Month: January 2014

When teams from the two states that have legalized marijuana for
recreational use clash at Sunday’s Super Bowl, so will activists on
both sides of the debate about pot prohibition. The Marijuana
Policy Project (MPP) is
sponsoring five billboards near MetLife Stadium in East
Rutherford, New Jersey, where the Denver Broncos will face the
Seattle Seahawks. The anti-pot group Project SAM is
responding with an ad that “will be placed on digital and vinyl
billboards throughout the New York-New Jersey area.”

Four of MPP’s
ads are variations on the marijuana-is-safer theme that played
a conspicuous role in Colorado’s legalization campaign and was
recently
echoed by President Obama. Two ads criticize the National
Football League’s anti-pot policy, showing generic players asking,
“Why does the league punish us for making the safer choice?” The
other two note that marijuana is safer than football as well as
alcohol. The fifth MPP ad shows a tally of attendance at the last
10 Super Bowls next to a tally of marijuana arrests in 2012 (about
750,000 in both cases).

How does Project SAM respond? It can’t very well deny that
marijuana is safer than alcohol, since its chairman
admitted as much on national television last week. Nor can it
deny that pot prohibition generates hundreds of thousands of
arrests each year, the vast majority for simple possession. Here is
what the group came up with instead:

That’s right: Project SAM—which stands, believe it or not, for
Smart Approaches to Marijuana—is warning Americans about
amotivational syndrome. In 2014. The theme reflected in this
billboard was hoary when it was first applied to marijuana in the
1960s, having figured prominently in anti-cigarette
propaganda two decades before the federal ban on
marijuana, which before it was portrayed as a soporific that
renders people lethargic and unambitious was feared as a “killer
drug” that made them aggressive and irrationally violent.

I am not sure what target Project SAM had in mind when it
created this ad, but even kids are apt to smell the bullshit here.
After all,
many NFL players use marijuana to relax or relieve aches and
pains, and it does not seem to have affected their motivation,
perseverance, or determination. It may even have helped. The

swimmer who won more Olympic medals than any other athlete in
history was a pot smoker, for crying out loud. Nor did marijuana
prevent our last three presidents from ascending to the highest
political office in the land. MPP has a list
of various other high-achieving cannabis consumers, in case you are
curious.

Many people who are not celebrities also manage to consume
marijuana without losing in the game of life. Yet Project SAM is
still trying to persuade Americans that if they smoke pot it will
kill their drive and prevent them from accomplishing anything
worthwhile. In a country where most people born after World War II
have tried pot, it is hard to make this tired slacker stereotype
stick. But I guess it’s the best pot prohibitionists have to
offer.

India watchers know that the country’s explosive economic growth
after it ended its daft autarkic policies and rolled back the
License Raj lifted nearly 300 million people out of poverty. The
country’s IT sector became the global outsourcing hub. And Indians
started harboring delusions of grandeur, talking loosely about
India becoming the next super power.

That was then.

Now, the country’s growth has plummeted to a mere 4 percent,
raising fears that India might be headed back to the days of the
dreaded Hindu rate of growth of 2 percent. Given that every one
percent drop in GPD growth consigns millions of Indians to poverty
– defined as living on $1.25 a day —jumpstarting India’s economic
miracle is not merely an academic question but a vital human
issue.

Given such stakes, it is no overstatement that national
elections this spring are the country’s most momentous since
Independence in 1947. The Congress Party, that formed a coalition
government in 2004, is facing a serious challenge from the
opposition Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Narenda Modi. Although
tainted by his failure to prevent a massacre of the minority Muslim
population in 2002 in the state of Gujarat, where he remains chief
minister, Modi’s promise to fix India’s abysmal infrastructure,
tackle its hidebound bureaucracy, attract foreign investment and
end affirmative action has made him the darling of business.

But a new threat emerged in the form of the Aam Adami Party
(literally: Ordinary Man’s Party) in the state assembly elections
in December. AAP’s leader, Arvind Kejriwal, a political neophyte,
ran a populist campaign promising relief from inflation and rampant
corruption of the established parties, riding to victory in New
Delhi.

But do any of the parties or candidates have what it takes to
reignite India’s economy? Are they campaigning on the right issues?
Will this election produce a government that can fix India’s broken
governing institutions and restart its economic miracle? Will any
party gain the moral authority to enact the next wave of
liberalization? Or will the elections produce more political
fragmentation with no political party obtaining a clear mandate to
enact a bold reform agenda?

These are the questions that Reason Foundation plans to address
at a panel it is co-sponsoring with Asia Society and the South
Asian Journalists Association on Feb. 4, Tuesday, 6.30 p.m., at the
Asia Society’s Park Avenue premises. I’ll moderate a stellar lineup
that includes American Enterprise Insitute’s Sadanand Dhume, a
Wall Street Journal columnist, Arvind Panagariya, a
Columbia University economist who has co-authored several books
with the inimitable Jagdish Bhagwati (and Amartarya Sen’s nemesis)
whom reason.tv interviewed here,
and Carnegie Endowment’s Milan Vaishnav.

Reason still has a few complimentary tickets to give away that
you can get if you rush to this
website and register now.

Bonus material: My column on the
noxious Narendra Modi and why India ain’t going to catch up with the
West any time soon.

Americans
have always treasured the freedom to pick up and go anywhere they
please. Our forebears had to travel to get here, often had to
travel more after they arrived and sometimes moved on to uncharted
territories out West only to return East. No one stopped them,
whatever direction they were going. They had the good fortune to
live and migrate before the creation of the all-encompassing
national security state. After the 9/11 attacks, Americans woke up
to find that their freedom to travel was not a fundamental right
but a vaporous privilege, bestowed by the government and revocable
at its whim. For more than a decade, writes Steve Chapman, the
federal government assumed it could consign thousands of Americans
to travel purgatory without justifying itself to anyone. But the
no-fly list as currently administered may be headed for its final
approach.

View this article.

The LAPD is facing a lawsuit from Roy
Galvan, a 24-year-old father who spent more than a year in jail
before being tried and acquitted for a murder he says the LAPD
tried to frame him for.
Via NBC Los Angeles:

[The lawsuit] accuses LAPD Officers Miguel Terrazas,
David Nunn and Richard Arciniega of destroying evidence in the
case, falsifying reports and bribing witnesses for statements,
false arrest and malicious prosecution, among other claims of
misconduct and civil rights violations…

Galvan claims the officers who took him to trial strong-armed,
bribed and refused to investigate “several” potential witnesses,
including two homeless people – Mark Loving and Syrella Carpenter,
who had paranoid schizophrenia – living in a tent near the shooting
scene.

The lawsuit alleges Loving and Carpenter were paid nearly
$10,000 for their false testimony, and that the police requests for
city checks for the two were submitted into evidence during
Galvan’s trial. Other witnesses were allegedly promised they would
not face deportation if they provided false testimony. The lawsuit
also claims other eyewitnesses fingered a different suspect, but
that cops did not interview him.

The police officers named in the lawsuit appear to remain with
the LAPD. You can read the entire complaint here
(pdf), via NBC.