijuana tends to make people more passive and less social. As a result, each drug caters to different personalities and different situations. And since marijuana is already widely available to whoever wants it, that segregation of use occurs already. As with the Netherlands, I’d expect that the eventual end of marijuana prohibition won’t have any noticeable effect on the current rates of alcohol consumption.

What it would have an effect on, however, is our prison overcrowding problems.

Last week, people threw out some good suggestions on what to do with these contests going forward. One good suggestion was to have a rotation of themes, so I’m planning to do that from now on. On the first and third Sundays of the month, it’s a regular contest, just a randomly selected location. On the second Sunday, it’ll be a movies/TV themed contest. The view will be something from a movie or TV show (old or new). On the fourth Sunday, it’ll be a news item from the previous month. If there’s a fifth Sunday in a month, it’ll be a regular contest for now, but I’m thinking of a possible theme for that in the future as well (suggestions are always welcome).

The contest two weeks ago was won by wes.in.wa. It was Aurora, OR, where a plane crashed into a house. This is the third Sunday of the month, so this week’s contest is a random location, good luck!

After Christine O’Donnell knocked off Mike Castle in the Delaware GOP primary this week, there’s been a lot of focus on her long history of TV appearances in her 20’s, where she covered a wide range of topics. Much of this has been in the context of “how did this strange person manage to win a Senate primary battle?”, but that’s not what I find most interesting about all of this.

What I’m more curious about is why Christine O’Donnell was ever on television so much in the first place. A lot people in their 20s have strong personal and political views, and many of them go so far as to dedicate their lives at that time to some particular cause. But it’s exceedingly rare for any of those people to successfully get such high-profile media platforms to air their views. O’Donnell was clearly motivated in her causes, but her media ascension at the time seems oddly out of place with the actual substance of her activism. She was talking about the evils of masturbation for fuck’s sake. I was alive in the 90s, and I don’t recall that being a particularly pressing problem in our society at the time. Why was this young woman showing up on various high-profile television shows so often, when her only qualification appeared to be that she screwed around in college and later regretted it?

UDPATE: Commenter rhp6033 shines some light on this with a good comment that I’d missed from earlier this week.

With the election results last night showing Republican voters in the northeast rallying behind their more extreme candidates, I’m left wondering what was so different about our own primary. On the surface, it seems like all of the same parts of the equation were at play. Clint Didier was endorsed by Sarah Palin, had enthusiastic support from the most motivated Republicans, and was certifiably nuts. In Delaware and New York yesterday, that trifecta was a recipe for success. But here, it only translated into 12% of the vote in the primary. What was different about Washington? Was Didier not as sophisticated a campaigner? Was the Washington GOP more effective in making electability the focus? I’m not really sure what the answers are, so I’m posting this as an open-ended question. I’m very curious why Didier couldn’t catch the same wave that Paladino and O’Donnell did.

Last week was the 100th Bird’s Eye View Contest, so instead of looking for a good view to post, I decided to do a tally of the winners. Some contests had multiple winners, so there are more than 100, but here’s the list of those who won more than once (31 people won one contest):

Wes.in.wa – 20
Milwhcky – 20
Mlc1us – 10
Don Joe – 5
YLB – 4
Dave Gibney – 3
Waguy – 3
2cents – 3
ibogaine – 2
Liberal Scientist – 2
Dan Robinson – 2
Brian – 2

I’m always open to suggestions for this contest. If you have a good idea for how to make this contest more fun, please feel free to post it in the comments. I’ve always wanted to make the views difficult but possible, and it’s been a challenge of my own to keep finding ones that strike that balance. Thanks for playing everyone, and enjoy some football this afternoon.

I meant to post this last night, but have been buried up to my neck in changes to my fantasy football website. Throw out your predictions for the season in the comments below. Will the Seahawks be a .500 team? Can they win the division? Does the old man in Minnesota have another year in him like last year (didn’t look that way last night)? Will McNabb and Shanahan make the Redskins a winner? Can the Cowboys become the first team to play in their home stadium for the Super Bowl? Has the NFL milked the Saints-Katrina storyline enough, or is there still some juice in that raisin?