Vice Squad
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Lazy Link-Based Post
Well it is finals week here at Vice Squad central and that means some neglect of blogging duties. Fortunately, our virtual comrades are more reliable:
(1) Libby at Last One Speaks highlights two marijuana-related prosecutions. One of the incidents features, as an arrestee, a middle-aged former prosecutor; the second is an 18-year old kid who was selling a batch of pot brownies. Which of these defendants is likely to do some serious time? Hint: Not the one who simultaneously was charged with drunk driving and possessing a loaded firearm while intoxicated.
(2) Ken at Crim Law via CrimProf Blog via Objective Justice points us to this tale of a former judge who was ordered to stay off the sauce while serving his 90-day home confinement for fixing traffic tickets. He caught a cold, took some Nyquil and went to bed. A surprise visit from a probation officer led to detection of the alcohol from the cold medicine, and a week of non-home confinement. (I should mention that the ex-judge had been warned to notify the authorities in advance of any cold-medicine-taking, which he failed to do.)
(3) Mark Kleiman brings us up to date on ayahuasca; somehow the feds were able to take time off from their porn crackdown (hat tip to Radley at The Agitator) to try to convince the Supreme Court to allow them to suppress the sacramental use of tea containing the South American hallucinogen (i.e., ayahuasca, silly).
(4) Lawrence at DUI Blog explains why even people who don't care about drunk driving should care -- I think that his point applies to vice policy more generally.
Labels: alcohol, driving, hallucinogen, marijuana, policing
Saturday, December 11, 2004
Lazy Link-Based Post
(1) Hallucinogen hoasca legal (for now) in US when taken for approved religious ceremonial use. From Mark Kleiman.
(2) The New York Times looks into "dirty driving," where DVD-equipped motor vehicles play porn movies that are clearly visible to pedestrians or those in other cars. Will Baude at Crescat Sententia provides the pointer and the legal analysis. Concerned Women for America have a legal analysis, too -- in which the fact that possession of (adult) porn cannot constitutionally be criminalized in the US is lamented.
(3) While at Crescat, keep up with Will (here and here) on Chicago liquor regulators and a major Chicago wine store.
(4) More bad news for moi: even one cup of coffee per day can harm you. From a blog by Edward Staines entitled "One More Cup of Coffee"
(5) Vice Squad hasn't had too much to say about the recent vice Supreme Court cases, medical marijuana and interstate wine. I think that the "liberalizers" are going to have a hard time in both cases, but especially in the cannabis case. But if my pessimism proves to be warranted, I hope that the losing sides nevertheless use the resulting publicity to make the case that the laws in question -- the federal demonizing of marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, and the protectionist wine shipment bans -- should themselves be repealed. (Of course they make these cases all the time, but I hope they will "redouble their efforts.") Bad laws that are Constitutional are still bad laws.
Labels: alcohol, caffeine, Chicago, coffee, hallucinogen, Kleiman, pornography, Supreme Court
Sunday, February 22, 2004
Psychedelic Pioneer
Today's New York Times (registration required) contains an obituary of Dr. Humphry Osmond, who invented the term "psychedelic" for drugs such as L.S.D.: "...in his own view and in that of some other scientists, Dr. Osmond was most important for inspiring researchers who saw drugs like L.S.D. and mescaline as potential treatments for psychological ailments. By the mid-1960's, medical journals had published more than 1,000 papers on the subject, and Dr. Osmond's work using L.S.D. to treat alcoholics drew particular interest."
The sort of research the Dr. Osmond conducted, however, withered for decades, in part because of regulatory hostility. Here's the Times take on the research dearth:
"...the combination of flagrant youthful abuse of hallucinogens; the propagation of a flashy, otherworldly drug culture by Timothy Leary; and reports of health dangers from hallucinogens (some of which Dr. Halpern [a substance abuse researcher] said were wrong or overstated) eventually doomed almost all research into psychedelic drugs.
Research on hallucinogens as a treatment for mental ills has re-emerged in recent years, in small projects at places like the University of Arizona, the University of South Carolina, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Harvard. Though such research was always legal, regulatory, financial and other obstacles had largely ended it."
The Times obit concludes with an overview of the late stages of Dr. Osmond's career, which took a different track because of hostility to research on psychedelic drugs:
"He mainly studied schizophrenia but was disappointed he could not pursue his research into hallucinogens, Mrs. Blackburn, his daughter, said.
'I'm sure he was very saddened by it,' she said. 'It could have helped millions of people.'"
The claim that the problems with hallucinogens were exaggerated brings to mind last year's discovery that a much-ballyhooed study finding lasting brain changes from a single night of ecstasy use was off-base: it turns out that the researchers examined the effects of another drug, not ecstasy, during their research. The original, flawed research helped to stoke the flames for the offspring of the RAVE act. Did you notice all of the attention paid to repealing the legislation after the mistake was revealed?
Labels: ecstasy, hallucinogen