Last week’s contest was unsolved as of Friday night. It was the athletic complex at Northwestern University, where the football team is voting to unionize.

This week’s is a random location somewhere on this planet, good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by Seventy2002 for his second in a row. It was Thomson, Georgia.

This week’s is related to something in the news from April, good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by Seventy2002. It was West Vancouver, BC.

This week’s is a random location somewhere in the state of Georgia, good luck! And happy 4/20!

Last week’s contest was won by zzippy. It was Queens, NY.

This week’s location is a random location from Google’s 45 degree views, good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by Brian. It was the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, KS.

This week’s contest is a random location somewhere on Earth, good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa. It was Lake Worth, FL, the location of this disturbing Florida news story.

This week’s contest is related to something in the news from March, good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by Seventy2002. It was Gulfport, MS.

This week’s location is somewhere in Florida, and because it’s Florida, it’s related to something ridiculous in the news from 2014. Good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Osaka, Japan.

This week’s contest is from Google Maps, good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where a sinkhole swallowed up some classic cars.

This week’s contest is a random location somewhere on Earth, good luck!

Recently, the quiet neck of the woods where I reside was the scene of a homicide. As things like this are relatively rare, our neighborhood’s Facebook page buzzed and people gossiped about how and why this could have happened. A few days later, we got a partial answer. It was revealed that the owner of the home is also the operator of the medical marijuana dispensary in the center of Fairwood, called the The Solution. And the victim, a 27-year-old named Ryan Prince, was shot as he confronted several burglars. Prince was not the owner of the dispensary or the house, but he was a resident.

The Solution is located in the center of Fairwood, in the same building that used be a law office until the attorney who owned it went crazy and defaced it. The new ownership has kept up the property nicely and I never noticed any strange behavior there (the building is in front of the main bus stop in Fairwood, so I see it quite often). One morning, I noticed a window was shattered. It was fixed very quickly. Otherwise, I don’t know the owner personally and have never been inside the dispensary.

Over the weekend, police announced the arrest of a 34-year-old man in Tacoma in connection with the murder. They’re still looking for more people and a purple PT Cruiser in connection with the murder.

At this point, we still don’t know what the alleged burglars stole – or were hoping to steal. There were no plants being grown in the residence, but did the burglars know that? Were they just after cash? It’s not hard to see that businesses that are forced to be cash-only open themselves up to these types of situations. It’s why it’s so vital to fix the banking issue with marijuana businesses.

The future was already bleak for dispensaries like The Solution. These types of businesses were never fully made legal by the state, and are now in the process of being completely shut down by the legislature. There were smarter middle-of-the-road solutions to cater to those who use marijuana medicinally and might not be served as well by a recreational market, but that battle appears to be lost for now as the ACLU is even throwing its weight behind the effort to remove the idea of collective gardens from the law.

The hope is that once the licensed stores under I-502 open, both recreational and medical users will find what they need. Many are skeptical that it will be so easy, at least at first. But moving towards a properly regulated marketplace is essential for reducing the kinds of tragedies that took the like of Ryan Prince, and continue to take the lives of many in places where all of this commerce is done in the dark.

Last week’s contest was won by don. It was Dover International Speedway in Dover.

This week’s is related to something in the news from February, good luck!

Last week’s contest was unsolved as of Friday night. It was the Cultural Education Center in Albany, NY.

This week’s is a location somewhere in the state of Delaware, good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa. It was Matamoros, Mexico.

This week’s is a random location using the Google Maps 45-degree views, good luck!

I went on a short rant about this on Twitter recently, but I wanted to expand on it more here. Last week, Keith Humphrey’s at The Reality-Based Community wrote a post entitled “The Link Between Overcrowded Prisons and a Certain Drug“, where he claimed that alcohol is largely responsible for our prison overcrowding problems, rather than the war on (certain) drugs.

That’s simply not correct, and it’s very easy to debunk. If the effects of alcohol use were responsible for the criminal behavior that swells our prison ranks, you’d see at least some correlation between alcohol use and prison populations among the different countries of the world. But you don’t. It’s not even close. According to this World Health Organization report from 2011, these are the countries that lead the world in alcohol consumption (total in liters per capita per year):

1. Moldova (18.22)
2. Czech Republic (16.45)
3. Hungary (16.27)
4. Russia (15.76)
5. Ukraine (15.6)
6. Estonia (15.57)
7. Andorra (15.48)
8. Romania (15.30)
9. Belarus (15.13)
10. Croatia (15.11)
11. South Korea (14.8)
12. Portugal (14.55)
13. Ireland (14.41)
14. France (13.66)
15. UK (13.37)

The United States consumes only 9.44 liters per capita per year, far behind these other nations. Yet we imprison a whopping 716 out of every 100,000 people. How does that compare to those countries that consume more alcohol? Here’s the same figure for each of the countries listed above:

1. Moldova (185)
2. Czech Republic (154)
3. Hungary (173)
4. Russia (484)
5. Ukraine (311)
6. Estonia (245)
7. Andorra (49)
8. Romania (156)
9. Belarus (335)
10. Croatia (115)
11. South Korea (92)
12. Portugal (134)
13. Ireland (94)
14. France (101)
15. UK (148*)

* Just England and Wales, Scotland is 146 and Northern Ireland is 99

It’s not even close. So is this because all of those other countries don’t put people in jail for homicide, rape, simple assault, aggravated assault and robbery…the types of crimes that Humphries called out as being tied to alcohol use? Of course not. Is it because Americans are somehow more predisposed to commit crimes when drunk? That’s pretty far-fetched as well. One potential difference comes from drunk driving laws, but both Australia and Canada drink more than us, have a similarly car-dependent culture, and still lock up far fewer people than we do.

As much as Humphries and his colleagues seem eager to obscure this fact, it’s the overaggressive way that America wages its war on drugs that leaves us with such a huge amount of people behind bars. Looking solely at the number of people locked up for marijuana offenses and not finding very many is a terrible way to draw conclusions about its impact.

The way that our drug war inflates our prison population is more complicated than just sending people to jail for pot. It’s about the effect that a pot arrest can have for a person down the road. In far too many cases, a pot arrest early in life becomes a wall against future opportunity for many people (mostly minorities). A felony drug conviction (often through a plea deal that allows the person to avoid going to prison initially) makes future educational endeavors and various types of employment nearly impossible. The end result is that significant numbers of people in that situation find that becoming a career criminal is their only path towards survival.

So to really understand the impact of the war on pot, you can’t just look at what percentage of the people in our prison system are there because of a pot conviction. You have to look at what percentage of the people in our prison system had their first contact with the criminal justice system because of a pot arrest. Mix that with massively punitive mandatory minimums for various drug offenses, and you have the recipe for prisons bursting at the seams with people who largely end up there by design.

None of this is to say that the violence and criminality resulting from alcohol isn’t a problem. It certainly is, but it’s very easy to look at the heaviest drinking countries in the world and see that it’s not the reason we have 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of its people.